THE CRAVING FOR PUBLIC SQUARES

August 27, 2016 by Charlie London

sent in by Keith Hardie

Here is an essay by Michael Kimmelman about the importance of public squares from the April, 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books. A good read, and something urban planners should keep in mind: every neighborhood should have a public square, now more than ever. Building a great city “requires not just making attractive buildings but providing citizens with generous, creative, open, inviting public spaces.”

The Craving for Public Squares

Michael Kimmelman

public squares, Berlin, 1997
Joachim Schulz/ullstein bild/Getty Images

Ludwigkirchplatz, Berlin, 1997

The twenty-first century is the first urban century in human history, the first time more people on the planet live in cities than don’t. Experts project that some 75 percent of the booming global population will be city dwellers by 2050. Dozens of new cities are springing up in Asia, their growth hastened by political unrest, climate change, and mass relocation programs that have cleared vast swaths of the Chinese countryside. Much of the growth in countries like India and Bangladesh is chaotic and badly planned. In many growing cities across the Global South there are serious shortages of water, sanitation, and housing, along with increasing air pollution. The United States has some of the same problems on a smaller scale, while here urban development is also being stimulated by growing numbers of university graduates and empty-nesters who are rejuvenating downtowns and rejecting suburbia, the culture of commuting, sprawl, and the automobile.

Not that suburbs have stopped growing, but since the late 1990s, the share of automobiles driven by people in their twenties in America has fallen from 20.8 percent to 13.7 percent. The number of nineteen-year-olds opting out of driver’s licenses has tripled since the 1970s from 8 to 23 percent. Electric, self-driving vehicles may soon revolutionize transportation and urban land use. Meanwhile, deindustrialization, plummeting crime rates, and increasing populations of singles and complex, nontraditional families have reshaped many formerly desolate urban neighborhoods.

People are moving downtown for jobs, but also for the pleasures and benefits of cultural exchange, walkable streets, parks, and public squares. Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. The public square has always been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state. There were, strictly speaking, no public squares in ancient Egypt or India or Mesopotamia. There were courts outside temples and royal houses, and some wide processional streets.

By the sixth century BC, the agora in Athens was a civic center, and with the rise of democracy, became a center for democracy’s institutions, the heart of public life. In ancient Greek, the word “agora” is hard to translate. In Homer it could imply a “gathering” or “assembly”; by the time of Thucydides it had come to connote the public center of a city, the place around which the rest of the city was arranged, where business and politics were conducted in public—the place without which Greeks did not really regard a town or city as a town or city at all. Rather, such a place was, as the second-century writer Pausanias roughly put it, just a sorry assortment of houses and ancient shrines.

The agora announced the town as a polis. Agoras grew in significance during the Classical and Hellenistic years, physical expressions of civic order and life, with their temples and fishmongers and bankers at money-changing tables and merchants selling oil and wine and pottery. Stoas, or colonnades, surrounded the typical agora, and sometimes trees provided shade. People who didn’t like cities, and disliked democracy in its messiness, complained that agoras mixed religious and sacrilegious life, commerce, politics, and theater. But of course that was also their attraction and significance. The agora symbolized civil justice; it was organic, changeable, urbane. Even as government moved indoors and the agora evolved over time into the Roman forum, a grander, more formal place, the notion of the public square as the soul of urban life remained, for thousands of years, critical to the self-identity of the state.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that early in 2011 the Egyptian revolution centered around Tahrir Square, or that the Occupy Movement later that same year, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, expressed itself by taking over squares like Taksim in Istanbul, the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. And I don’t think it’s coincidental that the strangers who came together at places like Zuccotti and Taksim all formed pop-up towns on these sites, producing in miniature form (at least temporarily) what they imagined to be the outlines of a city, with distinct spaces designated for legal services, libraries, medical stations, media centers, kitchens serving free food, and general stores handing out free clothing.

Aristotle talked about an ideal polis that extended the distance of a herald’s cry, a civic space not so large that people could no longer communicate face-to-face. In Zuccotti Park, a contained space only a block long and wide, the police allowed protesters, who were prevented from using loudspeakers, to communicate by repeating phrase by phrase, like a mass game of telephone, what public speakers said, so that everyone, as it were, spoke in one voice. As in any healthy city or town, the occupants did not in fact all agree about goals and dreams or about how to bring about political and social change, even while they shared the same space; and without a sustained and organized structure of governance, their spontaneous occupation inevitably came apart, even before it was invaded and dispersed by the police. That said, for a time Zuccotti became a physical manifestation of democratic impulses and hopes embedded, since the days of the agora, in the very notion of a public square.

I grew up in Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs’s old neighborhood, where Washington Square Park was a place I met friends, cooled off in the fountain, played catch with my dad, and people-watched. It was the heart of what was then a scruffier but more diverse and venturesome neighborhood than today’s Village. The city’s urban-planning czar Robert Moses notoriously wanted to drive an avenue straight through the middle of Washington Square. That the Village has become one of the most desirable and expensive places in the world is in no small measure due to Moses’s failure and the park’s survival. The good life, wrote another great New York urbanist of Jacobs’s era, Lewis Mumford, involves more than shared prosperity; it entails what Mumford described as an almost religious refashioning of values based on an ecological view of the city.

Seen whole, in all its variety and interconnectedness, urban health is expressed physically in a natural configuration of built forms across the city. The art of architecture requires not just making attractive buildings but providing citizens with generous, creative, open, inviting public spaces. And one of the basic truths of urban life turns out to be that there’s a nearly insatiable demand for such places. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, New York City inaugurated a program to convert streets across the five boroughs into plazas and squares.

Making Times Square into a pedestrian mall was the program’s main event. But the mayor’s office invited communities everywhere to suggest disused traffic triangles, parking lots, and other forlorn sites in far-flung areas that might also be reimagined. Dozens of new public spaces were proposed. The city carted in potted trees, benches, chairs, and tables, and voilà, new squares were created. Since then, they have not all been well maintained or supported by City Hall. But some of them made an immediate difference in reducing crime, boosting local commerce, and improving street life.

The big news was just how much people craved public squares. Madison Square Park, lately renovated and one of the loveliest parks in New York City, faces the Flatiron Building, where Fifth Avenue and Broadway cross. The two avenues created for years what was the widest and most unmanageable street crossing in Manhattan. The Bloomberg administration’s idea was to turn the middle of that street into a new public plaza. One day I ran across Michael Bierut, whose design firm, Pentagram, faces the site, and he told me he had thought the plaza was a crazy plan when he first heard about it. Who in the world would sit in the middle of the street, he wondered, when you had one of the most beautiful parks in the city right there?

“Was I wrong,” Michael recalled after the plaza was completed when I spoke with him for a column in The New York Times. Today, the place is full of people on nice days, its café tables and umbrellas scattered where trucks had rumbled down Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The new square instantly became one of the most successful public spaces in the city, with people toting prosciutto sandwiches out of Eataly, the nearby Italian food market, and Shake Shack burgers out of the park just to sit in the middle of traffic—because from there you can see the Flatiron Building one way and the Empire State Building the other, but also for the reason people gravitate to Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza della Signoria in Florence as opposed to Hampstead Heath or the Boboli Gardens: to be in the middle of things.

As retreats, parks give us room to breathe and feel alone. Squares reaffirm our commonality, our shared sense of place, and our desire to be included. “It’s why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of in the living room,” is how Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who directed the plaza program during the Bloomberg administration, described to me the attraction of the square. “That’s where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.”

A new public square in the Fawwar refugee camp in the West Bank, June 2014
Adam Ferguson/The New York Times/Redux

A new public square in the Fawwar refugee camp in the West Bank, June 2014

This impulse to watch stuff happen is universal. On another Times assignment, I visited a refugee camp in the southern West Bank called Fawwar. There, a Palestinian architect, Sandi Hilal, worked with residents of the camp to create a public square, something virtually unheard of in such places. For Palestinian refugees, the creation of any urban amenity, by implying normalcy and permanence, undermines their fundamental self-image, even after several generations have passed, as temporary occupants of the camps who preserve the right of return to Israel.

Moreover, in refugee camps, public and private do not really exist as they do elsewhere. There is, strictly speaking, no private property in the camps. Refugees do not own their homes. Streets are not municipal properties, as they are in cities, because refugees are not citizens of their host countries, and the camp is not really a city. The legal notion of a refugee camp, according to the United Nations, is a temporary site for displaced, stateless individuals, not a civic body.

So there is no municipality in Fawwar, just a UN relief agency whose focus is on emergency services. That’s what residents turn to when the lights go out or the garbage isn’t picked up, unless they want to deal with the problem themselves. Concepts like inside and outside are blurred in a place where there is no private property. A mother doesn’t always wear the veil in Fawwar, whether she’s at home or out on the street, because the whole place is, in a sense, her home; but she will put it on when she leaves the camp, because that is outside.

In other words, there is a powerful sense of community. And some years ago, Hilal—who then headed the Camp Improvement Unit in the West Bank for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, along with her husband, Alessandro Petti, an Italian architect—began to talk with Fawwar residents about creating a public square. The residents, especially the men, were immediately suspicious, not just about normalizing the camp but about creating any space where men and women might come together in public. Fawwar was established in 1950. It’s under a quarter of a square mile, just south of Hebron, crammed with nearly seven thousand people, many the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948. “I feel at home here,” said one middle-aged resident who was born and reared in the camp. “I want the right of return so I can decide for myself if I want to live here. It’s a matter of freedom, choosing where you live.”

Of course, this entire question is complicated by the refusal of many Arab states to take in Palestinian refugees, a refusal partly based on the claim of right of return. And I’ve heard that a survey taken decades ago suggested that some Palestinians would trade this right if they received substantial compensation. But in Fawwar the issue of the right of return clearly binds residents to the camp as a site of shared sacrifice and resistance. “It’s an architectural issue, in one respect,” is how Hilal put it. What she meant about it being an architectural issue was that identity in the West Bank (although not only there) is invariably tied up with notions of belonging and place and expressed through architecture, including public spaces like squares.

Hilal showed me around the square she’d designed. She said that pushback was initially fierce. “When we merely mentioned the word ‘plaza,’ people in the camp freaked out,” she remembered. But a counterargument gradually took hold, which entailed abandoning what Hilal called “the strategy of convincing the whole world of the refugees’ misery through their architectural misery.” Hilal focused on women, young and old. At first they didn’t want to oppose the men who were against it. But they feared, in such a conservative enclave, that if the square were built, men would simply take it over, and that if women did try to use it, they would feel too exposed in an open space. They longed for someplace to gather outdoors with a screen or enclosure.

So the challenge became: How could a space be made open—so that men, women, and children might be able to gather together—while also allowing the women some privacy? It was decided that a wall of varying height should surround the square, which was about 7,500 square feet. Three disused shelters from the 1950s were torn down. The wall created a kind of house without a roof, a space at once open and contained. The architects interviewed residents whose homes faced the site, and negotiated with each one separately about the appearance of the wall in front of their houses. What resulted is a dusty, L-shaped place, made of limestone and concrete, with several entrances, which has stirred debate in the camp about the position of women.

The square has given children a place to play other than crowded streets. Mothers who rarely felt free to leave their homes to socialize in public now meet there to talk and weave, selling what they make in the square, an enterprise that is entirely new in the community and that one of the mothers told me “gives us self-esteem and a sense of worth, like the men have.”

“For me,” another mother said, “the radical change is that men here now look at women in a public square as a normal phenomenon. I can bring my kids. I can meet my friends here. We are in our homes all the time. We need to get out. We want to be free. Here, in the public square, we feel free.”

Her remark put me in mind of a square that seemed to me just about perfect. Some years ago, I moved to Berlin with my wife and our two sons in order to start a newspaper column on cultural and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere. We settled into an apartment on a quiet street in the west and soon discovered Ludwigkirchplatz, a square, two blocks away. It unfolded at the rear of a neo-Gothic redbrick church from the 1890s, St. Ludwig’s, one of the few freestanding churches in Berlin. Several streets converged from different angles onto the square, which used to be the center of Wilmersdorf, a leafy cobblestoned quarter whose roots go back at least to the thirteenth century. George Grosz and Heinrich Mann lived nearby. Not long ago, Wilmersdorf was subsumed by Berlin administrators into a larger borough, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, which includes the Ku’Damm—the Kurfürstendamm—West Berlin’s faded but undaunted version of Broadway or Paris’s Champs-Élysées, with its glossy auto dealerships and sprawling department stores.

Ludwigkirchplatz is off the beaten path. If several roads lead to it straight from the Ku’damm, they’re quiet, and you can still come upon the square as if upon a clearing in the woods. These are slumbering streets of stucco, stone, and concrete apartment blocks with funny little shops selling belly-dancing supplies, gay sex toys, Cuban cigars, and German wine. The square announces itself gradually, from a distance, with the sound of children playing and church bells.

It’s not quite an hourglass shape, paved in patterned bricks and shaded by rows of linden trees, with café tables spilling from bars facing the square. A sandy playground squats below the bellowing apse of the church. A raised semicircle of benches looks back toward the café tables and onto a pair of slightly tilted concrete ping-pong tables, which do a brisk business in warm weather. A plaza between the café tables and the ping-pong tables is the square’s main stage, where skateboarders vie with toddlers, dog walkers, young mothers pushing high-priced strollers, and Wilmersdorf widows, the last generation of war survivors, not unlike the Italian matrons whom I recall from my childhood in the Village, and similarly disapproving.

Someday we will lose all this and return home, I told myself whenever I arrived in that beautiful square under the towering church steeple and settled onto the benches beside the playground, where our children loved to play. The square was a home, drawing us daily as it did our neighbors. With the usual mix of sadness and pride, I watched our older son, just eight when we moved, grow up game by game, learning to play ping-pong on the lopsided tables; I watched our younger boy learn to walk in the sandbox near the swings. In December, when the square was silent and briefly taken over by Turkish immigrants selling Christmas trees, we lugged our tree to our apartment after a heavy German lunch in an old corner bar that had an especially lovely view of the slumbering playground and barren branches through steamfogged windows.

We declared spring’s arrival as soon as we could clear the snow from the ping-pong tables. Wilmersdorfers desperate for winter to end were there, too, wrapped in blankets, shivering at the outdoor café tables facing the square. If a polis is measured by the length of a herald’s cry, a parish extends the distance of a church bell’s ring, and the bells of St. Ludwig’s, while deafening in the square, filtered through the surrounding streets, binding the neighborhood together.

On our final day before moving back to New York, one of those cruelly perfect, sun-kissed summer Sundays in Berlin, my older son and I returned to the square for a few last games. The square was packed with newly arrived Russian émigrés and children carrying ice cream cones from the Italian gelateria facing the playground. “Everything is as it should be,” Nabokov once wrote. “Nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” The smell of fresh bread wafted from an organic bakery, just off the square, mixing with the perfume of lindens in bloom. Skateboards rattled over the stone plaza. The bells tolled for what seemed like an hour that afternoon. We played game after game, vainly hoping to slow time.

The perfect square, it turns out, is also a state of mind.

The Craving for Public Squares

Filed Under: BlightStat Meetings, Featured, HISTORY, Living Well Tagged With: faubourg st john, fortier park, keith hardie, New Orleans, parks, public spaces, recreation

PIKACHU IN THE PARK

August 10, 2016 by Charlie London

pikachupark

The character Pikachu was seen in Fortier Park this morning.
A character of a different kind was seen sleeping nearby.

pokemon-parkPIKACHU IN THE PARK!

Pikachu (Japanese: ピカチュウ?) are a species of Pokémon, fictional creatures that appear in an assortment of video games, animated television shows and movies, trading card games, and comic books licensed by The Pokémon Company, a Japanese corporation. The Pikachu design was conceived by Atsuko Nishida and finalized by Ken Sugimori. Pikachu first appeared in Pokémon Red and Green in Japan, and later in the first internationally released Pokémon video games, Pokémon Red and Blue, for the original Game Boy.

Like other species of Pokémon, Pikachu are often captured and groomed by humans to fight other Pokémon for sport. Pikachu are one of the most well-known varieties of Pokémon, largely because a Pikachu is a central character in the Pokémon anime series. Pikachu is regarded as a major character of the Pokémon franchise as well as its mascot, and has become an icon of Japanese pop culture in recent years.

courtesy Wikipedia

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NATIONAL LAZY DAY

Today there will not be much information regarding this annually celebrated holiday as we do not feel like doing any research. Actually, we do not feel like doing anything at all.  So we are in our hammocks with a couple of good books and glasses of lemonade and iced tea.  Yes, it is National Lazy Day, and we choose to be lazy rather than tell you that this holiday is observed each year on August 10th.

***

WHAT IS POKEMON GO?

by John Davison at rollingstone.com

This weekend, you might have noticed some people – more people that usual – wandering around staring at their phones. To the untrained eye, it might have just looked like more tourists than usual were descending on your town, trying to follow a digital map to their next location. But those playing Pokémon Go could tell what was going on. Since its initial rollout on July 6th, the app already has more Android installs than Tinder, and will soon have more daily mobile users than Twitter. It’s already caused some skateboard spills, led a girl to find a dead body, and some not-so-clever teens allegedly even used it to lure in victims to rob. But WTF is it?

Developer of hottest mobile game ever is scrambling to deal with its popularity

Technically, it’s a free-to-play, location-based, augmented reality, multiplayer online mobile game that also supports its own custom wearable tech. Huh?
It’s still a Pokémon game, and has roughly the same principles as every other Pokémon from the past 20 years. You look for the critters, catch them, train them and battle with them. What’s different here is that it uses the real world to inform your game experience. The game uses your phone’s GPS sensors to track where you are, and makes use of a stylized Google map as the primary game board. Your character moves in the game as you walk around in real life, and events and objects – known as PokéStops – are associated with specific locations in the physical world. In order to interact with them, you need to actually walk to a particular place, like, in the real world. You can look at the game world through your phone’s display, which serves as a viewfinder that mixes reality with game objects. Hence the term “augmented reality.”

How does that actually play out?
For starters, Pokémon Go comes with no instruction manual, so you’ll have to rely on your intuition (or Google) to figure out just how to catch ’em all. The Pokémon will show up at random, but you will not have to compete with any other players for them. You may also notice certain Pokémon cluster in certain spots – for example, fire Pokémon tend to be found near gas stations, grass Pokémon in parks, and ghost Pokémon after dark. (Though law enforcement recommends that you stick to daylight hours.) The more Pokémon you catch, the more points you score as a trainer. You also score points when you rack up free items at Pokéstops, or when you evolve your Pokémon. Once you’ve accumulated enough experience points to reach Level 5, you can train your Pokémon at the nearest Gym, marked by a wacky-looking laser tower in your map. The Gym will usually be found near a local landmark. Where most people see a pack of weirdos circling a statue and thumbing at their phones, you will see a path to glory.

You mentioned wearable tech?
Walking around all day staring down at your phone may be something you’re used to doing anyway, but it’s not necessarily the safest option if you’re walking around a busy city. Don’t worry, though, your phone will vibrate whenever there is a Pokémon near you, so you won’t miss anything important. If you want to wear something that looks like a kid’s Pokéball watch, there will be an official Pokémon Go Plus wearable released any day now, which is a $35 wrist device that pairs with your phone via Bluetooth, buzzes when you’re near a Pokémon and lets you catch them with the push of a button.

How did all this get started?
The idea for the game was conceived in 2013 by the late Satoru Iwata, president and CEO of Nintendo, and Tsunekazu Ishihara of the Pokémon Company as an April Fools’ Day collaboration with Google called the Pokémon Challenge. Revealed with a slick trailer on YouTube (which has since been viewed over 17 million times), the “joke” launched a fake competition to find 150 Pokémon hidden in real world locations. The trailer showed participants holding up their phones to reveal the creatures through the device’s camera. Little did we know at the time that this would be the premise for the real game launched three years later.

How did it get so huge, so fast?
The game was originally supposed to be rolled out around the world starting in Australia on July 6th, and then it would launch in North America, before moving west to Europe and finally Asia. Things didn’t quite go according to plan though. By the time the game was turned on in North America, demand was so high that it made the game’s servers grind to a halt causing all kinds of problems. The game debuted at Number One on both iPhone and Android, and there were so many people trying to play it that the system struggled. Lots of players found that they couldn’t log in, or if they did, the game would freeze and crash. As a result, the global rollout was paused while things were fixed, which is on set for this week.

Filed Under: Featured, HISTORY, More Great Posts! Tagged With: bayou st john, character, faubourg st john, fortier park, fun, game boy, New Orleans, park, parks and recreation, pikachu, pokemon go

Bike Racks Abound in Faubourg St. John

October 28, 2015 by Charlie London

article and photos by Charlie London (except as noted)
bikerack-terranovas
Bike racks are nothing new in Faubourg St. John. Terranova’s has had one for over 30 years. There is a story about the one that is by the store now. A few years ago, two N.O.P.D. officers arrived at Terranova’s on horseback, entered the store and asked if it would be ok to tie up their horses to the bike rack. The always affable Terranova family agreed.

The officers secured the horses to the bike rack then proceeded on foot. Before they could get more than a few yards away, a car backfired causing the horses to rear up and pull up the bike rack out of the cement. The bike rack was destroyed. Not long after the incident, a Terranova’s customer indicated that a bike rack was under their house and they would be willing to donate it. Paul Laplace installed the bike rack still in use today.

bikerack-cansecosCanseco’s Supermarket has a bike rack too!

bikerack-fairgrinds
Several years ago, then owner of Fair Grinds, Robert Thompson installed a bike rack in front of the coffee shop. There was much discussion about the use of an on-street parking spot for the bike rack. The bike rack at Fair Grinds gets regular use by patrons of the area.

bikerack-fsjna-friendsoffortierA few months ago, several bike stands were put up at the bus stop on Esplanade near the corner of Grand Route Saint John. The bike racks are part of the “Where Ya Rack” program and were donated by the Friends of Fortier Park and the Faubourg St. John Neighborhood Association.

David Armond captured this photo of the bike racks by the bus stop right after they were installed.
David Armond captured this photo of the bike racks by the bus stop right after they were installed.

bikerack-fortierpark
Last Saturday, a large bike corral was installed by Fortier Park on Mystery Street near the corner of Esplanade. It too is part of the “Where Ya Rack” inititiative. The bike corral was donated by friends and family of Bill Kraemer.

bikerack-fortierpark1Michael Ward wrote this about Bill on the neighborhood Yahoo group:
Bill was a good friend of ours. He rode his bike from Albuquerque to New Orleans. He would come out to stay with us every Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras. Most of time for Halloween too. He loved New Orleans and one year while he was staying at my house for Jazz Fest, he took ill and was diagnosed with blood cancer. He died the next year. We miss him greatly. His widow and friends contributed for a bike corral through the “where ya rack” program with the YLC. It was installed Saturday on Mystery street and Esplanade in the marked off no parking corner in memory of our friend Bill.

bikerack-badparkingbikerack-badparking1
While bike racks abound in Faubourg St. John, there are still those who chain their bikes up to whatever is convenient. Hopefully, they will notice the abundance of bike racks soon.

The Fortier Park beautification project is the brain child of Bobby Wozniak.  It is an urban oasis worth bicycling from anywhere to visit.
The Fortier Park beautification project is the brain child of Bobby Wozniak. It is an urban oasis worth bicycling from anywhere to visit.
A bird stops by Fortier Park to enjoy the splendor.
A bird stops by Fortier Park to enjoy the splendor.
Fortier Park
Fortier Park

Filed Under: HISTORY Tagged With: bayou st john, best neighborhood in New Orleans, bike lanes, bike racks, biking, bus stop, exercise, Fair Grinds, faubourg st john, fortier park, New Orleans, nopd, parking, riding, terranovas, touring, where ya rack

Saturday in the Park

July 18, 2015 by Charlie London

Just a few of the many wonderful Faubourg St. John neighbors who came out to keep Fortier Park the best pocket park in the city.
Just a few of the many wonderful Faubourg St. John neighbors who came out to keep Fortier Park the best pocket park in the city.

ccc2014-FortierParkMany neighbors came out on Saturday, July 18 to get Fortier Park back in shape.

Neighbors cut back plants, pulled weeds, spread pine straw mulch, planted new things and evaluated the lighting system previously installed by neighbors. Mostly, neighbors took care of general maintenance in Fortier Park.

Refreshments and some supplies were provided. It was a great opportunity for neighbors to get together.

FAUBOURG ST. JOHN
“Where Big Dreams Grow”

fortier2015july18Brendafortier2015july18Philfortier2015july18Gregfortier2015july18Paulfortier2015july18Davidfortier2015july18Bonnie

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: bayou st john, best neighborhood in New Orleans, esplanade, faubourg st john, fortier park, join, mystery, New Orleans, saturday in the park, volunteer

Neighbors Enjoy Coffee and Treats in Fortier Park

February 15, 2014 by Charlie London

z1-coffee-donutsErich Caulfield, Walter and Bonnie Lee along with Charlie and Brenda London met with many of the great neighbors of Faubourg St. John during the coffee social. In addition to the coffee, tea and donuts, Al and Jean Kramer brought some tasty banana nut bread for everyone to enjoy. Click on the photos below to get a larger view of a few of the great neighbors who met in Fortier Park for the coffee social.


coffee-saturday-park
We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community… Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.
Cesar Chavez

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: bayou st john, coffee, coffee social, community, faubourg st john, fortier park, New Orleans, outreach, saturday

BOUNTY on the BAYOU

November 1, 2013 by Charlie London

Over 600 children arrived Halloween night to join the
Pirates of Fortier Park for Bounty on the Bayou.


 
There was music and bottled water in the park and, of course, all manner of treats for the kids supplied by Faubourg St.John neighbors. Below are just a few photos of a very Happy Halloween in Faubourg St. John:

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daltonHalloween2013

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: bayou, best neighborhood in New Orleans, bounty, candy, faubourg, fire truck, fortier, fortier park, fun, great neighbors, halloween, neighborhood, New Orleans, new orleans best neighborhood, pirates, police cars, trick or treat

Park Excellance

March 23, 2013 by Charlie London

photos by Charlie London. All photos were taken in Fortier Park on the afternoon of March 23, 2013.
Fortier2013j

Fortier Park has flourished under the tutelage of Bobby Wozniak for decades. However, the tremendous beauty in Fortier Park comes at a price.

So, once again, on Saturday, April 20th, Bobby Wozniak and Bob McGuire along with the help of the Faubourg St. John Neighborhood Association will have the Fortier Festival. There will be a silent auction. Please bid generously to keep the best pocket park in New Orleans growing strong. And, if you’ve been to previous Fortier Festivals you know that really cool musical surprises happen at the Fortier Festival. So mark your calendar and bring lots of money on April 20th to the corner of Mystery and Esplanade in Faubourg St. John. Faubourg St. John and Fortier Park are where big dreams grow!


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Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: 3200 esplanade, bayou, bayou st john, best, best neighborhood in New Orleans, bobby wozniak, eclectic, faubourg st john, festival, fortier, fortier park, friendly neighbors, fun, mystery and esplanade, neighborhood, New Orleans, new orleans best neighborhood

Saturday in the Park

December 21, 2012 by Charlie London

Fortier-2012a1

A Little Surprise Holiday Celebration in Fortier Park

Join your neighbors and bring the kids to Fortier Park this Saturday December 22 from 5:00PM – 6:30PM

Help decorate then light the beautiful Christmas tree donated by Harold’s on St. Claude Ave.

DJ “Dr. Vic” will be spinning the Holiday tunes — CCs is providing Hot Chocolate for the kids

Sip on some Eggnog donated by Cansecos (bring your own nog if you know what we mean)

Tip your hat & raise a glass to Bob “Doc” Cousins of DeBanc Pharmacy to congratulate him on his retirement. (did you know that he has been paying the light bill for Fortier Park all these years and will continue to!)

Want to help? Contact Bob McGuire 504.388.3362

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Bobby Wozniak to be Honored October 25th

July 24, 2012 by Charlie London

by David Armond | photo by Charlie London

A special Parks and Parkways Gala at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans on Thursday Oct 25 will celebrate their 30th year and honor 30 volunteers.

Bobby Wozniak happens to be one of them for a number of reasons but especially for Alcee Fortier Park in Faubourg St John. If you would like more info, visit www.parkwaypartnersnola.org or if you need tickets,email: [email protected] .

Come check out Fortier Park in its mid-summer finest this Saturday, July 28th from 9 am to Noon as Faubourg St. John continues its series of neighborhood park cleanups. Fortier Park is located at 3200 Esplanade at Mystery Street.

Filed Under: More Great Posts! Tagged With: alcee fortier, bayou, bayou st john, bobby, bobby wozniak, esplanade, faubourg, faubourg st john, foliage, fortier, fortier park, fsjna, mystery, new orlenas, pocket park, triangle park, wozniak

Fortier Park This Saturday

July 22, 2012 by Charlie London

This Saturday, July 28 walk on over to Fortier Park.

COFFEE | RAKE | GAB | GARDEN
in
FORTIER PARK

Come for coffee or come to help for a while! Help your neighbors, gab and laugh and plant or rake and sweep or mulch and play. Bring the kids to play, everyone is welcome!

SATURDAY MORNING | July 28th | 9 am to NOON |
3200 Esplanade Avenue

Free coffee, snacks and fun

Bring a rake or broom, bring a shovel or pruners and help keep Fortier Park the best park in the city!

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Beautiful Fortier Park

March 24, 2012 by Charlie London

I stopped by Fortier Park this afternoon and ran into the nice folks you see in the photo above. They indicated they were from out-of-town and decided to forgo a trip to the French Quarter so they could take in the beauty of Fortier Park and Faubourg St. John. Thanks to all of the great volunteers who helped maintain the beauty of Fortier Park this morning. And, a special thank you to Bobby Wozniak for his decades of dedication to making Fortier Park what it is today.

cellphone photos by Bonnie Lee


poster by LINDA LANDESBERG

COFFEE | RAKE | GAB | GARDEN

FORTIER PARK

Come for coffee or come to help for a while! Help your neighbors make a smile!. Gab and laugh and plant or rake, sweep or mulch and play. Bring the kids, bring a friend, everyone is welcome!

SATURDAY MORNING | March 24th | 9 am until NOON

3200 block of Esplanade at Mystery Street

Free coffee, snacks and fun

Bring a rake or broom, bring a shovel or pruners and help keep Fortier Park looking beautiful!

CLICK HERE to print out your very own flyer to put on your refrigerator or share with your neighbors and friends.

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: bayou, bayou st john, beautify, clean, esplanade, faubourg, faubourg st john, faubourg st. john neighborhood association, festival, fortier, fortier park, fortier park festival, grand route, mystery, New Orleans, orleans, park, rake

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