Making and Unmaking Collect Pond Park
Lower Manhattan was a much different place not so long ago. The area south of Canal Street, where the current Collect Pond Park is located, was very different. According to the descriptions of early settlers and some surviving engravings, the Collect Pond area was downright bucolic.The pond once sprawled over 48 acres. It waters went as deep as 60 feet. People skated here in winter and held picnics in summer. Businesses and homes located beside the spring-fed waters as the city grew. The pond, which was the city’s main source of fresh water in the early days, soon became a fetid sewer.
The growing city and businesses meant the pond had to die. Not long after the city grew around its edges, the surrounding hills were razed. Streets were cut through the swamps and brush to house the teeming masses of the infamous ‘Five Points’ neighborhood.
The Collect Pond Park most New Yorkers remember from serving jury duty nearby was a windswept, raised plaza in the ‘Brutalist’ style. A park so unloved it spawned a recent redesign to replace the blank expanses, heaving pavers and sinkholes. The old Collect Pond Park was a place loved by rats, pigeons but few others.
By Troy Torrison
Lower Manhattan was a much different place not so long ago. The area south of Canal Street, where the current Collect Pond Park is located, was very different. According to the descriptions of early settlers and some surviving engravings, the Collect Pond area was downright bucolic.The pond once sprawled over 48 acres. It waters went as deep as 60 feet. People skated here in winter and held picnics in summer. Businesses and homes located beside the spring-fed waters as the city grew. The pond, which was the city’s main source of fresh water in the early days, soon became a fetid sewer.
Who uses this place?
Aside from the court workers, cops and jury duty
sufferers, the park attracts a relatively large number of homeless New Yorkers and patrons of the various charity services in the area. When the park underwent its long renovation, these folks relocated. Today the park appears to have fewer permanent homeless guests but the shopping carts haven’t vanished and are a reminder that even so close to tony Tribeca and SoHo and bustling Chinatown, there is extreme poverty in New York.
Where is Collect Pond Park?
It’s downtown, south of Canal Street, bound on all
sides by imposing court buildings and their ilk. The area bustles on weekdays from 9-5 but empties out most nights and weekends. The park takes up almost exactly one acre of precious Manhattan real estate. By comparison, beloved Gramercy Park, a few dozen blocks north, takes up two acres. Note the large grey block to the south
of the park devoted to extra wide concrete sidewalks and parking spaces.
There are some thing to like in the new park. The western edge has some lovely stone pavers, like this path (seen to the left) that recalls rustic New York park motifs.
But this is not a love letter
This stretch on the northern edge of the newly renovated park. It is a trash dump surrounded by broken chain link
fencing. The large line up of healthy, older shade trees were preserved in the recent renovation, but the cost of their survival appears to be their use as a dump.
From the Parks Department website:
This park will be closed to transform it into a lush green space with a reflecting pool and other elements that will evoke the large pond here that served as a source of fresh water for the early residents of lower Manhattan. An interactive spray shower will provide recreational opportunities in a community where they are greatly needed. A plaza with benches and tables will attract workers and jurors during lunchtime as well as others attending the surrounding courthouses and community residents. The new park also will include a pedestrian bridge over the pool, decorative pavements, plantings, lighting, bicycle racks, drinking fountains, trash receptacles, fencing and gates. The former parking lot will be incorporated into the park.
Anticipated Completion: Fall 2013
Note: You know you’re in trouble when the list of park amenities includes ‘trash receptacles’.
Today the water feature features no water, save for small puddles of rain water. Even the birds prefer taking baths elsewhere. Repairs on the broken water supply seem to have stopped as of September 2014 with no word on when they’ll resume. In the meantime, the large expanse of concrete seems all the larger. The tidy planter pods provide some sense of nature but are also framed by geometric quotation marks.
The New Pond
Evocation of water was the point of the
recent renovation but making a place for water where there was once a 60 foot deep natural pond is easier said than done, apparently.
The water’s depth was no more than a few inches. The water made no sound and had no visible movement. It presented a glassy surface to reflect the buildings and trees. The concrete at the water’s edge cantilevers over the water like a diving platform for small rodents. It’s self-consciously arty—all jagged angles and intentionally artificial cliff-like edges. The design avoids the ‘squaresville’ Beaux Arts work Calvert & Vaux and updates the ‘straight lines’ approach of modernist parks. The design has a curiously indoors look. Like something one might see in a shopping mall atrium. Or a Hilton Garden Inn. No doubt in 20 years, this will scream “early 2000’s”.
What have we lost? Not much. The unloved old version of the park violated just about every rule of thumb on how to design a good public space. Pigeons and rats used the old park more than humans. It was windswept and ugly.
The lost opportunity
As you look east down Leonard Street you see the south edge
of the park. And what a large edge! This has to be one of the widest one way streets in Manhattan. Why such a wide right of way when there’s so little traffic at even the busiest of times? This stretch of pavement looks wide enough to host a local flea market and free concerts. But no. It connects little used Centre Street (and the lovely Columbus Park beyond) to barely busier Lafayette Street in the foreground. The street
mainly acts as a parking lot for police as well as municipal and court workers. The vehicles here sport ‘placards’ on the dashboard allowing free parking–so it’s no wonder the spaces are filled. This is a wide parking lot masquerading as a street. It’s an epic waste of space that should be repurposed to serve more needs of the larger community and not just a lucky few well-connected commuters.
Why this design?
Collect Pond Park’s renovation began in the
first decade of the new century—and is still ongoing. The main goal of the design was to bring the ‘pond’ back to Collect Pond park. The pond in question is to be a few inches deep and lined with concrete embedded with river pebbles to give it a somewhat natural look and the ‘wavy gravy’ pavement style is meant to convey a sense of the hydrological and geological goings-on beneath the surface. It’s not a bad effort, but the park’s one decided use ornamental. It’s a park for sitting in and looking at—for strolling through and not much more. The park offers little to attract families with children in the area. This is a park designed explicitly to not feel like nature. It is about making us aware of the area’s history while showing “grass” and “water” and even “nature” in quotes.
Pseudo Landscape Architecture
The style of the park quotes some of the terribly in vogue styles of park design these days. The Landscape Urbanism
sobriquet has been thrown around a lot to describe the very successful High Line project. It’s hard to nail down what LU ideas are (their jargon-filled literature makes a fine sleep aid) but it boils down to making places for plants and people that feel ‘modern’ and not old-fashioned. Landscape Urbanists seem to have made peace with cars. They love using the look of the underlying water table in their designs and they tend to put people on to ‘tracks’ so they don’t damage the native grasses and ‘authentic’ plantings rather than using ‘false’ park tropes like hearty, city-friendly trees and ‘simulated’ natural places a la Central Park.’ The High Line is sui generis and hard to criticize on any aesthetic level but here, the LU vocabulary seem far less successful. Even at the park’s grand re–opening it seemed filled with dazed people not knowing what to do.
Who should we blame?
The parking lot on the southern edge no doubt has its share
of VIP’s who prevented the reclaiming of Leonard Street for green space.
Potential liability lawsuits probably ruled out a ‘real pond’ or even something that looked like a real pond along the lines of the ponds in Central Park. The complexity of the water feature’s pumps and pipes meant when those failed the jackhammers had to be called in. An easy fix seems to be elusive—the pond, which delayed the opening of the park by many months—has now been dry longer than it held water. And the designers favored concrete stylings over trees or making a place something besides and backdrop.
Today
I walk through or around this park at least twice a day. It’s in a pretty tragic stage at the moment, but I’m sure it’s fixable. As of September 2014 there is a lot of construction equipment but no actual construction (or re-construction) work happening. Since the park’s purpose is ornamental there isn’t much outcry from the neighborhood who have so little at stake. “Why get bent out of shape about some ugly work happening…there’s been work happening on that park for the last 5 years!”
Who Cares?
This pond in Collect Pond Park has no use beyond looking like a pond—there are no small radio controlled sailboats or geese waiting to use it. No dogs, no Tai Chi folks, no frolicking kids. The park is designed to look good from a helicopter or out a window. And it’s currently failing at the one it is mainly designed to perform: to be a thing of beauty. If and when the water feature is repaired, the use of the park for most won’t change much. It won’t even be all that beautiful. Aesthetically, it tries hard to be modern but ‘groovy’ pavement colors don’t make the place feel special.
What Next?
Maybe the next go-round (in a few decades) will give the community a park we deserved in the first place. A place that’s larger, allows more uses—outdoor concerts, a play area for kids, farmers’ and flea markets—and maybe, if we’re lucky, an actual pond instead of one presented in oh-so trendy Landscape Urbanist quotation marks. With all the condos rising along Broadway the area will almost certainly have more residents in the near future. Perhaps someday there will be a park here to hold their interest. Mayor De Blasio recently proposed $130 million fund to help the city’s neediest park
