Bryant Park

After extensive renovations 20 years ago, the former potter's field once known as Reservoir Park became a crazily successful hub for social activity, which it remains today. Bryant Park's own website has a good quick history along with abundant information about what's going on there—which is an awful lot—eating, drinking, ice skating, sitting, going on a carousel…even playing pétanque. Concerts, movies, you name it. Right in midtown, behind the Public LIbrary, with a south view of the Empire State Building, it doesn't get much more central than this.

Last winter we sat under a heat lamp at the outdoor Southwest Porch bar and were went home with free Slankets. (They're like Snuggies except better quality.) Woo-hoo!


Pétanque

The one thing that didn't go on in Bryant Park this year was Fashion Week, which moved uptown to Lincoln Center. A good thing, too. Fashion Week ruins the park for everyone else.


Bryant Park Grill, just before the dinner rush


The lawn on a quiet late afternoon


An after-work crowd relaxes


City street scene: man dressed like monk just outside Bryant Park takes picture of skyline

Chelsea Park

This long, skinny park between Ninth and Tenths Avenues is given over mostly to recreational facilities, but it gets an entry here because the tip that faces Ninth is parklike, in a humble sort of way, with some benches and trees and two monuments. The central World War One monument holds the Chelsea Doughboy statue, a striking piece by Philip Martiny, who studied with Saint-Gaudens. It was dedicated in 1921.

More interesting to me are the granite gateposts memorializing Frank L. Dowling, a Tammany Hall leader who served as President of the Board of Aldermen (an antecedent of today's City Council) in the nineteen-teens. Faded, eroded, they're rather fitting as a remembrance of those bygone days of corruption. (Because as everyone knows, local politicians today are squeaky-clean, every last one of them!)



The Parks website seems confused about the pillars, noting correctly that the Horatio Seymour Tammany Club put them up, but getting the year and the honoree wrong. One suspects there might be some confused old ghosts passing through the posts, over and over, wondering "What's my name?" and "Why have I been misremembered?" Or even "Have I been totally forgotten?" (Yes, pretty much.)

The guy in this photo is probably thinking about something more current. We'll never know. At least he found a nice bench.

Signs of the Times (Old and New) at Seward Park

Unless you're in the Chinatown area and happen to be looking for a playground, Seward Park wouldn't seem to have too much to recommend it.



Some of the surrounding buildings, like the former Jewish Daily Forward Building and the handsome 1909 Seward Park Library, are more interesting-looking than anything in the park itself, which in terms of activity seems mostly focused on its playgrounds.

The north playground, according to the Parks Department website, opened in 1903 as "the first permanent, municipally built playground in the United States." Pretty historic, but not much to look at.



The park is named for William Seward, an impressive statue of whom commands the southwest corner of the much prettier Madison Square Park a few neighborhoods to the north. What Seward Park lacks in beauty it seems to make up for in unexpected Sewardine semiotics, such as a "Mount McKinley" play unit honoring "Seward's Folly"—Alaska. I prefer the more obvious signage, though, like the superbly ungrammatical "Please Flush" notice in the men's room.

That's right—this is one of those parks with public toilets. Make a note of it.

One more thing: the Parks Department thinks that Seward Park is the ideal opportunity to talk about beavers, apparently because the city flag appears in the park and it features a beaver. (Beavers, as any aficionado of early New York history knows, were critical to the economy of the early Dutch colony). As it happens, we recently visited a park just a couple of hours from the city that's loaded with beavers (or "loaded with beaver" as a pelt hunter probably would have said): Mount Tom State Reservation in Massachusetts. We didn't see any of the big rodents, but found plenty of evidence of their eagerness and busyness, including an abandoned dam and many chewed and toppled trees. So if you're interested in beavers, head up to Mt. Tom, not Seward Park. Here's a tree from up there, half-chewed-through by beavers, accompanied by a pair of human legs artfully presented for scale.

John Paul Jones Park

Deep in southwest Brooklyn, next to the massive on-ramp to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, sits square-shouldered John Paul Jones Park.



Named for the naval hero of the War of 1812, not the Led Zeppelin drummer, the park is chockablock (I always wanted to use that word!) with military monuments, as is perhaps appropriate given its proximity to Fort Hamilton. From within, the park feels pretty substantial in area, especially when you think about it compared with some of those tiny parks we've been talking about squeezed into crowded Manhattan, but its most dominant feature is a monstrous Civil War era cannon.



The cannon is used now only for the most peaceful of purposes—like climbing on. Still, this is not a quiet park. The reason: that aforementioned on-ramp, which pours a constantly undulating stream of traffic noise over the soft spaces below.



I visited on a blustery, cloudy September afternoon with fall in the air, but just as I was leaving, the sun came out for a moment, illuminating the great granite obelisk and the flagpole. The obelisk commemorates the Dover Patrol of the First World War English fleet. The flagpole comes from a Navy destroyer. The park also contains memorials to the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

But while we're mindful of the sacrifices of our warriors and those of our allies throughout the seemingly countless wars that gape through our history, let's remember one of the main purposes of parks: parking. As in, parking your butt on a retired cannon. Which is to say: playing.

Isham Park

I discovered Isham Park on a trip to another, much bigger, rockier swath of green and purple and grey, Inwood Hill Park. Nestled up against its vast neighbor in far upper Manhattan, Isham is a hilly, 20-acre patch whose undulating terrain makes it seem bigger than it is. Springtime, of course, is the most colorful time to visit a park like this:



The park is named for a leather merchant named Isham whose mansion once stood on top of the hill. Now, as the Talking Heads would say, there's "nothing but flowers."







Hessian troops landed here during the Revolutionary War. I wonder if they're responsible for this malformed piece of woodsiness. I don't know what to say about it. Just—here it is:



And lest we forget we're in the big city, the colors don't stop with the spring flowers.



Isham Park is well worth a visit. You can even get some exercise here walking up and down and around the hill—without even crossing over into Inwood Hill Park itself.

And if you're headed that way, to do some real climbing and check out the only remaining bit of original Manhattan forest, take a little time for Isham too. In any other part of town not contiguous with a huge and more famous park, Isham Park would be a well-known treasure.

The Golden Swan Garden

Eugene O'Neill, John Sloan, and Rudy Giuliani all take their turns in the history of this obscure little corner of Greenwich Village. The Golden Swan Garden is so obscure that Google Maps doesn't even show it, though the decrepit-looking Washington Square Coffee Shop adjoining the Garden merits a listing.



As "megan c." says on Yelp, the Golden Swan Garden is a "sad, scrungy little patch of land" that's worth a visit because of the history attached. The Golden Swan Café stood here many years ago and played a part in inspiring O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.

But there's not much to say about the Garden that you can't read on this 'ere sign:



No need to squint, you can read the text here. The yellow banner bears an environmental message, resonating in its fluttery way with one of the place's earlier incarnations: a local recycling center which predated citywide recycling. (Greenwich Village residents were always forward-thinking in that way.)

On my recent visit, the Garden's only occupant was an apparently homeless man rooting through some stuff he'd collected, although the woman in this photo, just beyond the impressive iron fence, had just used it as a shortcut from the West Fourth Street shops and restaurants to Sixth Avenue.



Too bad. It could be nicer. Maybe because it's in a commercial area rather than a residential one, it doesn't get the loving care other Village green spaces get. Right next door are the much more famous West 4th Street Courts, which, as a purely athletic facility, don't get their own post on this blog. But there's a lot more action in The Cage than in Golden Swan Park.

Madison Square Park

Madison Square Park. Ring a bell? Madison Square is where the world-famous arena, Madison Square Garden, got its name.

The original Garden lived here starting in 1879 when P.T. Barnum converted a railroad depot to an open-air arena at Madison Avenue and 26th Street. In 1890 it was replaced by a magnificent "Hippodrome" designed by Stanford White, who was later murdered there.

This second incarnation closed in 1925, giving way to the New York Life building with its distinctive gold pyramid. (In the photo to the left you can see it gleaming next to a dark, modern monstrosity of a tower.) I worked in the New York Life building some years ago, and spent many a peaceful lunch hour in Madison Square Park. That was before the arrival of Shake Shack, which now dominates the southeast corner of the park with the smell of French fries and lengthy lines of lunchers.

Of course, it's commerce that's responsible for all the fantastic architecture that surrounds the park (except for the wonderful Beaux Arts Manhattan Appellate Courthouse building). The photo on the right shows the Metropolitan Life tower. And below is the even more famous Flatiron Building. Walking around the park's southern environs, you have to watch your step, or you'll bump into a tourist taking a picture of it.



With all its famous skyscrapers, this is a much quieter neighborhood than the biggest centers of Manhattan commerce, like Wall Street and Midtown. But just in case you forget where you are, here's the Empire State Building peeking out from behind a tree, granting a taste of its majesty to Madison Square.

The girls below, in the cheery red dresses, are focused on something much more homely. Probably pigeons or squirrels on the lawn, which, though frequently the site of art installations, was on this hot late-summer day in 2010 just plain grass, which was just plain fine with me.



And on a sunny Saturday morning, before the Shake Shack throngs descend, these Falung Gong practitioners can enjoy some peaceful meditation…



…while this old elm stands guard over the northern end of the lawn, confident it will outlive us all.



A worker skims leaves out of the pool. Just like in your suburban swimming pool!



Of course, you can't swim in this one. But at your house in the suburbs, you probably have to skim the pool yourself. Unless you're rich enough to have someone to do that sort of thing for you. In which case, what are you doing living in the suburbs? You can get a great apartment for just a few million here in Manhattan. Just look at these pictures, isn't it gorgeous?

Madison Square Park also boasts a lovely fountain, and three statues, the best of which, to my eye, is the imposing 1876 seated figure of William Seward—Governor, Senator, Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln, and purchaser of Alaska.



If you're ever in upstate New York, Seward's mansion in Auburn is worth a visit. But then head on back to New York City. We have hundreds more parks to visit.