Frederique Krupa
May 4, 1992

Hamilton Fish Park

"I view large cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice," wrote Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th century. America's anti-urban sentiments have become a firmly rooted tradition, in the name of national interest. Tillers of the soil were considered the ideal citizens for a growing nation, but once the United States had conquered and settled its territory, the settlers were soon replaced by the individual homeowners. If a man owned a piece of land, he would be a more loyal and upright citizen. Through it all, the city remained a symbol of wretched living conditions, immoral behavior and constant danger, nowhere more so than America's largest megalopolis and cultural center, New York City.

More significantly, New York was where the liberal agenda was formed--from the turn of the century labor movements lead by European immigrants--to protect the interests of the disenfranchised. The more recent anti-New York sentiments are due to a perception that New York City is holding onto its social welfare liberalism, considered an expensive and failed experiment by the growing neoconservative movement. In reality, New York lost much of its socialist traditions in the financial restructuring following the fiscal crisis of 1975 when the city sought to privatize its assets and services, paid in taxes and controlled by local jurisdictions. The poor jurisdictions have inevitably suffered the most as they are the least likely to afford private street cleaning or a library card. Privatization led to the enrichment of a small private sector and the loss of political leadership. With this erosion of moral authority, projects from the two periods of grand civic movements, the City Beautiful movement in the 1900s and FDR's New Deal in the 1930s, have become an increasingly compelling focus for many people; Hamilton Fish Park is a perfect example.

Located on the corner of Pitt and East Houston Street in the Lower East Side, Hamilton Fish Park evolved in three major stages. The park was initiated by the City Beautiful movement as a slum clearance project, based on the prevalent idea that nature in form of a parK was the civilizing antidote to city life. The main building, an 1898 Beaux Art, symmetrical brick and limestone structure by Carrere and Hastings, served as a gymnasium and is the only surviving element of the original design. The second stage came in 1936 with the conversion of the garden to a swimming pool complex and the gymnasium to a bath house by Park Commissioner Robert Moses and his chief architect Aymar Embury. The project was funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in order to give New Yorkers employment during the Depression and provide the overcrowded immigrants with more athletic recreational facilities.

The reopening of Hamilton Fish Park in July of this year ushers in the park's third phase as an extensive restoration project by the New York Park's Department and John Shardullo Associates. Over twelve years on the drawing board, the rehabilitation of the park took place because an otherwise poor hispanic community banded together to draw attention to the park in order to secure its financing. The community group, called the Committee to Save Hamilton Fish Park, was able to get a landmark designation in 1982, ensuring the park's existence and giving it more credibility for reinvestment. Along with the ten other WPA pools, Hamilton Fish Park was turned over to its community in 1981 in the hopes that this would somehow finance its restoration. The park is located in what has for over a hundred years been one of New York City's most depressed neighborhoods, and such a project was exactly the kind of expense this neighborhood could not afford to undertake under privatization, especially with more pressing needs for social services. This essentially shelved the project until 1987 when municipal capital funding was finally allocated. Hamilton Fish Park and its current restoration illustrate a story of civic pride and optimism.

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Starting in the post Civil War period, New York's Lower East Side absorbed millions of European immigrants and turned into one of the most densely populated slums in the world. Private homes were turned into multiple dwellings or superseded by low-rise tenements with few amenities and even less sunlight. Sanitary conditions were terrible. Additional tenements would be constructed in the back yards, increasing the density and reducing open space. Around 1897, Tenth Ward, a mostly Italian, Irish and German community around Orchard and Hester Street, packed 70,168 people onto only 109 acres (643.8 per acre); Eleventh Ward, a mostly Jewish community in which Hamilton Fish Park now stands, had 86,722 people on 213 acres (407.1 per acre). Before the 1880s, schools did not have playgrounds, and the Lower East Side's average of 229 children under the age of fifteen per acre made for terrible gang problems. Hamilton Fish Park was constructed in response to this situation. By opening up the slum and creating a park, it was hoped that this would lower the crime rate and increase respect for the law. Following the popular Agrarian philosophy that cities were inherently evil and could be cleansed by nature, infusing even small parks into the urban environment was seen as a cure. The City Beautiful movement also felt that parks could improve the health and morality of neighborhoods, but the focus was on uplifting the urban dwellers with sophisticated and beautiful structures. Nature in the form of a park would transcendentally make the immigrants into better citizens.

In 1884, New York State enacted a bill to empower the Board of Street Opening and Improvement of the City of New York to create such parks, with a million dollar annual budget. Named after the democratic senator from New York City, Hamilton Fish Park's site was chosen in March 1896 for its greatest number of menaces to public health. These two blocks bounded by Pitt, Houston, Stanton and Sheriff Street contained many tenement buildings, including seventeen rear tenements. The land was cleared in 1898 at a cost of $1,719,505.00. Having come to prominence for their second place entry in the St. John the Divine competition of 1891, Carrere & Hastings were commissioned for the design of Hamilton Fish Park, executed simultaneously with their first place scheme for the New York Public Library (won in 1897). Construction began in April 1899.

Carrere and Hastings designed in the French Renaissance tradition and were one of the leading exponents of the French Ecole des Beaux Arts, which evolved into the City Beautiful movement in America. They felt America possessed the same forces that brought about the Renaissance and that modern buildings should only use Renaissance standards but not be exact copies. The resurgence of Classicism was tied to the feeling that America was heir to Western civilization and was a response to the new wealth brought about by industrialization in the northeast. In contrast to the economic exploitation of the era, the aspirations of the City Beautiful movement sought to beautify the public realm, elevating all classes in the process. The City Beautiful's urbanism attempted to work within the capitalist market forces to try to fulfill these aims, and instead of individualism, the movement stressed the collective forum. Although the notion that a grand architecture could reform crime and make people into perfect citizens seems naive, no harm would come for making the city's public space more pleasant.

With Hamilton Fish Park, Hasting's intention was to create more of a public square than a picturesque park. Sculpted water fountains, benches, lawns and trees formed a symmetrical arrangements, with the pavilion located on the west side of the park for visibility to those approaching from the more populated section to the east. Inspired by Charles Giraults' Parisian Petit Palais of 1895, a central, round arched entrance is sided by symmetrical wings incorporating arched windows and a pedimented roofline with boldly sculpted lion's heads placed between the windows. Limestone framed brick panels create the illusion of columns throughout the facade, and the front and rear elevations are nearly identical. Inside the barrel vaulted entrance portal, an ocular window lit the space. The identical sixty ft. gymnasiums, the north one for men and the south one for women, had a gallery that served as a running track and wood beamed ceilings. The small basement contained the coal room, boiler room and male/female dressing rooms with showers for only three people. The park opened on June 1, 1900, costing $183,000 and was highly criticized for its extravagant use of materials and the lack of planting and bathing facilities. Not taking into account the force of the throngs of children from the tenements, the park had to be closed within a year. Additional trees, asphalt paths and basketball and tennis courts were added in 1903. The park ground was again remodeled in 1935-36, under Aymar Embury to create one of New York's WPA pools.

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In the interim period of the two World Wars, the New York metropolitan area had substantially expanded and become a megalopolis. In 1921, the first immigration quotas were implemented, slowing the annual incoming rate from over 800,000 to 350,000. The hardest hit segments were those from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, due to the government's fears of communist influence in the workforce. The 1924 immigration quotas brought the numbers down to 150,000 people a year. Many of the immigrants moved on after briefly landing in the Lower East Side as work could easily be found elsewhere. During the 1920s, the population in the Lower East Side gradually dropped from 600,000 to slightly over 250,000. Crowded conditions improved slightly but were still deplorably unsanitary. By 1910, 1,562,000 Jews--mostly Russians escaping the pogroms--had migrated to the U.S. One of the largest Jewish communities in the world was created in the Eleventh Ward, surrounding the Hamilton Fish Park.

When the Depression began in 1929, the nation was psychologically and financially unprepared for it, as no form of social security existed. Hoover's unwillingness to help individuals precipitated an already grave situation: the stock market crashed, banks closed and fifteen million people were out of work by 1933. The nation got its first taste of capitalism under the rein of enormous corporations that were now failing. When Roosevelt came to power in 1933, he was in a powerful bargaining position and formulated the New Deal, essentially the controversial, centralized welfare state. Because his programs defied laissez faire capitalism, many New Deal programs, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), were soon dismantled by Congress, either by not renewing funding or by claiming they were unconstitutional.

Robert Moses became the first Parks Commissioner of New York in 1934 and assumed responsibility as New York's master planner as the Depression was already well under way. A man of impressive connections (including FDR) and administrative talents, he was able to channel one-seventh of WPA funds for projects in New York City. By 1937 when employment was rare, 1900 architects were on WPA payroll supervising 70,000 workers. Artists, designers and engineers were also hired in mass to collaborate on these projects. Using WPA funds, he set about transforming New York to make the expanding city more efficient for automobiles, with massive highway and bridge construction. Many of these projects also doubled as slum clearance projects. By 1937, Moses had constructed 255 parks in New York City and spent eleven million dollars on eleven swimming pools, known as the WPA pools. These WPA pools reaped the benefit of his special interest in the sport. Robert Moses was an avid swimmer, first at Yale then at Oxford where he served as water polo team captain, and felt swimming instilled discipline as well as a competitive spirit that fostered positive American values.

Moses's head staff for Hamilton Fish Park was the same as for the other 10 WPA pools: Aymar Embury, chief consulting architect; W.H. Latham, engineer and Allyn Jennings, landscape architect. The teams of engineers were pushed to invent new, efficient filtration plants, extra-wide anti-bacterial scum gutters that used sunlight, and underwater lighting for swimming at night. The enormous pools, all Olympic sized in ratio, could be drained and used for court games in winter. Artists were commissioned to create sculptures and murals for the facilities. During the summer of 1936, Moses used his talents as a showman to stage a pool opening ceremony every week for eleven weeks, incorporating swimming races and diving events.

For Hamilton Fish Park, Embury stayed with the Beaux Art motifs although his predisposition was towards modernist buildings. He had been very impressed by the government funded, modernist sports facilities being constructed in Europe and created most of the other WPA pools in the early modernist aesthetic. In coherence with the City Beautiful movement, Moses also felt the Beaux Art style was suitable for the recent refugees from Europe, to civilize and integrate them into the American melting pot. Carrere & Hastings's pavilion remained intact on the exterior but was underpinned entirely and converted into locker and shower facilities that surely must have been appreciated by cold-water tenement dwellers. Two pools, a large rectangular swimming pool and a semi-circular, 18ft. deep diving pool, were added. On the south side of the park, bleachers, a spray pool and new basketball and handball courts were installed. By supplying the tenement children with more physical forms of recreation, the claimed result was a 44% decrease in juvenile arrests. In any case, the planning of Hamilton Fish was so renowned that it was used in 1954 by the Olympic teams training for the Helsinki Games.

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The pool's decline occurred in the 60s along with Moses's decline in influence. His powers were curtailed by newly created community groups that saw Moses's urban renewal schemes as something detrimental to neighborhoods, serving efficiency at the expense of people. The shift in leadership from a centralized government to community based organizations were generally more positive on community development as these groups responded better to local needs than a bureaucracy could. In the late 70s, the hispanic community group "the Committee to Save Hamilton Fish Park" would play a decisive role in its rescue, though in an ironic twist to the story, Moses was a segregationist and did not want the "colored people", including hispanics, to mix at his pools. In any case, community boards, started in 1951 as an experiment by then Manhattan Borough President Robert Wagner, gave citizens a voice in the decision making processes for land use, capital and expense budgets. Along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, they filled the vacuum left by Moses and assumed the role of advocates and planners for their communities.

The demographics of the Lower East Side slowly changed in the 50s, 60s and 70s. The Jewish community was replaced by Puerto Rican and southern black communities, while the relaxation of immigration quotas in 1965 initiated an enormous increase in the Asian population quickly spreading into the northern parts of the Lower East Side. The area remained devastatingly poor, and the drug trade flourished since it was one of the few income producing options available to the poor. During the fiscal crisis of the 70s, the Lower East Side faced an enormous amount of abandonment of its buildings and a serious decline in population; an estimated seventy percent of the housing was lost.

The virtual disappearance of federal interest in cities aggravated the precarious fiscal crisis that came to a head in 1975, resulting from a complex combination of gross mismanagement of funds, the decline of the industrial northeast and the government sanctioned suburban exodus. New York City became dependent on New York State for funding. Given over to neoconservative belief in the free market's power to allocate money more efficiently than the government, New York City was financially restructured by the Municipal Assistance Corporation, an association of banks that financed the city's debts for major profit. Next came the Emergency Financial Control Board to oversee the rest of the city's financial affairs, including all labor contracts; the EFCB was composed of the governor, mayor, comptroller and 3 corporate executives. The city's restructuring for the benefit of banks and corporations severely undermined most of its socialist ideals.

The solution for lightening the burden of the municipal government was seen as privatizing its services. Controlled through local jurisdiction, the trickle-down theory of economics did not pan out; instead, it broadened the gap between the rich and poor. As William Tabb explained,
"this effort to bring back the world of laissez-faire, in which social responsibility is reduced to private charity...is not unique to New York City: on the contrary, the shift to neoconservative reprivatization that is proceeding rapidly under the Reagan administration is...merely the New York scenario writ large."

In the midst of all this, the hispanic community founded the Committee to Save Hamilton Fish Park to get the local politicians's support to restore and reopen the park. They attracted the attention of Mayor Koch, whose administration turned over all the WPA pools to their communities in 1981, privatizing the restorations through the local jurisdiction's taxes. Hamilton Fish Park was in a poorer jurisdiction that could hardly afford such a renovation when it had a higher need for social services, so the project was put on hold. At least the Committee was able to get a landmark designation for Hamilton Fish Park in 1982, securing its future and brightening its investment prospects.

Even with the early setbacks and seemingly insurmountable odds, the Committee did not give up hope of getting the necessary municipal funding. They finally got Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins and Councilwoman Miriam Friedlander to arrange a $100 million capital fund in 1987 from the city's then expanding budget for the restorations of all the WPA pools. The restoration of Hamilton Fish Park became a major undertaking for the New York Parks Department. In this age of privatization, an entirely city-sponsored-and-executed project is indeed a rare occurrence, more so for being well executed.

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Costing around $12-13 million, the Hamilton Fish Park's restoration is expected to be completed for the 1992 swimming season, in the beginning of July. Although executed by the Parks Dept., John Shardullo Associates were the restoration architects. Any changes done to Hamilton Fish Park were under scrutiny of the LPC, so the exterior of the main building has no visible changes, aside from new windows, a spotlessly clean facade and a new name on the sign over the doorway. The main building is now the Hamilton Fish Play Center and serves as a community center on the main floor with two community rooms. This building which will now operate separately from the sports facilities has been beautifully restored with a full marble and terrazzo interior. As for the changes to the rest of the complex, everything was replaced or renovated. The swimming pool was enlarged in both length and width but not depth. The diving pool was back filled to 2.5 feet, creating a training pool. The basketball and handball courts were replaced, but remain on the southern edge. The bleachers were removed and a playground was put in. The spray pool was replaced with a spray area containing four large concrete pillars with different arrangements of spraying water, which would be really interesting provided they work according to plan. The tall steel fence are a bit of an overkill for a park, but at least it is not an ugly chain-link fence with barbed wire, the customary fence construction in the area. The landscaping, protected by a shorter layer of steel fence, is a little foreign on East Houston Street. Reality sadly dictates that these shrubberies must be protected, but fencing off older trees seems a bit odd.

As the main building will no longer be used for entry to the pool, three small brick structures were built to house 250 lockers. This operates on the premise that people will come to swim already dressed. The problems arise upon leaving with no place to change into dry clothes, almost guaranteeing exclusively local patrons. The lack of adequate public transportation in this area will probably dissuade others. Even if the set up discourages non-area residents from attending the park, the numerous Housing Authority projects surrounding the site contain more than enough kids to ensure the project is heavily used. This will give these kids, whose current idea of water sports is probably a fire hydrant, a really great place to hang out in the summer.

For whatever loss might be felt for not entering through the magnificent main building, the main entrance is now off on the corner of Pitt and Houston St. and is easily accessible to people with disabilities. Creating the most aesthetically pleasing, curving wheelchair ramps to be found anywhere, the red brick paths are lined with wooden benches and give impressive vistas over the expansive park. Located in the back, the symmetrical Beaux Art brick buildings--housing the maintenance facilities of the pool--have also been restored and provide another elevated lookout point, with a large stairway leading to a rooftop platform. The overall excellence of the restoration says much about the capabilities of this government agency and should be equally credited with the Committee's efforts for the success of Hamilton Fish Park.

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Beside recalling times when the city was an important priority for government, the current restoration successfully illustrates the way in which community groups and municipal government should work together. Privatization excludes those most in need of help, but empowering local community boards allows the community's needs to be better met. The community budgets should not be based on the incoming taxes of the jurisdictions; instead, they should be based according to need. The excuse that New York City is simply proliferating its liberal welfare system anytime it attempts to improve the quality of life of the disenfranchised is misguided. The city lost most of its socialism, especially in the past decade of Reaganomics that managed to concentrate 90% of the wealth to 1% of the population. New York City is at least trying to deal with the by-products of the capitalist system. Under the current system, the growth of one part entails the deterioration of another. The relocation of manufacturing industries to the cheaper southern belt have left entire towns stranded in the northeast. The same principal applies on a smaller scale to cities. Besides withholding aid to cities, the government budgets for highway construction and tax incentives for the middle-class suburban exodus have caused the cities to decay. The war on poverty of the sixties seems to have been refashioned into a war on the poor.

Reversing the trend of federal disinterest in cities seems unlikely with the current crop of political contenders. This leaves cities holding the bag, but pandering to the whims of the financial world is not the solution. Following the example set by Hamilton Fish Park, the community and municipal government have to work closer together. The Hamilton Fish Park's success is that the community organized itself, got the park landmark designation and after a long effort, influenced the capital funding decision for the restoration. The city did not take the easy way out by turning it over to a private developer; instead, a city wide effort was made to restore all the WPA pools. Once Hamilton Fish Park was commenced by the Parks Dept., they did a tremendous, meticulous job. The park does remind us of a time when the cities were considered important enough to care for and improve. The park also makes its neighbors feel worthy of such an effort. When Hamilton Fish Park reopens in July, after almost twelve years on the drawing board, the community will finally be able to enjoy the fruit of its labor.

 

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