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.
