First Street Green Art Park

An "oasis of art." That's how UP Magazine, which covers street art and graffiti, describes First Street Green Art Park on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Also known as First Street Green Cultural Park, this strip of green space is festooned with striking murals, curated by grassroots creative activist Jonathan Neville.

First Street Green is "a non-profit collaboration," masterminded by design and architecture firm TODO DA, "with the goal of converting a seemingly derelict lot of land located at 33 East 1st Street from an inaccessible, garbage-strewn, rat-infested piece of 'vacant' land into an active public space." It prioritizes emerging local arts organizations and artists.

At one time there was a website at firststreetgreenpark.org. The website has expired. That seems almost fitting. This site should be experienced in person.

Much of the park, including all of the paved portion of the irregularly shaped parcel, is at present devoted to the memory of actor and East Village art scene icon Patti Astor and Fun Gallery, the influential showplace she founded in the early 1980s.

Is some of this stuff a bit over the top? Maybe. But then, so was Patti Astor, as I understand it. And after all, as William Butler Yeats once said, "If you don't express yourself you walk after you're dead. The great thing is to go empty to your grave."

All photos © Oren Hope

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.