City seeks input from community over Vannie renovations

The Parks Department plans to spend $4.2 million during the next few years on improving design and accommodations in Van Cortlandt Park near the entrance at W. 242nd Street, and is collecting public suggestions for renovations that are to be completed by 2020. 

Landscape designers and planners from the Parks Department met with local residents and community activists on Nov. 10 to present the project and gather proposals for the stretch of the park from the basketball fields and tennis courts along Broadway, around the stadium and the W. 242nd Street entrance, to the public restroom just to the north. The Parks Department will also be collecting suggestions online for about 10 more days. 

The project to redesign the section of Van Cortlandt Park was a result of an online survey that asked New Yorkers to nominate an area of a local park they thought needed improvements. The stretch of Van Cortlandt Park was nominated 286 times, the highest number among all parks in the Bronx, said Marisa Berry, a Parks Department urban planner. 

The two-block stretch of the park along Broadway is “pretty unsightly,” Will Harris, a landscape architect with the Parks Department, acknowledged at the Nov. 10 gathering. More than 50 designers, planners and local residents convened at Horace Mann School, sitting at round tables to discuss and list proposals, and snacking on chunks of pineapple, melon, berries and cheese. 

Suggestions so far include improving lighting and signage, replacing the aging fence between the park and Broadway with a better-designed low barrier, installing benches and ping-pong tables, putting a kiosk with information about the park near the subway, and widening the entrances to the park, among scores of others. 

The section of the park is now separated from Broadway by a slanting chain-link fence. Beyond it, concrete-covered basketball fields and tennis courts take up much of the adjacent strip of land, separated from the rest of the park by a gray concrete wall of stadium bleachers. 

The area has “too much concrete,” Gus Frindt, a Parks Department landscape architect, told The Press during the meeting. While the concrete wall that supports the bleachers will probably have to stay, Mr. Frindt said he would “add more green to around the stadium.” 

Other participants in the discussion took a harsher stand against the concrete-covered courts.

The “tennis courts need to go,” Christina Taylor, the head of Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, told the gathering. 

Instead, the park could use a plaza where visitors could meet, an improved BBQ area, or a place to hold craft fares and farmers markets. 

Safety was also a concern: The section of Broadway along the park has few traffic lights and an abundance of fast-driving cars, so crossing the street often takes a long wait, followed by a dash across the street during a lull in traffic. At nightfall, the area descends into darkness, with the dim light cast by street lamps providing little illumination. 

Improving street crossings and adding more lighting were among popular proposals at the meeting. 

If the project goes as scheduled, the Parks Department will review proposals next year, spend 2018 working on design, begin construction in 2019 and present completed “showcase” projects in 2020. The work has already been underway for at least a year: The department began soliciting nominations for park improvement projects in November 2015. 

That sounds like a lot of time. The Parks Department’s design director for Bronx projects, Renata Sokolowski, said her agency needed to coordinate the project with the departments of Transportation and Environmental Protection, and would need to get approval from the Department of Buildings for any construction more than 6 feet high. 

The Parks Department will continue collecting proposals online for about 10 days. To tell planners and designers what improvements you would like to see in the section of Van Cortlandt Park, go to www.nycgovparks.org/planning-and-building/input