Speaking in a confident tone over a pint of Brooklyn Lager, Cathryn Swan explains why she started cataloging what she and others view as abuses of power perpetrated by the New York City Parks Department.
“If nobody writes about it one day you wake up in a different city,” she says.
With a rising star among the city’s bloggers, a growing readership, and now attention from reporters and academics, Swan is finding an outlet on the internet for a viewpoint that might otherwise be ignored.
Swan began writing at http://washingtonsquarepark.wordpress.com in late February after discovering that trees at her beloved Washington Square Park were being chewed up by the New York City Parks Department as part of a complete redesign of the space, a redesign which in her view was wholly unnecessary. And she wasn’t alone in that perception; many Greenwich Village residents agreed that the design of Washington Square Park was sound, with only minor repairs needed to bring the park up to snuff.
Some locals even sued to prevent construction from moving forward, alleging that the Parks Department hadn’t fully revealed the extent to which Washington Square Park’s topography would be altered. Though the suit initially succeeded, it was overturned on appeal.
Most controversial with Greenwich Village residents has been the plan to move and shrink the central fountain, which has acted as a natural place for citizens to gather for generations. The Parks Department is shifting the fountain 23 feet to the East, so that it aligns with the Arch, and allowing a renaming of that focal point – after the Tisch family, who has donated more than $2 million to the City to fund the redesign.
Another common complaint among Greenwich residents is shabby treatment by a monolithic, opaque government agency that has refused to listen to people who live near this iconic park. Phone calls and emails to the New York City Parks Department were not returned in advance of this article.
Swan had these concerns, and more. After attempts to have her questions answered were ignored by Parks Department officials and the issue dropped from the agenda of Manhattan’s Community Board Two, the body charged with hearing citizen’s concerns about the park, she decided to begin cataloging her complaints on the internet. A publicist by trade, she understood the value of a sustained PR campaign and with her trusty Macbook and a broadband connection, she had the tools to get started.
Things began slowly, with a few lines alleging mistreatment. Swan quickly became comfortable with writing in a blog-style format. Now, according to Alexa, a traffic ranking site, Swan’s blog has increased readership by 56 percent over the last three months. Though her site still ranks outside of the most 100,000 viewed sites on the internet, her regular updates and thoroughly researched postings are steadily growing an audience.
She’s even begun to garner notice from the traditional media, using her blog as a lightning rod to attract attention to a controversy now seen by many as a foregone conclusion, not least the Parks Department. She’s been contacted by a half dozen reporters and asked to comment on the redesign of Washington Square Park. On Friday, September 12th she spoke at Conflux, a convention dedicated to the creative exploration of urban public space. Her speech, well received by a crowd of fifty to sixty artists and activists, was titled “Washington Square Park: New York City’s Intervention on a Perfect Public Space.”
Swan is an example of a frustrated citizen who felt she had no place left to turn. Her site describes her reasons for blogging: “the system is broken. It’s corrupted and the process - if you can call it that - isn’t transparent or accessible. So what do you do?”
If you’re Cathryn Swan you lay out a website, and you lay out the evidence. From there, people will take notice.
Swan does have concerns outside of Washington Square Park, especially with the administration that has allowed the Parks Department to railroad through a redesign without talking to citizens, she says. If current Mayor Michael Bloomberg finds a way around term limit legislation that would be it for Swan.
“I would have to leave New York City if that happened,” she quips, but with an unwavering dedication to preservation of public space, and a poison pen (or laptop) to point the way, the City would be the worse if she followed through with the threat.
No comments:
Post a Comment