I have to thank the Internet for the coming together of ideas. Researching the latter part of the nineteenth century New York I came across the Moses King Photographic Views of New York originally published in 1892.
I cannot but help to think in the last twenty four hours looking at the cover of the King’s Tourist Guide that Bill Porter hanging around pool halls, billiard parlors and rummy saloons around Fourteenth Street, fingered his King’s Guide to New York to inspire a story for a much needed sawbuck to pay his bar tab and some back rent on a furnished room.
That about a year and a half to two years into residence in New York City he may have been ready to toss that book - feeling like a native NYer - but instead fingered that guide for inspiration, in a copy newly purchased when he has first arrived or in a dime used copy at a bookstore outdoor stall – with the cover image of Diana the Saint Gaudens sculpted weathervane on top of Madison Square Garden - pointing an arrow at Lady Liberty - may have just been the visual inspiration trigger for the story mentioned above.
The leaves are turning colors. I see the leaves are still on the trees in Zuccotti Park on TV. It is a week before Thanksgiving. It is time to strip the remaining leaves off those trees and wrap the bare towers of stick in crystal clear tree lights.
It is something the tourist comes to expect in New York for Christmas – that Kodak moment at night – or when you pull out your cell phone and snap a digital image Tourists equate with Hollywood glamour, Disney Land beauty or whatever takes your visual fancy.
The Occupy Wall Street status at this park seems at present to be on temporary hiatus. The movement is only just starting. Losing this park as a symbolic base perhaps reflects time and energy needed to reorganize, re-strategize, and rethink the moment traveling into future reality. The future is born from a single seed.
Liberty Plaza Park as I originally knew it has been renamed to Zuccotti Park to pay fitting tribute to the Corporation that owns its. He actually does not own it; his company does and doesn’t own it. It is sort of jointly owned with the city.
Zuccotti Park is sort a hybrid mutant creation – the result of blind corporate GREED from the 1920s and hate, ignorance of the environment, fighting a city fit for humans habitation concept.
It all started with 120 Broadway, the Equitable Life Building, built to its maximum ground and air space in the high flying anything goes roaring twenties. If you know anything about that building monstrosity, you cannot walk two people abreast down its side streets of Cedar and Pine.
I find it ironic that the streets in downtown Manhattan with the tree names seemed to be the most forgotten and ugly lanes.
They changed the zoning laws after that or probably more accurately they started to have zoning laws in the permanent eternal, sunshine-less, shade on the ground around 120 Broadway.
So when they built One Liberty Plaza at 165 Broadway in 1973 and they wanted to top it up at 743 ft. (226 m) they had a problem. The zoning for a building that tall and so close to the Greedy Tower at 120 Broadway, they had to offset some ground space as a public space in order to let the sunlight in at ground levels for a few hours each day next to the corporate skyscraper.
And the added bonus with sunlight, you might even have some trees in that public space. Do people need sunlight? One Liberty Plaza tower is like one of the ugliest pieces of architectural shit on the downtown landscape with its Omnipresent, Monolithic, and Fascistic presence sucking all oxygen out of the room modern look.
Ta-Dah! Liberty Plaza Park is born around 135 Broadway bordered by Liberty Street and Cedar Street.
This is the first park I knew when I first came to New York in the late seventies. It wasn’t even finished. There was one holdout building, Chock Full of Nuts coffee shop, that held out until its lease was up. Can’t get away with that anymore. With corporations having the right of eminent domain, Liberty Plaza Park would have been built up at one time instead of the piecemeal way it evolved.
After 911 they cut down the trees in Liberty Plaza Park, all 24 of them, to make way for emergency parking at the World Trade Center site diagonally across the street at Liberty and Church Streets.
Somewhere along the timeline, they restored Liberty Plaza Park, they I think meaning the taxpayers, and renamed it in favor of a man who owns One Liberty Plaza. That kinda reminds me of all these stadiums where taxpayers pay 99% of the cost of the stadiums with municipal bonds and some corporation kicks in 1% and gets its name, free advertising, put onto the structure. I think the same situation applies at Zuccotti.
Well anyway. We should be grateful that that put back the trees and call it a park though I think they call it urban sculptural landscaping or such these days. Needs to look like a Hollywood set. Does not have to be comfortable and it is called a park.
It is also a good thing that they don’t charge us to look at the trees in a city where everything is fees, tolls and fines for the rabble walking or driving around the streets.
