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CB1 Support For Park Toilet Site Follows Months of Indecision “You have done your due diligence. You’ve been here three times. I’m kind of tired of talking about it.” Julie Nadel’s words to city Parks Department officials last month seemed to echo the thoughts of many of her fellow Community Board 1 members as she called for a resolution, finally, to the question of where to put toilets in Washington Market Park. For the third time in three months, Bob Redmond, the Parks Department’s director of capital projects, had appeared before CB1’s Tribeca Committee with maps, outdoor toilet renderings, and his agency’s arguments for putting the facility in the park’s northwest corner, next to the community gardens. And again he found himself confronted by some who worked those gardens and opposed him. The dispute had been so contentious, with the Parks Department and Friends of Washington Market Park on one side, gardeners on the other, that CB1 put off taking a stand at meetings the two previous months. This time, however, a resolution supporting the Parks Department choice came to a vote, and it won. Installing the toilets at that site requires the temporary destruction of the gardens for at least one season so that sewer lines can be dug from Greenwich Street. The gardeners argued that they are being saddled with unnecessary sacrifice, and maintained that there are better sites in the park. “A lot of plants, rosebushes, antique heritage plants, peonies that took years to establish themselves will be destroyed in the course of doing this,” said Larry Wasser, a gardener who led the opposition to the Parks Department choice after it was announced last November. Wasser had found an alternate site in the south end of the park, near the Chambers Street fence, close to existing sewer lines and much closer to the playground. But that, said Redmond, would mean that “an incredibly large, beautiful beech tree” would be destroyed in order to install a wheelchair ramp to the toilets. It would also mar the view of the park to passersby on Chambers Street, he said. The 300-square-foot toilet structure, estimated to cost $1 million, will feature a planted green roof and curved brick facade with climbing rosebushes. Work is expected to begin this fall. Eight of the 60 garden plots will be permanently lost after the facility is built. The community board and the park’s Friends group are urging Parks Department officials, who say they will work with the gardeners in the redesign of the gardens, to restore as many of those plots as possible. “We’ll look at it,” Redmond told the Tribeca Committee. “Everything we can do we will do.”
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