Open Washington Square Park Coalition

Narration Text to The Truth About Washington Square Park

Since its founding in 1827, Washington Square Park has been the heart and soul of Greenwich Village. The famous Washington Square arch leads to the Fountain Theater, a unique central plaza which has hosted America’s freest and most spontaneous political gatherings and musical performances since well before the days that Bob Dylan played here.

Last year, the non-profit group Project for Public Spaces was hired to analyze how the public uses the park and how it might be improved. The group found that Washington Square’s current design is overwhelmingly successful, and warned that changes to the existing central plaza design could “destroy the park’s unique character and vibe.”

During the past few years, Washington Square Park has been deprived of basic maintenance, and has fallen into serious disrepair. Instead of using earmarked city funds to repair and improve the park in its current design, as virtually everyone who uses the park wants, the Parks Department has insisted upon a radical redesign of Washington Square. By transforming the park into a garden-style pass-through mall, surrounded by a four-foot fence and funded by a private conservancy, the plans will make the park less hospitable to spontaneous gatherings and hanging out.

Two surveys of 500 park users by the Open Washington Square Park Coalition found that more than 98% preferred the current design to the new one. The New York Times, The Villager, and even the New York Post, all editorialized strongly against altering the park’s existing design. Representatives of the 40 surrounding block associations that comprise the umbrella Greenwich Village Block Association were unanimous in their opposition to changing the park’s central plaza design.

Among the most controversial aspects of the plan is the transformation of the fountain from a theater-in-the-round to an ornamental showpiece with a spray so strong, nobody could sit in or around it. In addition, the plan calls for a reduction in size of the central plaza so significant that on a crowded day an estimated five thousand fewer people will be able to gather in it.

A lawsuit filed by local residents one year after the city received its approvals from Community Board 2 and the Landmarks Commission, argued that the extent the plaza would be shrunk was never disclosed to the public.

In fact, at a May 2005 hearing before Community Board 2’s Landmark’s Commission, Parks Department designer and spokesman George Vellonakis responded to questions about the park plaza’s size reduction as “not significant” and “about 5%.”

Yet in Greenberg vs. the City of New York, heard in State Supreme Court in May 2006, it was argued that Parks Department bid documents suggested that the plan for the central plaza called for a 33% reduction in size.

In its response to the lawsuit, the city, for the first time in writing, stated that the reduction in size of the central plaza was "only" 23%.

In a landmark 19-page July 25, 2006 decision, New York State Supreme Court Judge Emily Jane Goodman ruled that the city did indeed obtain its approvals from the community board and Landmarks Commission under false pretenses. She wrote, "...essential aspects of the Parks Department's plans ... were not adequately revealed to Community Board 2 or the Landmarks Commission ..."