Keepers of Duane Park Take Its Future Refinements to the People

Friends of Duane Park polled the public on which future plan they preferred for the park and some of the voting took place over several days at the nearby cafe Laughing Man, on Duane Street. Photo courtesy of Friends of Duane Park 

Friends of Duane Park are re-reimagining the historic triangular green space they care for at Duane and Hudson Streets.

The new plan, an overwhelming favorite in a community poll taken recently, comes two years after the group proposed to expand the park to its historic 1797 footprint. The 2021 design called for extending the western end of the park and restoring the sidewalk on the southern side so that, as with the original park, the walkway would wrap the entire perimeter. 

Armed back then with an approval from Community Board 1 and prepared to foot the estimated $400,000 expense, the group went to the Parks Department with their plan.

Months later, officials returned with a far heftier price tag: $1.7 million.

“When they looked at our project they didn’t see it as just an addition of a southern sidewalk and western green space, they saw it as an overall capital needs project for the entire park infrastructure,” Friends of Duane Park President Karie Parker Davidson told Community Board 1’s Parks, Waterfront and Culture Committee this month. 

Along with the proposed changes, the Parks Department said it wanted to redo the entire sidewalk perimeter and pave the Belgian Block entrances to make them accessible.

As a result, Friends of Duane Park tasked Signe Nielsen, the landscape architect behind the park’s 1999 major redesign and a longtime Duane Street resident, to come up with an alternate design. That plan calls for installing greenery, not granite sidewalk, on the park’s widened south side and also at the western end, roughly reversing the amount of added sidewalk to added greenspace. The group argues that the additional greenery would aid neighborhood resiliency. 

With the likely need for public funding, the Friends group wanted to go back to the Parks Department, and to elected officials, with a showing of community support. “We realized, who are we to decide? We really have to ask the community. Is this something they want for Duane Park,” said Michael Quinn, who heads a committee in charge of the project.

The group offered three options: Adding sidewalk to the south side (the former plan), adding greenery to that side (the revised plan) or leaving the park as is.

The results of an online and in-park vote (including balloting at the nearby cafe Laughing Man ) were decisive. 

Out of 369 votes, 78% chose greenery.

The CB1 committee voted its advisory support for the revised plan (there was no resolution due to the lack of a quorum). Some, however, expressed concern that the cost of the plan is as yet unknown. Parker Davidson said that, with community support for the new plan, they would return to the Parks Department and the Department of Transportation to seek a revised cost, then to elected officials for funding, to be supplemented by their own. 

Change is nothing new for the little triangular park. The parcel, purchased by the city from Trinity Church in 1797, was greened in the early 1800s and given a tree-lined perimeter sidewalk. Paths and greenery were added towards the end of the century (a design by Calvert Vaux, a partner of Frederck Law Olmstead on the plan for Central and Prospect Parks). But in 1940 the city reduced the footprint and scrapped Vaux’s design by removing greenery and paving over much of the park. The city took off a bigger chunk in 1954 when the neighborhood was a booming butter-and-egg warehousing district. Truckers apparently needed the extra space to maneuver. 

Signe Nielsen’s current redesign, completed in 1998, brought back much of the lost green space, and created the wavy path that evokes Vaux’s vision. But the original footprint, harkening back to the neighborhood’s 18th century origins, has yet to be realized.