East Village Parks

New York doesn’t have the same kind of great outdoors that you’d find in or near other cities. Instead there’s a motley collection of concrete playgrounds and corporate plazas, interspersed with vest-pocket parks of all kinds. I grew up near the East Village back before the cafes and art galleries. Back then the buildings didn’t have windows, just smoke stains rising from vacant or bricked-over openings. Last weekend we took a walk into the depths of the former Alphabet City and discovered what seems like hundreds of little community gardens. Each one started life as the rubble of an arson reduced tenement. Over the years, the city has dubbed many as official parks and there are currently about 75 of these semi-natural reservations dotting the neighborhood. We didn’t have a map at the time, but found ourselves easily wandering from one unique park to another without needing one.

The most beautiful was the 6BC Botanical Garden which came complete with ponds, quiet walkways and a chalet-style tree house. At the other end of the spectrum, the Brisas del Caribe boasted a funky collection of junk. One park had live chickens, tended by a surly teenager on his cell phone. We asked him how the chickens had come to be there. He looked up from his conversation briefly to reply, “I don’t know. People bring them.” El Jardin del Paraiso is being worked on a a model of sustainability. The history of this park is telling, because it begins with the destruction of buildings (mostly by fire) and the killing of an eight-year-old girl on the vacant lot. To me, all these parks are a memorial for one of the saddest, scariest times for the area, when it was ruled by drug gangs, arsonists and despair. Each park rose from destroyed homes and should serve as a reminder of the terrible scars inflicted on the Lower East Side during decades of banishment from the civil infrastructure of New York City. They are beautiful flowers, growing from graves.