Excellence in Design

Fort Greene Park is 190 this year! Happy Birthday, Park!

Parks Without Borders gave the old park $5,000,000 to shape it up. The Brooklyn Borough President and local City CouncilMember added on $2,000,000.

PWB will remove trees, the "Mounds," a Myrtle Ave. entry and 200' of old walls that have kept the park from spilling down Willoughby Street.

The trees and the Mounds have to go to make room for an esplanade to the steps to the hill to the moving, majestic Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument honoring the 12,000 soldiers who died on British prison ships anchored in the East River during the War for American Independence.

The Myrtle entry has to just go. The 200' of walls have to go to honor Parks Without Borders who believe the park is imprisoned in them. The problem of the park slipping down the hill is solved by also removing the hill. The northwest corner will be smoothed to look like a DOT pedestrian plaza.

NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver initiated Parks Without Borders a couple of years ago to move NYC Parks from frumpy to edgy. PWB are literally edgy: They believe the edges to parks determine the feng shui of the "park experience."

The Fashion Institute of Technology recently showed PWB's latest styles. The work was praised as "bold," "innovative," "exciting." The only criticism was Parks is "perhaps too responsive to the public."

The Commissioner has corrected for that. He's dismissive. He pooh-poohed Fort Greene residents' negative opinion of his $7,000,000 ideas and rejected their request for more meetings. There have been enough. There were two for invited guests and there was a general meeting at a community center that went badly and another that also went badly. He says it doesn't matter if people don't like what they've been shown because it's all still up in the air: There is no final design and no designer, and his name is being withheld. The Commissioner told the community they can take their negativity to the community board.

He isn't against meetings per se. He's been having them in the Parks Department to instruct staff how not to be too responsive to the public.

A May 22 article in the New York Post described his three-session "Public Engagement 101: Tips to Enhance Your Public Meeting Experience." Recommended is showing slides (say, of non-existent designs) to escape having to talk too much, and be cheerful with the audience.

"During a March 22 lecture in Queens, Silver bluntly made it clear to 200-plus capital projects staffers that they needed training because he wasn't happy over community pushback to his $7,000,000 plan to make over an entrance at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn...Silver pointed blame at parks staffers for being flat and not properly promoting the Fort Greene project during community meetings."

You can appreciate the Commissioner's frustration. Here he has his elite design unit funded from the Mayor and the people aren't going along.

They want repairs to the rundown parts of the park but $7,000,000 doesn't include repairs. Most residents have never been to FIT. They like Fort Greene Park the way it is.

As Winston Churchill is said to have said, "There's nothing wrong with the government: It's the voters are wrong. We need to change the voters." If Commissioner Silver can just get his Fort Greene changes past residents in public housing, there will be new residents in luxury towers, the people and housing PWB design is all about.