Support our parks and our NYC Parks Department!!

From NY4Parks :

“We encourage you to testify in support of four bills at an upcoming parks hearing on

Wednesday, March 1, at 1:00PM.

The hearing will take place in the Committee Room, City Hall, New York, NY and via Zoom.

LINK: Register to testify in-person or remotely

Int. No. 7 would make NYC Parks recreation centers free and more accessible to young adults ages 18-24.

Int. No. 128 would require safe and sanitary diaper changing tables in all park bathrooms
Int. No. 213 would require NYC Parks to assess, support, and increase urban farming and infrastructure.

Int. No. 576 would codify the reporting process for cleanliness of public bathrooms in NYC, including in park comfort stations.

Talking Points:

–          Mayor Adams and the City Council must allocate 1% of the city budget for NYC Parks to address longstanding maintenance and staffing needs and to achieve an equitable twenty-first century parks system.

–          Recreation center programming and amenities provide critical opportunities for youth development through exercise, education, and socialization. To be truly equitable, these facilities must be free and accessible to all young people regardless of financial status.

–          Accessible and convenient public bathrooms are a matter of public health. Comfort stations in parks must include essential amenities for parents and guardians of babies and small children.

–          Unsanitary and unsafe comfort stations reflect insufficient funding for NYC Parks maintenance and operations. Codifying the public bathroom reporting process in addition to allocating 1% of the city budget for NYC Parks is necessary to improve and maintain consistent sanitary conditions and increase the agency’s capacity to service comfort stations.

–          Urban agriculture in community gardens and urban farms supports education, community building, nutrition, and climate mitigation. We must invest in and expand urban agriculture to make these programs accessible to all New Yorkers.

In the words of our NYS Attorney General Tish James:

“Let me be clear: New York will not stand for a single day, hour, or minute of hate against our communities.”

The Chinatown Revitalization Initiative presented many safety-providing, positive, interesting  proposals. We thank Governor Hochul for this funding.

This is a link to all the projects proposed

Specifically, on the proposal for Sara Roosevelt Park Hester to South Delancey:

We’ve listened to nearby residents, local organizations, gardeners, businesses, and sports users, we’ve sent out updates, used social media, and conducted one in-park tabling for ideas and to create awareness (not nearly enough).

Our proposals, as always, draft pending true community engagement.  “In-Park” outreach done with no other agenda (except to ensure any improvements to not hasten the removal of low -income neighbors) than to learn what people want here.

For safety, for beauty, for public park uses, for maintaining our unique strengths and our diversity, while upgrading for even more positive use, for encouraging the neighborhood and public to see Parks as their backyards, get-away vacation spots, their air-conditioning, for uses aligned with the needs of our neighborhoods, that do not encourage further displacement of the low-income communities of color here via gentrification:

• After a number of consultations with birders over the years: New wrought iron fence around the bird sanctuary 5-7’ tall -north end for safety, 4’ for south section with gate so there are two means of egress in an emergency. Consult birders for any changes.
• Grand St. entryway: Remove brick walls along Grand Str for maximum visibility from the street and maximum
• South Delancey entryway: Remove broken steps, create two wide accessible pathways.
• Retain community stewarded garden plots. (Hua Mei, Sebaestian de Britto, Ribbon plot).
• Pipe water sources (there are none here for the garden plots) –Bruckner boxes and water fountain.
• Remove low brick walls that front the two side plots – misused to sell drugs. Restore decorative gates.
• Attach two metal tables in the open walk-way areas. Visible from street to provide seating that doesn’t encourage harmful or unsanitary acts.
• Repair asphalt from Delancey to Grand for accessibility and beauty.
• New, brighter lighting, downward facing, in the area. (some of this has been done)
• Fix the benches along the Pit.
• Do in sections when possible so most of the park can remain open.
• Fix drainage in Pit in southern end.
• Share the Broome Parkhouse with a local community organization or storage for local sports recreation. Or return it for full community activation.
• We need more information from those who would be most impacted on any changes to  Forsyth Street from Hester to Grand Streets. What do they want/need. Such as, how would it affect small business parking needs? Small businesses, the local schools, Parks Dept, and residents need to weigh in on this part of the proposal.
• We assume Parks Department will address and heed all of this.

On proposed artificial turf lawn burying the Pit area:

We have a synthetic turf field in this section and are oversaturated with synthetic turf fields (used primarily by outside sports groups that have the tech ability to get and retain permits). Artificial turf has issues with carcinogenic materials.

More problematically, no one we spoke to, who lives (or plays) or has businesses here (for decades) had heard of this or, if they had, did not think it affected them.

In this area of SRP, ‘The Pit’ is one of the only active, versatile, and well used spaces (used by the local community and others): The Burmese Water Festival, the New Museum, elected officials, ROAR, badminton, Tai Chi, Bike Polo, Soccer (the soccer ‘pitch’ recently painted as an East River Park mitigation), etc. As such, The Pit use makes the area safer, as does the gardening by SRPCC volunteers and the 5^th Pct’s Youth Explorers. City Relief also provides a safety on south Delancey on Thursdays.

– Revised December January 2023

(former draft proposals are kept on the website – we get smarter and more informed as we ask our neighbors).

Community Service, Leadership training, Awards and Scholarships, National and Local Competition, and…Working with PO Chan one of the best mentors we’ve ever seen.

We are thrilled to have Parks Operations Meetings for Sara Roosevelt Park with our new Manhattan Parks Commissioner Anthony Perez get started again as we thread this challenging times.

Below are DRAFT notes by K Webster, President SRPCC [we will correct as we get newer accurate information]

January 22, 2023 | Sunday | 11:00am – 3:30pm.

Sara Roosevelt Park at Grand Street.

Map from Chinatown Partnership:

Bulbs are in, mulch is underway, stones are in the process of delineating the borders of the plot areas. In spring, or if we can, on warmer winter days, we will continue to mulch and create borders.

Thanks to Sandy Pliego for the mulching!

And thanks to Michael (Parks Gardener) and Jamil (Park Manager) and Parks Forestry Department for the effort to clear sight-lines and prune large bushes and trees.

And it was a good day for sword play in The Pit

“the document proposes a list of 40 steps to build a “model of shared prosperity that is both pro-growth and anti-racist.”

Cities Are for People Who Want to Be There

Now they need to act like it.

BY HENRY GRABAR

“as a new report commissioned by the mayor and Gov. Kathy Hochul makes clear, the powers that be are ready to face reality: “Hybrid work is here to stay,” it announces.”

“…masterminded by a pair of deputy mayors from the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, Dan Doctoroff and Richard Buery, is the most ambitious document to address the urban crisis brought on by the pandemic. It’s an island of hope in a sea of dim prognoses for urban life. The gist is that if people are no longer compelled to be here to have access to powerful and remunerative jobs, we have to make them want to be in the city for some other reason.”

Dolores Hayden first proposed the idea of a “non-sexist city” in 1980, and Swedish cities have begun to center women’s urban experience in the planning process, redesigning spaces and changing bus schedules. The safety and interests of children helped shape Amsterdam’s safe streets movement in the 1970s and have become influential causes for American activists today. Curb cuts, initially designed for wheelchairs, soon made the urban environment accessible to a whole host of users, including parents with strollers and kids on bicycles and older people with shopping carts.

Flexible housing arrangements and relaxed licensing requirements make it easier for immigrants to set up shop. Better policing focused on solving crimes and building trust will keep Black families in the city—and it’s their flight, for the most part, that is behind worrisome population declines in places like New York and Chicago. The stability of a city’s neighborhoods, tax base, and school system depends on the continued favor of regular families, and a successful post-COVID politics will put their interests first. And if they stay in the city, they might even go to the office from time to time, giving corporate tenants a reason to stay put.

New York with other cities that are trying to adjust their economic model to account for changing times, it’s that a city can no longer put business leaders first. Instead, implementing a quality-of-life renaissance in cities will require first considering long-neglected groups whose wants and needs are suddenly vital to the city’s future: women, children, the elderly; immigrants, residents of color, the working class. Make the city work for them and it will work for everyone.

“a host of U.S. urban policies suggest many elected officials still have not gotten the message.

Why aren’t strollers allowed on all New York City buses?

Why do transit schedules and routes prioritize rush-hour downtown commuters?

Why do schools start before sunrise?

Why do city streets remain so dangerous for children?

Why are benches for older people so few and far between?

Why does zoning forbid small units to accommodate households that don’t resemble typical nuclear families?

“What does a quality-of-life project look like if it’s not about searching Black teenagers and arresting churro vendors in the subway? On the public safety front, the report correctly grasps that lowering crime rates requires repopulating the streets, decreasing the city’s unemployment rate, and encouraging workforce development programs—thought it also nods to increased police presence on the subway and the controversial effort to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with serious mental illnesses. This all-of-the-above philosophy categorizes many of the report’s suggestions, such as the idea that pols should “develop a sustainably operating budget model for the MTA while increasing subway service.” 

“..Other…daunting goals include affordable childcare, a new subway line, and an accessible mass transit system.”

read the article here.

This fall we walked through of Sara Roosevelt with NYC Manhattan Parks Commissioner Anthony Perez and Council Member Chris Mart, Parks Deputy Chief of Operations Ralph Musolino, Park Manager Jamil Phillips, and Storehouse Manager Dennard Harris to gather information and survey problems and what is working.

Resulting in immediate solutions for the park:

Brighter lighting in the park (see previous posting), CM Marte brought up issues around Canal area and the need for better lighting and work to deal with encampments. The removal of derelict and ineffective (sometimes dangerous) fencing around the sprinkler at Stanton and bench areas there, and the Hua Mei Bird area. The neighborhood’s request to return the benches at the front of the Pit – done! (Jamil installed the benches the next day!).

We walked the entire park. There was strategizing on increasing the public’s use of the Pit, recreating the Hua Mei bird fencing and the possibility of using pieces of fencing elsewhere in the park. (and the Coalition mentioned the possibility of a shared site at the Broome Parkhouse).

The police have requested to fence off an area south of Delancey – the dramatic lighting installed there has already made the area safer.

AND both Park Commissioner Perez and CM Marte let us know that the Stanton building will be released to public use: a new site and funding are found!! A structured timeline is being created!

The Commissioner also  promised to reinstitute Park Operations meetings for this park and he and CM Marte are committed to taking action about violence here.

Thanks to both Commissioner Perez and CM Marte for their support and partnership in re-centering our park to be for this community and the larger public!