Saturday Morning in Greenwich Village: Open House New York at the Jefferson Market Library

(Video courtesy Dean Mellis)

Sunday Morning on the Upper East Side: Manhattan Boro Historian Michael Miscione Leads Tribute to Andrew H. Green at the Future Andrew H. Green Park

This morning we took the L train two stops to First Avenue and then the fast M15 Select Bus Service (SBS) from 14th Street to 57th Street and walked over to the site of the future Andrew H. Green Park by the East River just north of the Queensborough Bridge and Roosevelt Island tram

for the eighth annual memorial tribute to Andrew Haswell Green,

the brilliant 19th-century civic leader and master planner responsible for so much of what we've taken for granted in New York City for a hundred years.

Manhattan Borough Historian Michael Miscione, who's been on a mission to raise public awareness of Andrew H. Green's seminal role in creating New York City as we know it, led the tribute ceremony for the eighth year in a row.

Green's legacy is everywhere: Central Park, Riverside Park, and Morningside Park; the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library; and indeed, the very five-borough city that exists today.

This annual ceremony was previously held at the Green Bench in Central Park,

but because Community Board 8 approved the final phase of the park project in March, the ceremony was held at the new gorgeous park site instead.

Mike Miscione briefly discussed Green's many accomplishments -- he headed the Board of Education and the Central Park Commission and as Controller, he cleaned up much of the corruption of Boss Tweed and his cronies, but his greatest contribution was his very early (1868) championing of consolidation of all the New York Harbor communities into one metropolis -- and Mike talked about his own campaign to restore Green's rightful place at the center of NYC history.

Then he reported on a recent discovery of previously unknown Green documents that he found at the home of a recently deceased family member.

Next, Thomas G. Lannon, Assistant Curator of Manuscripts and Archives, spoke about what is in some of these documents -- including an account of Green's arduous journey as a 15-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, to the city he'd live in the rest of his life. There was a lot more interesting material he talked about from the documents, and no doubt some of it will be of value to historians.

Tom noted that a visiting researcher from Munich, sitting in the crowd, is one of the first historians to look at the material, but it is open to the public from where its kept, at the NYPL under Bryant Park.

After that, Terese Flores, City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation Manager for Manhattan Districts 6, 8 and the East River Esplanade, described the design plans for the new park site,

which sounds magnificent, although currently things look pretty raw.

It will be part of the grand Pavilion Park, designed under the supervision of Alex Hart, and has been created to fit in with the surroundings. Renderings look spectacular.

Judy Schneider of Community Board 8, was up front in the crowd of about fifty on a sunny, mild day, and spoke briefly about the park and the funding for its construction.

Because of the noise from the FDR Drive traffic, the streets, the harbor, etc. -- a lot of which will be mitigated by the park's design -- hearing the speakers was challenging, although most of us had no trouble. It was surprisingly easy to imagine, given the spectacular view, how beautiful this park will be when it's finally turned into reality.

Terese Flores introduced Mr. Corona and his crew, who got the site into shape for today's ceremony and who will be in charge of the site as it becomes Andrew Haswell Green Park.

As we all got our plastic cups of apple cider to toast the memory of "the father of New York City," former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern arrived. He's gotten older but hasn't changed his style from when we last saw him around 30 years ago, when he was a city councilman, at the ticker-tape parade for the released Iranian hostages, where the crowd cheered him, mistakenly believing that anyone with Henry's thin, rumpled appearance must have been held captive for 444 days.

After Henry gave a brief eloquent tribute to Andrew Haswell Green, we all toasted Green's memory.


The park will be a tribute long overdue.

Thanks to everyone involved in today's event and the creation of the park, and we're especially grateful to Michael Miscione for his great work as Manhattan borough historian.

Friday Morning in Brooklyn Bridge Park: White Bird Puppetry presents "It Wasn't Always This Way" by & for kids

Late this morning we were in Brooklyn Bridge Park with a bunch of kids watching other kids perform "It Wasn't Always This Way," a charming thirty-minute puppet show, produced by White Bird Productions, about the natural and man-made environment of New York City.

Large puppets marked the history and geography of our urban environment: the island of Manhattan forming, birds flying, buildings being built, subways moving and much more. It was a delightful half-hour, with terrific music supplied by adults, from tom-toms to "The Sidewalks of New York," and you could tell it grabbed the attention of the very young audience by the lack of a single crying child during the entire performance.

According to its website,

For over 18 years, White Bird Productions has been producing plays, commissioning new work, collaborating with musicians and choreographers and, through Creative Theatrics, offering children’s theater classes in Brooklyn. Based in the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York’s South Oxford Space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, White Bird Productions has a particular interest in the urban landscape, and how the residents and the natural environment of New York complement and collide with one another.

Earlier work exploring these issues includes Villagers (John Istel) at St. Mark’s Church in the Bouwerie, COMBUSTION: The Politics of Trash at BAM (Kathryn Dickinson), and Islands: An Urban Archipelago (David Pleasant and Dickinson) at Blue Heron Arts Centre. White Bird has also developed and produced Boro Tales: Brooklyn at the Blue Heron Arts Centre and BRIC Studio in downtown Brooklyn and Boro Tales: Manhattan at HERE Arts Centre, with three boroughs to come in this five-borough project that seeks to celebrate our urban environment through the lens of well-known NYC playwrights.

This show began with a look, not 400 years ago, in 1609, when Hudson first sailed here, but 400 years in the future:




This wasn't history by Mike Wallace or Russell Shorto, but it was visual, musical and understandable, aimed at little kids. The new book Mannahatta, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, after all, details the streams that once ran through Manhattan.

A turtle, or perhaps a tortoise, roams.

A forest on a hill.

A beaver blissfully frolics in the water before the Astor family turns it into someone's chapeau.

The native people have their canoes.


What is this big ship? Rather than a Cunard liner, it looks like the Half Moon to us.

The Dutch build their houses, like the one in the neighborhood where we grew up.

The pigs are coming, or maybe they're real estate developers.

The houses seem a little skittish at the arrival of the pigs. But then the houses throw out scraps. . .

. . . and the pigs gobble them up. They're the sanitation department, only with shorter work breaks.

New multistory houses push aside the farmhouses and trees.

The Statue of Liberty brings new New Yorkers to their homes.

The first street musicians.

The first highrises.

Eventually skyscrapers, subways and high-flying planes become part of NYC's daily environment.



And the show ends in 2009, with a parade of all the actors in the natural history of New York, reminding us that it wasn't always this way. . .

. . . and getting applause and love from the audience. The kids, and the adults behind the show, did a magnificent job. It was a beautiful morning - now time to walk down Main Street for iced tea at Starbucks. Yeah, chain stores are part of NYC's environment, too.