effect on the spirit is one of silence.
Jacob Riis is credited with having invented the idea of the pocket park in 1897, when he was secretary of New York City’s Committee on Small Parks. The committee issued a statement declaring that “any unused corner, triangle or vacant lot kept off the market by litigation or otherwise may serve this purpose well.” New York abounded with possibilities at the turn of the century, but Riis’s idea went largely unrealized. The real surge in implementing the concept occurred in postwar Europe, London and Amsterdam in particular, where the staggering numbers of bombed-out building sites provided the opportunity to create an array of small parks at less cost than reconstruction. Pocket parks thus came into their own in literal gaps in the fabric of the city. In New York, their proliferation began in the late 1960s during the Lindsay administration, under the stewardship of the commissioner of parks Thomas Hoving. Noting the profusion of small parcels of empty land in the city—Bedford-Stuyvesant alone had 378 vacant lots along with another 346 abandoned buildings—Hoving saw that even a modest allotment of parks money, less than 10 percent of the annual budget, would be enough to acquire and develop 200 pocket parks across the city.
Hoving recognized how great a difference these small oases could make in the lives of the communities where they were situated. They offered the city not only “lungs” and a respite from noise but opportunities for collective action on the part of the surrounding communities that Hoving enlisted to reclaim the land. Hoving saw that the communal act of making these spaces of quiet itself promoted harmony.
Greenacre Park, where I walked next, on Fifty-first Street between Second and Third Avenues, is larger and to my mind still more exquisite than Paley. At the far end of the park from its Fifty-first Street entrance, an even higher waterfall tumbles down over great uneven blocks of rough-hewn brown granite. The steps leading down to each of the park’s three levels are themselves edged by a stream of water running over irregular stones. The lovely, pale branches of a Japanese magnolia tree scribble at the western border of the waterfall, and this afternoon a large ornamental pear tree up above was gorgeously festooned with white blossoms. Miraculous.
I sat down on a white metal chair on the lowest level of the park, nearest the waterfall. Having individual chairs, as opposed to benches, was part of what made the pocket parks novel—and successful. Several studies undertaken a few years after the opening of Paley Park to look at the use of public plazas and other open areas in the city found that their effectiveness was directly tied to their “sit-ability” —defined both by availability of seating and the ability to shift the position of one’s seat at will. Our sense of the quiet of a place depends on being able to comfortably pause within it wherever the mood takes us.
The white magnolia petals before me were open, long and gently droopy, like starfish cut from slightly damp summer chemises. The last time I’d really looked at a tree was a month earlier when I’d visited my brother in California and he’d taken me on a hike up in the Angeles Mountains. I’d noticed then how, at steep points in a narrow trail when our feet dislodged a tiny parade of gravel, the trunks and roots of the forest seemed to close directly over the sound.
There’s an old notion that trees quiet the noise of our self-obsessing and help us engage with the world beyond. John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century English gardener and diarist, was involved with a long campaign to defend England’s forests from the ax. In one of his impassioned appeals, he invoked the unpleasantness of walking along the “expos’d” roads of France. Without the shade and delimiting presence of trees, he declared, travelers “are but ill
Conversations
to themselves, and
Jacob Riis is credited with having invented the idea of the pocket park in 1897, when he was secretary of New York City’s Committee on Small Parks. The committee issued a statement declaring that “any unused corner, triangle or vacant lot kept off the market by litigation or otherwise may serve this purpose well.” New York abounded with possibilities at the turn of the century, but Riis’s idea went largely unrealized. The real surge in implementing the concept occurred in postwar Europe, London and Amsterdam in particular, where the staggering numbers of bombed-out building sites provided the opportunity to create an array of small parks at less cost than reconstruction. Pocket parks thus came into their own in literal gaps in the fabric of the city. In New York, their proliferation began in the late 1960s during the Lindsay administration, under the stewardship of the commissioner of parks Thomas Hoving. Noting the profusion of small parcels of empty land in the city—Bedford-Stuyvesant alone had 378 vacant lots along with another 346 abandoned buildings—Hoving saw that even a modest allotment of parks money, less than 10 percent of the annual budget, would be enough to acquire and develop 200 pocket parks across the city.
Hoving recognized how great a difference these small oases could make in the lives of the communities where they were situated. They offered the city not only “lungs” and a respite from noise but opportunities for collective action on the part of the surrounding communities that Hoving enlisted to reclaim the land. Hoving saw that the communal act of making these spaces of quiet itself promoted harmony.
Greenacre Park, where I walked next, on Fifty-first Street between Second and Third Avenues, is larger and to my mind still more exquisite than Paley. At the far end of the park from its Fifty-first Street entrance, an even higher waterfall tumbles down over great uneven blocks of rough-hewn brown granite. The steps leading down to each of the park’s three levels are themselves edged by a stream of water running over irregular stones. The lovely, pale branches of a Japanese magnolia tree scribble at the western border of the waterfall, and this afternoon a large ornamental pear tree up above was gorgeously festooned with white blossoms. Miraculous.
I sat down on a white metal chair on the lowest level of the park, nearest the waterfall. Having individual chairs, as opposed to benches, was part of what made the pocket parks novel—and successful. Several studies undertaken a few years after the opening of Paley Park to look at the use of public plazas and other open areas in the city found that their effectiveness was directly tied to their “sit-ability” —defined both by availability of seating and the ability to shift the position of one’s seat at will. Our sense of the quiet of a place depends on being able to comfortably pause within it wherever the mood takes us.
The white magnolia petals before me were open, long and gently droopy, like starfish cut from slightly damp summer chemises. The last time I’d really looked at a tree was a month earlier when I’d visited my brother in California and he’d taken me on a hike up in the Angeles Mountains. I’d noticed then how, at steep points in a narrow trail when our feet dislodged a tiny parade of gravel, the trunks and roots of the forest seemed to close directly over the sound.
There’s an old notion that trees quiet the noise of our self-obsessing and help us engage with the world beyond. John Evelyn, the seventeenth-century English gardener and diarist, was involved with a long campaign to defend England’s forests from the ax. In one of his impassioned appeals, he invoked the unpleasantness of walking along the “expos’d” roads of France. Without the shade and delimiting presence of trees, he declared, travelers “are but ill
Conversations
to themselves, and
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