The Tenement Gardeners of the New Forsyth Conservancy are looking for more volunteers assist with the first park renewal project of 2018, and we need your help.

This project is different from our routine weekly maintenance. It is a focused project with a lasting impact, and we can’t do it without additional support. Our objective is to rebuild and paint the three gates at the entrance to each of our three plots in Sara D Roosevelt Park. As you can see, some of them really need love and tender care.

Participation in this project will put you in direct contact with the history of park activism of the 1980’s. It is also a great way to be a part of the Lower East Side community dialogue- not to mention a powerful way to make connections to, say, the walking tours. These gates are at the intersection of class, race, city  bureaucracies and grass roots activism. Come see for yourself and be a part of a positive change in the neighborhood.

We will meet at 6pm on Thursday July 12^th at the garden in Sara Roosevelt Park on Delancey Street (south) between Forsyth and Chrystie three front plots.

Please call Sarah Tomasewski or me, and we’ll give you directions to the site.

Again, we really need help to see this project through. Indeed, the New Forsyth Conservancy could use some sustained volunteer power, so… Join on!

Jason Eisner

Tel: 646-518-3009

www.tenement.org

Photos from Department of Transportation:

From Twitter of CM Chin:

“Sending a huge thank you from our team and Team @NYC_DOT to everyone who joined us for yesterday’s Bike Helmet Giveaway at SDR! In only a few hours, we distributed 621 Vision Zero helmets to residents, including 183 kids… many of whom were getting their 1st ever helmet!”

Coalition: Appreciate bringing resources to our troubled Park.

We’ve heard the “Shakespeare in the Parking Lot” Crowd are looking for a new ‘home’.

The Stanton Street Area could sure use some positive activity!

Parks Department is saying one night only. Really? Do we have a better offer??

Shakespeare in the Parking Lot’s ‘Track Record’: 

– on  the  Lower  East  Side  fro  23 years, this will be their 24th year.

– offered Shakespeare for FREE for 23 years on the Lower East Side (Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays from early July to mid August)

– a 501(c) 3 organization

– received grants from both NYSCA and DCA 

– the idea is offer the production FREE of charge to the  Lower  East  Side.

– July 12-28 are  the  dates  our  current  cast of  HAMLET was scheduled to perform.

– from approximately  6pm -10pm. 

– able  team  of  interns  working  with the company through the DOE’s Work Based Learning (WBL) program. Their 15th year in the WBL program.

Employing our youth!

In Sara Roosevelt Park’s :  “The Pit” (Broome Street Entrance)

New Forsyth Gardens:

First, thanks to intrepid Tenement Museum Staffers and all our volunteers and Park’s staff who try to keep up with the mess!

In Forsyth Conservancy Gardens:

Garbage cans needed.

Garbage removal needed.

Disinfectant needed.

Brighter lighting needed in the Evening needed.

Removal of crumbling low walls needed.

Open the Broome Street Restrooms Again.

Audubon and Betty Hubbard and Stanton/Houston/Forsyth:

Trash Removal needed

Trash alongside Forsyth at Houston

Trash Removal Needed:

Cars and Trucks in the Park at Stanton: (Not even Parks cars/trucks!)

Remove them!

Interesting idea for men to gather and support one another while building useful things.

YouTube video here

Website here.

“They’re community spaces for men to connect, converse and create. The activities are often similar to those of garden sheds, but for groups of men to enjoy together. They help reduce loneliness and isolation, but most importantly, they’re fun.”

One purpose:

• Talking about the social and health benefits of Men’s Sheds in reducing isolation and empowering local communities. We do this through various communication channels, including public events, online and in the media.

And yes, we can have all kinds of “Sheds” for everyone who wants to belong to such a network!

NY Daily News:

“A one-way toll to nowhere: End the Verrazano Bridge loophole that chokes lower Manhattan with excess traffic”

Slowly the quilt grows. 

We bring our sacred intentions

Toward a better here and now

For our children, our neighbors, our friends and ourselves;

Peony roots from a mother’s garden, a child’s sculpture

A great band, a real-live chicken

Sometimes just flowers.

We bring ferns from the mountains, coffee from the corner

The family turtle, a perfect rose, the Daily News.

We bring our children here, sacred, raucous, irreverent, destructive;

But also our most  committed stewards;

We bring our friends and their friends, a cousin from New Zealand, from Israel, from Cincinnati; 3 guys from up the block with broad smiles and broader shoulders;

We bring more hot dogs, more daffodils, more visitors more might-come-in-handy

than anyone could ever eat, plant, talk to or use, and yet we do

And the quilt grows.

– Kate Fitzgerald (M’Finda Kalunga Community Gardener)

“Hart Island burials also came in smaller numbers, like the 27 from Rivington House, a nursing home in Manhattan exclusively for AIDS patients…”

Pridgen (2010) Directed by Fury Young Film shot by Christopher Cafaro

From the NYTimes:

“In an untold chapter of the AIDS epidemic scores of unclaimed bodies were buried in a remote spot on Hart’s Island. How many exactly remains unclear.

The bodies reached Hart Island on a ferry like all the others, in spare wooden boxes and bound for ignominious mass interment off the coast of the Bronx where New York City buries its unclaimed dead by the hundreds in long, shallow trenches…”

The island would go on to receive scores, if not hundreds, of people who died during the AIDS epidemic, which during the 1980s and 1990s killed more than 100,000 people in New York, about a quarter of AIDS deaths nationwide during the same period…”

“…Officials at several city agencies involved in the burials refused interview requests to discuss the issue and insisted that no data or any other information was available on AIDS burials.

“…the number of AIDS burials on Hart Island could reach into the thousands, making it perhaps the single largest burial ground in the country for people with AIDS.

It is an untold chapter of the AIDS crisis, but in recent years some of the island’s secrets have started to tumble out largely because of the work of a longtime activist whose legal pressure has wrested information from the city, giving relatives of people with AIDS answers they have long sought.

“Part of the history of the AIDS epidemic is buried on Hart Island, and it’s the unknown part,” said Melinda Hunt, the longtime advocate who has battled the city for information and believes that the island should be open to the public.”

For more information: Melinda Hunt‘s “Hart Island Project” here.

For Clair Yaffa‘s photographs of Hart Island Graves here.

Clair Yaffa: “It is difficult to get access to this place where the homeless, unclaimed bodies, and bodies of ?children are buried in common graves. Claire Yaffa spent one year, calling every day until she was finally permitted to go. Because of her photographic essays on child abuse, the homeless and children with AIDS, she had read about this place and wanted to see it for herself.  Says Yaffa, “I spent my time there?in awe and sadness to see what for some was the end of their life’s journey.”

Pridgen (2010) Directed by Fury Young Film shot by Christopher Cafaro