Park Is Designed, Paid For From Afar

 by Barry Owens

"The exhaust fumes, the traffic, the skateboarders, the homeless, the closing of parks at night. You know, most cities don't have fences around their parks," said Rick Doesburg, owner of a landscape design firm in Ohio. "It's a different thing entirely designing a park in New York City than it is in Cincinnati."

A rendering of the park planned for the traffic island at Canal, Varick and Laight streets, as proposed by designers who donated their time and will pay for its construction. The "ribbon" pathway (which may be replaced in the final design) represents the ribbons that laced the fence following the terrorist attacks. Illustration: courtesy American Landscape Contractors Assn.

Doesburg should know. He was the president of the American Landscape Contractors Association (ALCA) when the national group generously offered to donate a park to Tribeca. That was two years ago.

What he and his colleagues have since discovered is that New York is not only a different kind of place to design a park, but also a difficult place to get one approved. The city's Parks Department has welcomed the gift graciously, but with guarded enthusiasm, and the park, planned for the traffic island at Canal, Varick and Laight streets, remains only an unrealized offer.

"There's a built-in tension between donors who expect that their generosity entitles them to a certain say, and our insistence that certain thresholds and standards that we are committed to upholding are met," explained Joshua Laird, chief of planning for the Parks Department.

Meeting those standards has involved tweaking the park's design and altering some of its features. Even the park's name has evolved over the months.

ALCA, which designed the park as a memorial and tribute following the terrorist attack, originally pitched it as Heroes Park. When the group learned that the name had been taken, they proposed Ribbon Park. Meanwhile, Community Board 1 had its own suggestions, Phoenix Park or Canal Street Park among others. Finally, the Parks Department settled on Renaissance Park.
"I can't even remember which group came up with the name," said Laird. "There were just so many emails trading back and forth."

More revisions are probably in store. The city's Art Commission, which must approve changes to city-owned property that are visible from the street, requested that a planned ribbon of pavement engraved with the names of all 50 states be removed, or at least moved to the perimeter. It also suggested that a local artist be tapped to create a sculpture in lieu of a stone fountain designed by the contractors. The commission is scheduled to review the plan again this month.

A group of ALCA members drafted the park design on a single Saturday in April 2002. Most of them had seen the traffic island as a backdrop in television news reports. The triangular site had served as a staging area for rescue vehicles after September 11 and later its fence was lined with ribbons.
ALCA designers met in Chicago in April 2002 and in a single day drafted the design for what would become Renaissance Park. Photo: courtesy American Landscape Contractors Assn.
For months after the attack, ALCA waved dues for its members in Lower Manhattan, but most paid the fee anyway. The organization decided to put those funds to use in constructing a tribute of some kind for the city. When ALCA learned of the city's plans to convert the former Port Authority parking lot into a park, it was eager to take the assignment.

The group put out a nationwide call to its members and a score of them showed up for a meeting in Long Grove, Ill., a Chicago suburb. They divided into teams, shook hands over coffee, and set to work. By day's end, a preliminary sketch was complete.

"The last thing New York wanted was another memorial," said Doesburg. "We wanted to create something that people in Lower Manhattan would use, that would be functional, that they could be proud of."

The group hopes that the park's construction-which it will pay for, along with mainenance costs for at least a decade-will begin in October.
"Our mission is to put it in the minute we can," said ALCA member Mark Polinko, a designer from Chicago. "We'd hoped it would move forward far faster."

Said the Parks Department's Laird, "I think they were caught off guard by our process. Certainly, it's been a learning experience for them. But they've been incredibly resilient through all the twists and turns and have always come back and managed to meet our needs."