Union Square Park
About This Listing
Place Details
- Borough: Manhattan
- Neighborhood: Union Square
- Categories: Gathering Place, Great Places to Shop, Parks and Gardens, Recreation
Place Matters Profile
On September 11, 2001, New York filled with such overwhelming sorrow that personal rituals of grief spilled out of private lives and homes into public spaces, especially Union Square. Although the square was not an officially designated site for public grieving, it was the farthest south most people could go once the city below Fourteenth Street was closed off. It became the epicenter of the city’s collective mourning. By three in the afternoon of the eleventh, people were inscribing their feelings on sheets of butcher paper, taping up their “Missing” signs. Day after day, people came to stare at the homespun memorials, weep, leave flowers and candles, even demonstrate in peaceful protest.
Protest, grief, and celebration have always found a home in Union Square, where the temperature seems to be a little higher than elsewhere. It started in 1882, when nearly twenty-five thousand workers marched in the first official Labor Day parade to demand an eight-hour working day and the end of child labor. In 1910, garment workers rallied in the square for better working conditions and, just one year later, their pleas ignored, they marched here from Washington Square, mourning the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. In 1916, activist Emma Goldman delivered a passionate speech about birth control. One of the few radicals skeptical of the Bolshevik Revolution in the Soviet Union, she is said to have remarked that she never wanted a revolution that didn’t allow people to dance–and dancing is exactly what they tend to do at Union Square protests. During the Republican Convention in 2004, the square became the focus of protest. The march of 500,000 people past Madison Square Garden ended here, and so did the candlelit vigil during President George W. Bush’s acceptance speech. Even on peaceful days, the southern end of the square, along Fourteenth Street, is home to sign-carrying picketers or speakers propagating conspiracy theories.
Since 1976, this postage stamp of urban space has also been home to the Union Square Greenmarket, the oldest, largest, and most diverse of New York City’s farmers’ markets. Barry Benepe, a native New Yorker, art historian, and urban planner, started them to resuscitate what he called “metropolitan” farmland and farmers (those within a 120-mile radius of New York City) and to offer New Yorkers fresh, good-quality food. He and his associates also had urban reform in mind. By the 1970s, Union Square had been devastated, brought down by disinvestment, the city’s fiscal crisis, government neglect, drugs and crime. Benepe believed that “farmers selling produce from their trucks would start conversations, help resuscitate neighborhoods, and brighten the aesthetic of the troubled town.” With the aid of agricultural specialists at Rutgers and Cornell universities, word spread, via agricultural agents and associations, to small- and medium-scale farmers throughout metropolitan New York and New Jersey.
A dozen showed up in the first days. Today, farmers at more than seventy stalls sell their fresh fruit, vegetables, eggs, breads, dairy, meat, flowers, maple syrup, handmade pretzels, pies and tarts to the throngs of chefs, foodies and ordinary cooks who are beguiled by the chance to buy fresh food from the people who actually grow or produce it–or, in the case of the Blue Moon boat out of Mattituck, fish for it. The market is about variety as much as abundance. Thirty kinds of mushrooms; heirloom tomatoes of many shapes and colors; apples, apples, apples. All this diversity flourishes as a result of the communication between farmers and customers and among the farmers themselves, exchanging information and comparing notes. This is a place where strangers talk to each other–about food, about the neighborhood, about the season. Over the years, its presence and unique character helped to make the park safer and more vibrant. The city’s economic recovery in the 1980s brought investors to the area; now new businesses, luxury apartments and restaurants featuring greenmarket food ring the square. In a separate development, but one that further affirmed the square’s special significance, longtime union activists successfully managed in 1998 to have the square declared a National Historic Landmark. In 2004, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner (and brother of Barry), gave Union Square growers a ten-year lease. For many years they had been vulnerable, surviving on one-year leases. Ron Binaghi, one of the pioneer farmers and head of the Greenmarket Farmers Coalition, said, “We’ve parked….The farmers here are breathing a little sigh of relief.”
Nominations
Janet Wells Greene
This area is and has been an important open space in the city. It evolved from a mere intersection (Union Place, called “The Forks”) to a park for real estate development in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1854, the opening of the Academy of Music transformed the square in to a theatre district. And in 1882, the country’s first Labor Day parade marked the begining of Union Square as a site for political theatre. Marches for women suffrage, against child labor, anti-semitism, facsim, racisim and in favor of unions, Franklin Roosevelt, the Communist Party, May Day, and socialism have crowded these streets.
Today, the greenmarket on the north end of the square is a place where farmers can demonstrate the importance of fresh food in the city and their supporters turn out in droves to buy it.
Open space contributes to the well being of a city. The National Park Service has declared Union Square a national historic site and plaques along the interior of the park tell the stories of events that have taken place there. Most recently, the park was the site of a huge spontaneous memorial and peace demonstration following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The physical features of the Square that matter to me are the space for the greenmarket, and the benches surrounded by historical markers. We are quick to preserve buildings, but we are less able to share our knowledge of the events that took place out of doors.
This is a truly historically significant open space, which should be preserved as a space.
Sandy Brooks
This is a place where much history has happened! … worker demonstrations on May Day, for example. Also, the Union Square Greenmarket is a wondrous addition for us city dwellers.
Richard Greenwald
Union Square is THE public space for NYC. For generations, it was labor’s square — a space for protest and demonstrations. It has witnessed political and social movements — unions, civil rights, women/gender, anti-war. Because of its place in history, its singular importance to NYC’s past, it is deserving of recognition. Therefore, I am nominating Union Sqaure.
Union Square was the site of most all major social movements/protests in NYC history. Moreover, it was the center of workers’ political activity. Its place in the history books is secured. Why shouldn’t the physical space be secured as well.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
The Union Square Greenmarket is the finest farmer’s market in New York. Despite this, there is a mistaken notion afoot that the market is not upscale enough for the neighborhood’s aspirations. The Greenmarket’s aesthetic is the aesthetic we should protect rather than landscape this area or otherwise add fixtures and plants to it that would in any way reduce to say nothing of eliminate the Greenmarket. We have Union Square Park with its beautiful greenery. The vitality of the northern space (the Greenmarket area) is precious. We come here to buy locally grown, seasonal produce. We support agriculture in the region, especially small family farms. We support the growing of a wide variety of produce–more than 40 kinds of apples! Organic produce. There is nothing more glorious than the Greenmarket at the height of the harvest and more comforting than in the dead of winter to find live food, seasonal, locally grown by those who sell it.
Protect a space for small local businesses, small local farmers, responsible agriculture, and healthy eating in this big city. Protect our alternative to the big supermarkets and the big (and frightfully expensive) Whole Foods. What would you rather have? Planters in that space or a vibrant farmer’s market? It has taken years to establish the Union Square Farmer’s Market. It links the city with the countryside. Take away the market and even more family farms will go under. Take away the market and you’ll be reduced to “Delicious” apples shipped from Washington State (perfect and perfectly tasteless) or spend a fortune at Whole Foods for produce shipped from across the continent, while our local farmers go under.
Do not allow this city to become a mall dominated by big corporations and chains. Preserve the distinctive character of New York–that means supporting small business and vitality of our streets and parks, which includes our open farmer’s markets. Don’t let gentrification and corporate pressure drive out what ordinary New Yorkers value about living here, in New York City, not in the suburbs. Union Square is not Park Avenue. It is a mixed use area and the farmer’s market is vital to its vitality.
Keep this space open so that the trucks can park and the farmers can set up their stalls. Let the market grow to fill the entire space around the park. It is a gem.
