From The New Forsyth Conservancy:
“The great Reformers of the Progressive Era agitated for greenspaces in tenement districts because they asserted that people need parks. Turns out the opposite is true too- parks need people (not only to chillax in, but to help maintain).
Last week our humble Tenement band got to work rehabilitating some historic gates in the plots of Sara D Roosevelt Park that we steward.
Look only on what a couple hours of dedicated work can do, and think about how much more we could accomplish with a larger group of volunteers!”
Sarah will meet non-Tenement Museum staffers at the SDR Park in plots just south of Delancey Street!
Speaking of the positive effect of grass roots activism and fearlessness:
“… history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”
-Rebecca Solnit