Cadman Plaza Park

Part of the big green space between Downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights is Walt Whitman Park, but most of it is the 10 acres of Cadman Plaza Park.

On the late April day of my recent visit, part of the park had been transformed into a fairground, though with, at least as yet, only a smattering of revelers.

Avoiding the festivities, I didn't get close to the statue of William Jay Gaynor, reformist mayor of New York City from 1910-1913. Next time.

Under a long avenue of plane trees, patchy grass fades into a dirt trail.

The park's most striking feature is a 24-foot-high memorial designed by sculptor Charles Keck and dedicated in 1952 to the Brooklyn soldiers who fought in World War Two, "especially those who suffered and died. May their sacrifice inspire future generations and lead to universal peace."

Big dreams.

Hard by rises my favorite specimen of the borough's architecture, the Main Brooklyn Post Office, aka Conrad B. Duberstein U.S. Bankruptcy Courthouse – a New York City landmark that's also on the National Register of Historic Places.

Back in the park, never mind the carnival, there's plenty of room for a soccer pitch too.

So who was Cadman? I lived in Brooklyn for 14 years and never knew. Well, Samuel Parkes Cadman (1864-1936), born a Shropshire lad, was a Brooklyn Congregational minister, radio preacher, newspaper columnist, author, president of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and co-founder of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice) which arose during the heyday of the KKK to oppose antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and racial intolerance. In other words, aiming for – here it is again – universal peace. I remember the NCCJ's public service announcements – or were they requests for contributions? – on TV when I was a kid.

Walt Whitman Park

There's a surprising amount of open space in downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights. Across Cadman Plaza East from the larger Cadman Plaza Park is Walt Whitman Park, a nearly three-acre rectangle of grass, trees, curved paths, and a fountain kids can stomp around in.

Don't try to drive in here. Security measures are evident, probably because of the proximity of the New York City Emergency Management center – which, per Google Maps, one intrepid citizen has actually reviewed. (Five stars, in case you were wondering. Sadly, no commentary.)

There wasn't much action in Walt Whitman Park on a sunny Saturday in spring.

Only a few people had brought their kids to the fountain.

Walt Whitman, as readers of this blog and Brooklyn-history buffs know, spent a good part of his life in the Borough of Churches, even editing for a time in the 1840s the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, for which he wrote a poem called "The Play-Ground," which begins:

When painfully athwart my brain
   Dark thoughts come crowding on,
And, sick of wordly [sic?] hollowness,
   My heart feels sad or lone—

Then out upon the green I walk,
   Just ere the close of day,
And swift I ween the sight I view
   Clears all my gloom away.

For there I see young children—
   The cheeriest things on earth—
I see them play—I hear their tones
   Of loud and reckless mirth.

Liberty Park

Parks don't have to be green. The brand new Liberty Park, built atop the agonizingly named World Trade Center Vehicle Security Center and Tour Bus Parking Facility in lower Manhattan, is an acre of modernist walkways, weirdly angled wooden benches, and planters overlooking the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

When it opened on June 29, 2016, Gothamist called it "sparkling". The New York Times extolled its "touches of whimsy" and predicted it was "sure to become a popular destination, particularly when a half-dozen young honey locusts and other trees mature into a dappled canopy over an exposed, hard-edged expanse."

As yet, the hard edges still dominate, and on a pleasant early spring day as the workday came to a close, only a few people were using the park for anything but a route from one place to another.

At the western end, the new St. Nicholas National Shrine, designed by Santiago Calatrava, was taking shape (more rapidly than the honey locusts). It will replace the original St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed by the September 11 attacks.

The planters were looking nice – perhaps an augury of urban-bucolic things to come.

And the views of One World Trade Center and the other shiny new buildings are unbeatable.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media