A City of Shared Space

New York City sidewalks, historically speaking, were designed to be places of interest, places to meet those like and unlike you, places to people watch, places for both conversation and commerce.  For the rural or suburban visitor to Manhattan, these densely populated, cacophonous sidewalks are what makes the city such a unique pedestrian environment.

What is true of New York City sidewalks is also true of its parks.  Like sidewalks, parks were planned as places where different people from different walks of life can share open space in a city with very little personal space.  Thomas Bender, author of a history of New York called The Unfinished City, argues that the genius of the city is that its sidewalks and parks have been designed for the surprising and unexpected.  They are spaces carved out for improvisation.  All kinds of people can use them in ways conventional or novel.  And it’s true, one encounters all kinds of surprising and interesting things on the streets and in the parks.

Take Central Park, for example.  This winter has been long and cold.  And New Yorkers spilled out of their buildings in floods this week to enjoy the belated spring weather.  Last night after dinner, we took our three boys to the Sheep Meadow, a large open green space in the park.  We wrestled in the grass.  We played frisbee and catch with the baseball.  Henry whittled sticks and Remy chased a dog barely larger than a gerbil.  The group of adults next to us talked about things that, luckily, are still sailing over our kids’ heads.

The range of people enjoying the meadow and the range of their entertainments were carnivalesque.  To our right, a group if Italian men were in a circle with a soccer ball, each deftly toying with the ball on their feet before kicking it to someone else in the circle.  To our left, a group of three extremely loud Russian gymnasts intermittently wrestled with one another and struck a variety of odd poses.  Some slept.  Others read.  A Jamaican man wheeled a cart through the crowds like a vendor at a baseball game: “Water, Beer, Mojitos.”  Mojitos?

A Chinese man was throwing a plane in the air that somehow made languid circles taking thirty seconds or so to complete, returning back to where he stood.  After Henry chased the plane for twenty minutes or so, pointlessly but with glee, the man taught him how to throw it.

How would we live here in the city without this implicit, communal commitment to sharing our spaces?