Photos by Stacie Joy
A new community space is now open outside the Lillian Wald Houses on Avenue D at Third Street ... the result of a long, resident-led effort to bring life to a patch of lawn that had sat fenced off and unused for years.
Last week, neighbors, NYCHA residents and the Design Trust for Public Space gathered for a ribbon-cutting for Opening the Edge, a project first proposed more than a decade ago by artist Jane Greengold.
She said she was inspired to pursue this project after seeing fences around the green spaces at NYCHA housing, and then residents bringing their own chairs to sit on the sidewalks outside these areas.
Since 2014, residents and local partners have held community meetings, workshops and walk-throughs to imagine what this space could be and how it should function.
The finished design, created in collaboration with Davies Toews Architecture, The PARC Foundation and NYCHA, includes new benches, tables, lighting, and a small raised platform for performances.
Paths now run through the site, and the biggest change of all: the fence is gone.
5 comments:
good news and nice open space!
> Since 2014, residents and local partners have held community meetings, workshops and walk-throughs to imagine what this space could be and how it should function.
oof. Perfect example of design by committee, I suppose.
I’d love to see more actual green being used like plants, trees, benches & active lawns rather than metal & concrete. EVery urban blight zone starts off as a project like this that some contractor profited from. But it’s a start. NYCHA deserves a nice green campus that should rival the adjacent East River park!
In 2012, or so, there was a prior collaborative effort to build a designed Greenspan at the Lillian Wald House and it opened to great fanfare--walking path, water features, seating areas. Within a year or so, it was strewn with litter, including discarded cigarette butts and NYCHA maintenance either could not or would not keep up its cleanliness. As for this new space--good luck with that.
I just checked my notes and in fact the year was October 2011 and among the collaborators was a Green City Force and Planters Peanuts! The 8,000 square feet space was called Planters Grove. Apparently, upkeep beyond NYCHA staff has to be assigned if these spaces are to last
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