You See Rubble and Garbage. She Sees New York’s Next Great Park.

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You See Rubble and Garbage. She Sees New York’s Next Great Park.

Rosa Chang devoted herself to repurposing nine ugly acres under the Brooklyn Bridge. Amazingly, nobody has said no yet.

 

By John Leland

July 27, 2024, The New York Times

 

 

아래 글과 사진은 본문에서 발췌:

 

The area under the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan is a forbidding swath of rubble and construction equipment, cut off from the sky by six lanes of clattering bridge traffic. To most of the world, it communicates a single message: keep out.

 

To Rosa Chang, it conveyed something different: New York City’s next great park.

 

On a walk around the site last month, Ms. Chang peered through a chain-link fence at a few pieces of idle heavy machinery and described what she saw.

 

“I see opera,” she said. “I see children playing, I see trees, I see old people sitting down talking to each other. I see skateboarders flying in the air, I see nature, I see one of our most beautiful structures that humanity has ever been able to build anchoring it all.” ... [S]he saw a public library and a maker lab and museum. She saw an outdoor swimming pool.

 

With a young child at home, she gave up her work as an architectural consultant, dipped into the family savings and retirement account and threw herself full time — including evenings and weekends — into what had become not just a vision but an obsession.

 

Born in South Korea and raised outside Toronto, she became interested in the subject during a student year in Paris, and more so during stints in London, Milan, Rome, Tokyo and Helsinki. As an outsider in those cities, she said, she became aware of how public spaces brought together people of different ages, classes and races, all on an equal basis.

 

“That’s the one time where it’s socially acceptable to sit down and maybe start talking to your next-door neighbor,” she said. “We need to make spaces for that to happen. Because without that space to allow you to meet somebody new that you might not otherwise, your life is very poor in a sense, in experience and understanding.”

 

She added: “We learn to socialize and become good human beings in our public spaces. We learn to negotiate, we learn to share.”

 

“But how many times do you actually have an opportunity in your life to build something that could improve people’s lives? And if you see that opportunity, no matter the cost, can you walk away?”

 

 

 

Rosa Chang. “Her strategy is to kill with kindness,” Manhattan’s

borough president said. Graham Dickie/The New York Times

 

 

 

For Ms. Chang, the scene screams “park.” Graham Dickie/The New York Times