Spring Street Park

There's a large triangle at Spring Street and Sixth Avenue that I always think of as Christmas Tree Park because years ago a Christmas tree vendor would set up shop there. Once called, variously, Soho Square and Hudson Square Plaza, in 2018 it reopened after a $5.5 million renovation under the name Spring Street Park.

As most New Yorkers know, Sixth Avenue in Manhattan has two names. In 1945 the city, under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, designated the busy thoroughfare "Avenue of the Americas," "to honor pan-American ideals and principles" and perhaps in recognition of the selection of New York City as the home of the United Nations.

The name never totally caught on; some buildings and businesses use it, others don't. But either way, Spring Street Park houses one of six statues of Latin American heroes erected along the Avenue.

Here, then, is a backlit General José Artigas (1764-1850), the Uruguayan independence hero.

The original cast of the statue, by José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín (1891-1975), has stood in Montevideo for the past 75 years.

Facing north, toward the wide end of the triangle:

And facing south:

The unusual backless benches (with under-bench lighting) and squarish metal swivel chairs are interesting features.

Another are the "moonlighting" lamps, atop tall posts, intended to create a moonlight effect in the light and shadows on the ground.

Plain old London plane trees, among the thousands throughout the city, dominate the canopy, but not exclusively.

The renovation also included, according to DNAInfo, "anti-flooding infrastructure allowing the absorption of 1,140 percent more storm water."

My reason for walking through Spring Street Park is almost always because it's just around the corner from HERE Arts Center, where I've seen many shows (including some great puppet theater) over the years. But if puppets aren't your bag, maybe you're in the market for a Ducati racing motorcycle.

Where better to race noisy bikes, after all, than down Avenue of the Americas with its verdant parks and wide-open lanes?

I'm kidding, of course. But a walk along lower Sixth Avenue repays the urban adventurer seeking a bit of respite from the city's craziness.

All photos © Oren Hope except where noted

Nameless SoHo Park (Bobby Boles Park)

Down in SoHo, at the convocation of Watts, Broome, and Thompson Streets just west of West Broadway, sits a small triangular park – a sliver park, as these tiny oases are sometimes called. As near as my research can determine, it's part of the Parks Department's Greenstreets program, though I didn't notice a Greenstreets sign.

Forgotten New York explains that the island is a "result of latter-day street engineering, as prior to 1905 or thereabouts, Watts ended its eastern progress at Sullivan, but then it was extended to meet Broome just west of W. Broadway, creating the triangle."

Forgotten New York doesn't explain, and I can't tell you either, why the little park didn't get a name when, around the turn of the 21st century, it was landscaped with patterned stones, pleasant plantings (including a beautiful crape myrtle), a circle of benches, and a central sculpture. I think it deserves one.

Fortunately, every neighborhood has its chroniclers, you sometimes just have to hunt for them. Soho Memory tells us that the park has been unofficially called Bobby Bolles Park, because before it was turned into a park, sculptor and pro welder Robert S. Bolles, sometimes known as Bob Steel, installed his works here – without permission.

As amNY reported back in 2003, "For years, Bolles' sculptures covered what was then an asphalt traffic island. Bolles, a Gypsy, carved the 'Tree of Life' on the site with a blowtorch from a large metal pipe. It was his last major work before he died in 1980." By then, though, he had received official permission to install his works, according to a 1979 profile by Francis X. Clines in the New York Times. Bolles and his work were notable enough to get a mention in the Fifth Edition (2010) of the AIA Guide to New York City.

The city removed the sculptures when it made the park, but it seems one was re-installed, and in a place of honor. From what I've read of the "Tree of Life" sculpture, this isn't that one, but it does look like his work:

The little park narrows to a point at its eastern end where it stabs West Broadway.

No, the passions of current politics haven't bypassed this obscure little spot.

But it's good to be reminded that continuity can sometimes be found if you look hard enough. Sometimes a locally legendary character will, decades on, be memorialized, even if unofficially, in the urban landscape on which he had at one time a notable influence. Bob Bolles didn't live to see the world brought to its knees by COVID-19 in 2020, the Twin Towers fall in 2001, or even the Mets win the World Series in 1986. But in this unnamed little park in SoHo, he lives on.

All photos © Critical Lens Media

Soho Square, Father Fagan Park, and Avenue of the Americas

There's a string of small gardens and parks that decorate Sixth Avenue, otherwise known as Avenue of the Americas, in the West Village. From north to south, there's the Jefferson Market Garden, Minetta Green and Minetta Triangle, Father Demo Square, and Winston Churchill Square. There's also Little Red Square, named not for the Moscow landmark but (presumably) for the adjacent Little Red School House.

The sequence doesn't stop when you continue further south into Soho, because Avenue of the Americas down here refuses to line up precisely in parallel with the streets to its west and east, giving rise to lots of wee triangles too small for buildings.

Down here on the Soho stretch there's nothing with the green density of the Jefferson Market Garden or Minetta Green, but there is, to begin with, the sliver of a triangle known as Charlton Plaza, which I've documented before. Even though it isn't a park, and not even remotely a "plaza," I like it because of its startling narrowness. I note it again today because when I walked by the other day I saw, for the first time, its gate open.

No one was inside that I could see, and, fearing transformation into a Flatlander, I didn't venture in. On the far left, you can see a woman tending the vegetation, but doing it from outside the fence – seems she knows about that sinister Flatland possibility too.

Across the street on the next block, a slightly wider but much less green triangle known as Father Fagan Park doesn't seem to get much use. Those passing through doubtless give little thought to the 27-year-old Franciscan priest who gave his life to rescue two colleagues from a fire at his Thompson Street rectory in 1938 before lending his name to this space. Plaques also honor three firefighters who died in the line of duty at another nearby blaze in 1994.

The tree partially visible on the left, with leaves obscuring the sign, is one of the three callery pear trees planted here that same year.

Seen from the southern end at this early evening hour, Father Fagan Park looks none too appetizing, for sure.

A little farther south you hit Soho Square (not a square but, of course, a triangle), which is larger and more inviting. The northern fringe now hosts a Citi Bike station, one of the few that was positioned sensibly (that is, not taking up valuable parking spaces). On this occasion, you can see that most of the bikes are out, rented. In spite of all the technical problems with the city's new bikeshare program (and the cranky old bats blasting it with unhinged fervor), many's the time I walk by a station with almost all the bikes gone, and I see people riding them around Manhattan all the time, so by that early measure, it's a success.

Is Soho Square a park? Well, I see the Parks Dept. leaf logo on the sign. There's no grass to speak of, but plenty of trees and benches, and a red-and-black paving pattern that sets it off from its surroundings. So I give it the benefit of the doubt and tally it up as a park.

If you're wondering why Sixth Avenue was renamed Avenue of the Americas – or, to be more realistic, why it was given that alternate name – just walk down the southern section and you'll find monuments to figures from Latin American countries. At the southern end of Soho Square, near where its scalene triangle tapers to a point, you'll find General José Artigas, "National Hero of Uruguay," a cattle smuggler turned guerrilla warrior who became "the father of Uruguayan nationhood." This statue is a cast of an original by José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín that stands in Montevideo, and the base – here's a piece of unusual trivia – is of Uruguayan granite.

So, while Avenue of the Americas doesn't actually extend south into any other Americas, you can wander along it and acknowledge some of their heroes, while partaking of the Pan-American spirit that gave Mayor LaGuardia that crazy street-renaming idea in the first place.