I work in Gramercy, on one of the loveliest blocks in New York. Sometimes (like yesterday!) when I need to stretch my legs or clear my thoughts, I walk up Irving Place, admiring every dog that passes and watching the afternoon sunlight filter through trees planted more than a hundred years ago.
Then, without fail, I find myself at the gates of Gramercy Park and fucking furious. I try not to get shouty in this newsletter, but, friends: I HATE GRAMERCY PARK. I HATE IT!
Background: In 1831 a man named Samuel B. Ruggles (SAMUEL B. RUGGLES) proposed a small park be laid out just north of the Union Square neighborhood. In 1833 the park was enclosed by a fence, and a few years later developers figured the plots surrounding would make nice spaces for rowhouses, mostly occupied by wealthy people fleeing the smells (and immigrants) of Manhattan further south. In 1844 the rowhouse residents decided no one but them ought to breathe the park's rarified air, and so it was closed to the public and remains so to this day (notable exception: when the fancy Park Avenue regiment was called downtown to quell rowdy Irish Draft Rioters in 1863, the park's trustees let them hang out behind the gates eating hardtack or whatever.
It was a thing in the last decades of the 20th century to open the park once a year on Gramercy Day; that doesn't happen anymore because, according to the park's trustees, it was "too much like a street fair." At one point someone with a key tried to bring a bunch of poor kids into the park for an afternoon and one of the trustees, watching from a nearby window (I know) CALLED THE POLICE (I KNOW). The kids were poor but also smart and so they sued, each getting, in the end, something like $35,000.
And look. Something we can talk about another day is that there's really no such thing as public space (or private space, actually, because privacy is an illusory invention of the post-Industrial age we're definitely still living in). That's doubly true in cities like New York, which is filled with pocket parks that have, like, one table and two potted plants and exist because a) junior finance bros need somewhere to eat lunch and b) boring zoning stuff that required skyscraper-builders to make up for what they took in air with 'open space' on the ground. It's pretty clear that those parks aren't for everyone—the most obvious example is Zuccotti Park, a 'park' owned and operated not by the NYC Parks Department but by Brookfield Office Properties, a private corporation, and here's where I finish this sentence because I don't want to talk about Occupy Wall Street.
And yes, a big part of my hatred for Gramercy Park comes from the fact that it isn't concrete, and looks in fact like a nineteenth-century oasis, a green square in which one (or I, Angela) might sit and think about what kind of book to write, or what kind of hat to buy, or whether to marry a handsome striver or a blue-blooded bore. Whatever!
I read somewhere that it's always ten degrees cooler inside the gates, and on a hot August day, beaten down by the news and work and the garbage literal and metaphorical we all put up with, imagine having access to a park in which we might put all that aside for a few minutes! The argument of key-havers (oh yeah: you have to have a key to get into Gramercy Park like it's some kind of bullshit Gilded Age sex club) is that opening up the park to everyone would ruin it, but guess what? Living in a city with other people means shit is going to get ruined! If you don't like it, buy a house with a backyard! They exist here! Buy a country house! Buy a beach house! Start a garden on your LEED roof! Wanting to keep something special isn't, in 2016, a valid reason for being delusional enough to think part of the city belongs to you and people like you and no one else even though everyone else can see that space.
I mean, the gates are black wrought iron! Are the residents of Gramercy trying to be like the old man we all hope dies in a PBS show!? It's cruel, and worse, it's tacky, and that brings us to the moral of this week's story: if you're going to insist upon being gluttonously wealthy, at least have the decency to feel guilty about it and/or do it in private.