Rapkin-Gayle Plaza

This past July I happened upon a new plaza on East 4th Street, Manuel Plaza, which I have now learned, thanks to Gotham to Go,

is named in acknowledgment of the first North American free Black settlement, known as the Land of the Blacks. The name honors Big Manuel, Clyn Manuel, Manuel Gerrit de Reus, Manuel Sanders, and Manuel Trumpeter, who were among 28 people of African descent who negotiated their freedom from the West India Dutch Company and over 100 acres in land grants in the mid-17th Century in New Netherland.

Just a few weeks ago, thanks to a (mercifully short) bout of jury duty, I walked by Manuel Plaza's mate, the similar Rapkin-Gayle Plaza, which opened at the same time in 2022.

This site honors urban planner Chester Rapkin (1918-2001), the "Father of SoHo," and preservationist Margot Gayle (1908-2008).

The Parks Department website explains that we have Rapkin to thank for the saving of the lofts that made SoHo (a name he coined) an artists' haven – at least until the current gentrification priced most artists out.

Gayle, a member of the Municipal Art Society, helped save the Jefferson Market Courthouse (now the Jefferson Market Library), the most distinctive building in my neighborhood, from destruction. In addition, as founder of Friends of Cast Iron Architecture she helped preserve SoHo itself (not to mention Washington Square Park) from Robert Moses' execrable expressway plan.

Both sites are Department of Environmental Preservation properties, formerly gravel lots. But in the early 1800s, the Rapkin-Gayle site was Vauxhall Gardens, a pleasure garden and theater and "one of the most popular attractions in New York City" according to The Bowery Boys.

P.S. Incidentally we have Margot Gayle to thank that the city is still home to some of the old "bishop's crook" lampposts. Here's one with the Jefferson Market Library in the background:

Mariners Marsh Park

Head west on Richmond Terrace. Start from the familiar environs of the St. George ferry terminal (where you'll also find, believe it or not, an outdoor outlet mall). Drive further and further out along Staten Island's north shore, through parts unknown. Eventually pass through the neighborhoods of Mariners Harbor and Arlington.

Then the road creaks through two mysterious swaths of—parkland? wilderness? Or something in between? To your left: Mariners Marsh Park. To your right, the even more mysterious Arlington Marsh Park. Both fenced off, closed down, verboten since 2003. But beckoning.

What a pretty and welcoming sign! you may rightly declare. But the entrance pictured above, along residential Holland Ave., is nothing but a tease, drawing you in toward a tall fence with a gate blocked by a heavy metal rail pounded into the ground.

The gate swings open enough for a skinny explorer like yours truly to slip through, but not everyone in our party was game for the challenge. I'm talking about myself, mostly. Worried about someone coming along and padlocking the gate while we were inside.

A compromised fence along Richmond Terrace was more friendly. We slipped in where others, clearly, had before. In fact, although Mariners Marsh Park has been closed for some time – if it was even ever officially open – its accessibility seems to be something of an open secret. A year ago, for example, Caitlin van Dusen of City Lore explored the park, although she documented areas we didn't get to so I'm guessing she entered elsewhere.

We did, however, find a marked trail.

Fall colors and glistening marshlands made for an evocative experience, even if City Lore's description of the park as "the eeriest place in New York City" might be a slight exaggeration.

The builders of the green trail had laid out real infrastructure, including this plank walkway over some swampy ground.

The trail disgorges you into an open grassy field, resuming for a short distance on the other side before petering out.

You will find relics of the area's industrial past here. This hunk of concrete, for example.

And this rocky road:

As for these hexagonal paving stones, your guess is as good as mine:

There's more of Mariner's Marsh Park to explore, but we didn't want to push our luck. Alltrails, for example, seems to think the park is open, showing what it calls the Mariners March Loop Trail in an official-looking maplike manner. However the "green trail" we found is not marked on this map.

As for Arlington Marsh Park, it was sealed tight as a drum, at least along the stretch of Richmond Terrace we scanned. Perhaps on a more intrepid day, or in a beckoning future time of more advanced park development, Arlington shall reveal its secrets to us.

A Master Plan already exists for the transformation of these parks. The city has owned them since 1974, and transferred them to the Dept. of Parks and Recreation in 1993. In 2012 they were damaged by Sandy, and they remain at risk for flooding.

But with luck and determination, we'll be back. In the meantime, we'll keep exploring the countless parks of the five crazy boroughs of New York City.

Manhattan Beach Park

I've been to Coney Island and Brighton Beach plenty of times over the decades – in the case of Coney, since I was a wee kid. Still I had never sojourned further east on that same peninsula to Brooklyn's Manhattan Beach Park. This lapse was finally remedied on Labor Day Sunday, thanks to Mrs. Odyssey who knew the lay of the land (and sea).

Far fewer folks hit Manhattan Beach than crowd its better-known neighbors, in part because this beach is a bit of a hike from the nearest subway station (Sheepshead Bay). But that's where the adventure begins, with a walk down lively Sheepshead Bay Road, ending up at Emmons Ave. which runs along the northern edge of Sheepshead Bay (the bay itself).

The bay is really more of a channel cut into the bottom of Brooklyn, frequented by water birds (including swans) and home to leisure craft and chartered fishing boats.

A long, clattering wooden footbridge clad in fading blue paint takes you across the bay to Manhattan Beach, the neighborhood.

The Hidden Waters Blog reports that the bridge has the rather funny-sounding distinction of being the "longest pedestrian-only bridge across a waterway that is inside a borough."

The same post has a drawing of a much more substantial bridge, never built. Probably the residents of the tony Manhattan Beach neighborhood wouldn't have welcomed Coney Island-sized crowds scrambling down its streets on the way to its beach. Manhattan Beach, I am told by a reliable source, is one of New York City's five most expensive neighborhoods.

The strand was sparsely populated although it was a warm late morning on Labor Day Weekend.

Few concessions had yet been conceded.

But slowly more people arrived.

By the time we left two hours later the lunchtime crowd at the picnic area had started to take on a festival atmosphere.

Walking through the park's eastern side back out towards the street, we encountered a tree that really, really wanted to be playing handball, a field of rocks that was a pure mystery, and a little boy hoping against hope to be hit by a tennis ball.

There's actually another, tiny beach even further out near the end of the peninsula called Kingsborough Beach, but it's restricted to the good people of Kingsborough Community College.

The sun got hotter and hotter as we headed back to town along Shore Boulevard Mall – also a Parks Department responsibility.

Signs on a building visible from the elevated subway station broadcast the multiethnic nature of Sheepshead Bay. A Russian tailor, a Turkish Hair Salon, and a law firm with Italian roots doing business in English and Spanish.

Finally: To partake of that festival atmosphere I mentioned from the comfort of your domicile, please enjoy John Philip Sousa's "Manhattan Beach March."

Pier 57 Rooftop Park

Exhausted from a jostle through the tourist-thronged Little Island? You'd never know it, but right next door is a quiet new oasis with great views and far fewer people.

As of this writing, to reach Pier 57 Rooftop Park you have to follow crude signs a long way around to the side of huge Pier 57.

Privately financed by arrangement with Hudson River Park, the pier's redevelopment is to result in "a mixed-use development with retail, office and public open space, among other uses."

Google's new offices are already here. City Winery has settled in. And perched atop it all is a weird new two-acre park.

Not too much green space up here. But folks are colonizing what there is.

Not a lot of shade either.

A few springs of color liven the place up.

But it's mostly a place from which to look at the river, the lower Manhattan skyline...

and Little Island.

You could definitely get in your stair-climbing exercise here. (There are elevators to the main level, though.)

Pier 57 is a huge blocky building with, to my amateur eye, no redeeming architectural value. It is on the National Register of Historic Places, however. In the 1950s it was the terminal for the Grace Line's ocean liners and cruise ships. Later the Transit Authority used it, but it was closed up in 2003. It's nice to see places like this come to life again.

Manuel Plaza

I was walking to the Kraine Theater recently to see and review the excellent 2022 edition of The Fire This Time Festival. Along a stretch of East 4th Street that I've probably walked down a hundred times in my years of covering NYC theater, I stopped short. There on the north side of the street was something that hadn't been there before: a flat tract with a sparkling new Parks Department sign telling me that this was Manuel Plaza.

But is this a park? Evidently it's now a Department of Parks and Recreation property. Wisely they've designated it a "plaza" and not a park.

It does have a few park-like features, though, including landscaped greenery around the fringes and a central turf oval topped by what I at first took to be a lifelike sculpture of a dog.

It was a real dog. But what are those big flat stones? In fact, as of now, pretty much everything about this plaza is a mystery to me.

Which "Manuel" is it named for? [Update: I found the answer in researching Manuel Plaza's sister location, Rapkin-Gayle Plaza. Find it in my post on that location here.] At whose urging was this recently empty lot converted to a public space? (See the "before" photo below, courtesy of Google Street View.) Is the graffiti on the surrounding walls to be cleaned off, or preserved as cultural artifacts?

A web search for "Manuel Plaza" yields no useful information at present. Not about this place, anyway. I did learn a little about Manuel Plaza, the person – a Chilean Olympic long-distance runner from the 1920s. Manuel Jesús Plaza Reyes served as his country's flag bearer at both the 1924 and the 1928 Olympics, where he competed in the marathon and won the silver medal on his second try. Not too shabby. (There's also a newsworthy Manuel Plaza in the Philippines; he's legal counsel to new president Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. So there's also that.)

I'm sure more information about Manuel Plaza will be available at some point. Meanwhile, you heard it here (almost) first.