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Photos: Washington Square Park's Phase III Finally Opens, Sans Mounds
By
Scott Heins
Published Apr 10, 2014
Modified Apr 10, 2014
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Scott Heins / Gothamist
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By
Scott Heins
Published Apr 10, 2014
Modified Apr 10, 2014
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This week Washington Square Park finally unveiled a flashy new Park House (complete with Parks Department offices and yet-to-be soiled public restrooms!) and a grassy children's play area. The timeless Greenwich Village oasis of benches, chessmen, buskers, and layabout NYU students has come a long way since work on its massive, multi-million dollar redesign began in 2007. Now the completion of "Phase III" has given us the Park House Comfort Station and a netted jungle gym for the kiddos.
The new play area isn't without controversy, however. Many diehards still long for the trio of concrete mounds that were located in the southwest corner of the park for over three decades. Those '70s-era mounds were unceremoniously eradicated during the construction of Phase III, much to the dismay of Mound Advocates nostalgic for the knee-scraped days of New York's grittier past. Now, instead of mounds, we have a patch of artificial turf-covered ground complete with jungle gym of rope nets and poles. In a halfhearted tribute to the missing mounds, the patch has been landscaped to include shallow inclines and humps.
When we swung by today, more than a dozen happy children who'll never know the joy of smoking a joint atop a concrete mound were having the time of their lives climbing around the hilly play area. "The astrotuf is better for babies," one nanny told us. "The park is well-designed and safer." More than a few kids fell from the rope nets during our visit, only to laugh it off and leap up from the padded turf. A few yards away fashionable Manhattanites lounged and lunched on the same fake green ground. No grass stains here!
These kids sure are happy. Those twenty-somethings sure look stylish. Those bathrooms sure seem sanitary (mainly because they're not open yet). Welcome to your sterile new life in a post-mounds world! This area belongs to the children now. Please move along. Why don't you make yourself useful by rubbing sunblock on that topless guy's shoulders over by the comfort station?
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washington square park
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Scott Heins
Scott Heins is a freelance photo and video journalist based in New York City, and a frequent contributor to Gothamist + WNYC. His work often centers around labor rights, housing, and policing. In 2018-2019 he traveled to four states while covering a wave of public school teachers strikes, with work featured in The New York Times, The Intercept, Getty Images, Splinter, and Bloomberg Photos. Scott is a dues-paying member of the National Writers Union's Freelance Solidarity Project.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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