The Invention of Public Space by Mariana Mogilevich

Author:Mariana Mogilevich [Mogilevich, Mariana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ARC005080 Architecture / History / Contemporary (1945-), HIS036080 History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (dc, De, Md, Nj, Ny, Pa), SOC026030 Social Science / Sociology / Urban, ARC011000 Architecture / Buildings / Public, Commercial & Industrial
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Figure 4.10. MEND community garden, East Harlem, 1969. Parks Council Records, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Small parks, envisioned as a site produced by and producing a more inclusive public, ended up in entirely private hands. Here again, the park makers seem to have followed the advice of Schumacher, who argued in Small Is Beautiful that private ownership had different meanings at different scales: “It is moreover obvious that men organized in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomaniac governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry.”63 While the community garden could be a symbol of neighborhood strength, it also marked a defensive retreat, back to nature, rather than a vision of an urban future. The difficult lessons learned from the vest-pocket park experiments would not be applied but rather sidestepped. Rather than serving as interface, engaging conflict surrounding different values and demands of citizens, the garden was the possession of a particular community. With a claim (however tenuous) to the land and the locked gates to prove it, the community garden clearly marked the end of one vision of an inclusive urban landscape.

In some milieus, however, vest-pocket parks thrived. In 1971, long after the novelty had faded, the New York Times reported on the inauguration of a new vest-pocket park in Midtown Manhattan.64 Designed by Sasaki, Dawson, and DeMay Associates, a long-established firm normally engaged in the design of corporate and college campuses, and built on land that had cost $1 million to assemble, Greenacre Park had a more luxurious cast than most of its predecessors. It was a gift to the city by Mrs. Jean Mauzé, née Abby Rockefeller, who also set up a foundation for the park’s maintenance. Rockefeller had been inspired by the success of a nearby park, built by William Paley, chairman of CBS and a long-standing patron of the arts. Paley had attended Zion and Breen’s exhibition of small park prototypes in 1963 and then hired the landscape architects to transform a Midtown lot into an outdoor living room with elegant honey locusts, handsome movable chairs for pausing passersby, and walls of ivy and water that screened out the city around and above it (Plate 5). Paley Park and Greenacre Park, with their big budgets and Bertoia Diamond chairs, would not meet the same fate as their less elegant brethren.

Paley Park is often described as New York City’s first vest-pocket park. It has pride of place in the story of the origins of the privately owned public space. Paley Park directly inspired New York City’s 1976 amended zoning code, a corrective issued to improve the quality of urban open spaces.65 The new rules traded floor area bonuses for plazas, arcades, and urban open spaces that met higher design standards, so reminiscent of Paley’s amenities that the illustrations to the guidelines featured the same elegant movable chairs and tables. The sponsors of such spaces did

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