Lately I’ve been considering it the deal of the century. If you stand in East River Park on a sunny day or even a nice overcast one in which every inch of our gorgeous park becomes so eminently photographable you kind of can’t help thinking what a spectacular piece of real estate. I had never had these kinds of thoughts about the park before. Not before the past year. In the current climate even the most wondrous experience of nature is somehow just a shade and I can only compare this sensation to the opening of Tarkovsky’s Solaris where he’s wandering around on his father’s dacha in fact you don’t even know that for a while, it’s just a guy walking in nature yet the lighting is such that there’s a foreboding to the overwhelming sense of beauty he’s moving through like every bit of him is trying to hold on and absorb and photograph it in some way with his body and it’s just because he’s a psychologist about to go off into outer space. He’s about to leave the earth and that’s the source of the oddly stable unstable feeling. So I’ll be sitting around the amphitheater in East River Park watching the water move and runners passing by or a cyclist or a person with their dogs and some birds cross the sky and whirl off. I can hear kids cry out playing some sport and sports are practiced of course by people of all ages but I think sports in general are a pastime of people in relatively good health or passable health or enough health to move and finally sports are practiced a lot by people who are young and the 50 odd acres of East River Park are filled with young people playing sports, team sports a lot and it’s actually a really great thing for kids to do in the present and for the rest of their lives this experience of playing soccer with your friends or little league will stay with them. Or just hanging around. It’s the pleasure (for everyone) of having a body in unbridled space and it’s free and it’s home. Seems like a human right. Animal and plant rights too. And bees. So I hate to be a spoilsport but once in a while we’ll sidle over to the coach hey do you know the city is planning to destroy this park. He gets a grim look and goes I know and returns to the game. Cause it can’t be true. You probably know that East River Park was built in 1939 by Robert Moses. He wanted to build FDR and by adding a park to the plan he convinced the city the feds to let him do it. The notion almost sounds quaint now. The idea of creating green space for the poor and the working class of the city. You can certainly talk about the lack of such space today. Or the value of it. But actually initiating it on a large scale (or keeping it here) is something else. They’d rather start from scratch. Before the park the current shoreline was nonexistent. It’s landfill. The true riverfront is Avenue C. Indigenous people of course lived here. They were massacred about where the amphitheater is now by the Dutch in the 17th C and then like a century later they started putting in landfill then there were slaughterhouses, a glass factory and eventually there were sailors and a bunch of prostitutes walking around. I guess prostitutes are like a harbinger of development of some kind. Think of the west side.
Today across from the East River there’s NYCHA which is public housing for low income people (slowly getting warehoused and privatized) and I can just imagine Mayor Bill DeBlasio sitting in a room somewhere looking at a map thinking no no no this just can’t be. Looking at all that public housing at the riverfront and then those fifty odd acres of “empty” land continuing to exist day after day for the pleasure of the poor and working class and people from a wide variety of classes who use it— 100K in a “normal” year and who knows how many are using it in a pandemic — the problem for DeBlasio and the DDC (Department of Design and Construction) is that all that land is not being monetized. If you go a little further down the river you’ll bump into something called Basketball City which is kind of a pay to play basketball facility (kids get scholarships to use it) and Van Gogh the immersive experience is also down there. I think of both of these as predatory alien life forms creeping up the river. Because this unruly vernacular riverfront has always astonished me. In the 80s I liked running along the East river with headphones listening to opera. For newly sober me that was an immersive experience. I inherited this pastime from my friend James who ran around Rome with headphones listening to Aida before he died of AIDS in 1989. And the riverfront was still gorgeously funky then. The amphitheater was in shambles. There were broken concrete steps forming the ruins of what looked like an ancient theater and no indication of anybody having any thoughts of fixing it. There were beautiful collapsing WPA looking buildings you could wander around in and see strange maroon fallen curtains and busted walls. It was public abandonment. It was fun. I popped some of those interiors into a poem. There was a tiny building at the end of the path homeless people clearly dwelled in that must have been the best place to sleep in the whole entire city. It was some kind of little electrical building and it was all covered in graffiti and it had a tiny guardrail but the outer edge of this building was like a concrete lip over the river—I loved smoking there—it makes me crazy with joy that someone actually slept in that spot. The path along the river was closed then for ten years before Sandy and when it re-opened we were just in awe. The amphitheater was done up cool like it is now. That rebuild was funded as a gift for the kids who had lost their parents in 9-11. The esplanade as the trail along the river was now called was gorgeous. The track was redone in this soft dark pink material. The center of the track is astro-turf which is unfortunate. But that tree, one of 991 trees in the park, I first stretched my leg on in 1978 is still there. But not for long. So let me return to the terrible time of the present.
In the same way that 9-11 was an opportunity to push America to the right, bomb the middle east and grab all their oil while trampling domestically on our “freedoms,” same way the Reichstag fire enabled Hitler (always glad to pull him in!), Sandy is a new green opportunity for the real estate interests embedded in our city government (like the DDC and much of city planning) and its politician buddies to scarf up land and public funding in the name of climate resiliency. So the official reason the city wants to destroy the park is flood control. But it’s not true, it’s a lousy destructive plan and there were better ones but none of them laid bare the 50 plus acres of the park to other interests. The other plans made the park more resilient but kept it intact. I’ve only known about this for a year and thought hey I can write about this. People will want to hear this story. Uh-uh. There’s a media blackout on this project. The Times says it’s local and they don’t do local. The New Yorker will definitely write one of those long beautiful articles when it’s over. How could this have happened. The Mayor’s talking points are everywhere. We’re saving lives! But nobody died in the lower east side during Sandy. On Staten Island where people did die the city just approved a BJ’s big box store getting built right in the very wetlands that were another low income neighborhood of color’s last lines of defense. So I don’t believe the talk about protecting the vulnerable NYCHA residents. It’s almost like everyone’s in on it. How else can you label total silence in the face of a systemic assault on public health and green spaces all over the city. Some of the best plans for climate resiliency and our coastline got bandied around before Sandy and a little while after. Go look up the East River Blue Way. Somehow this very sweet plan full of beaches and wetlands and schemes for covering FDR just got trashed. In 2012 during Obama, HUD funded something called the Big U—which created the original ESCR (East Side Coastal Resiliency Plan) which was about protecting the neighborhood with rolling berms along FDR and maintaining the park. The community spent four years on the plan. It’s always been a fact that the neighborhood needs to be protected, first from FDR which spews carbon monoxide but the trees in the park help with that. Most of the flooding in the east village didn’t come from the river but from uptown and the park itself is very resilient, it’s like a big sponge and was open in two days after Sandy so you need to build on that, that’s protection, you don’t want to destroy it. But yes yes you do. If you want to get your paws on that land yes you do. The current plan, rammed through in 2019 by Jamie Torres Springer, the new guy at the DDC, protects the park by annihilation— removing every speck of biodiversity, uprooting all 991 trees, covering that exposed toxic scar with a million tons of landfill, putting concrete and astro-turf over that then stick in a bunch of tennis courts and saplings. There’ll be a ten-foot wall along the river though it’s widely known that walls don’t work. You need to work with water. But not in the city of New York. And this new plan costs twice what the earlier plan costs. The city will absolutely run out of money and that’s when the developers will come in. Everyone seems to know this except the city. They know something else and they just won’t tell. I just see a big pile of landfill sitting there for years and then the city will say we’ve run out of money and developers will come to the rescue.
The Daily News just ran an op-ed by Jamie Torres Springer (who came to the DDC from HR & A, a real estate consultancy the NYC planning sector is crawling with) on September 10 with the headline “NYC NEEDS TO BUILD DIFFERENTLY FROM NOW ON” and it’s him explaining that since Sandy we need to speed up and give the DDC more freedom to go forward on the great projects he’s so very proud of like “managing new shoreline protection programs” (the anti-park) and the construction of four new jails. These projects synch up nicely like the kids all having a wonderful time down at the park right now can be slid into the four new jails if we don’t know what to do with all that young energy. He says “[t]hese are important public projects that will help lift the local economy.” I guess that means the kids could alternately work in the jails.
But keeping the park is cheaper than destroying it, right, and cheaper than jails too. What gives? It seems like nobody cares if the new ESCR plan actually works. Jamie doesn’t care. Him and DeBlasio are go ahead guys. The health effects of ESCR on the neighborhood haven’t even been examined since the pandemic and what about all the recent flooding. There’s been no comprehensive state or federal review of ESCR. It’ll be okay.
I remember reading once the reason the Titanic really happened— well actually there were several. One was they forgot to supply the men on the crow’s nest with binoculars. That is an actual fact. So they couldn’t see the iceberg. And the captain wanted the Titanic to go fast on its maiden voyage. While the thing they actually should have done on the night to remember was stop dead in their tracks in the middle of that iceberg rich sea and wait for daylight so they could see what was going on. But it’s thrilling to go fast especially if you’re sailing on a lot of money and if you make a blunder well you’ll make a really big one which you can always fix. I have to admit I’m scared. It’s the deal of the century and everybody knows it and it’s like screaming in a dream and nobody can hear and The New Yorker ran that beautiful piece about oysters coming back and we’re hearing about how important trees are in The New York Times and if no one intervenes we’ll be hearing them fall, and the birds making noise, we’ll be smelling that dirt and feeling that shudder and it will be anything but calm. It will be hot and airless and silent except for those cars still driving by the river. They didn’t even have to close a lane and that’s great.