By LANDMARK WEST!
The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based education and advocacy non-project, released their annual Landslide report and this year they are focusing on sites of demonstration in U.S. history. Landslide 2024: Demonstration Grounds, a thematic report and digital exhibition highlights thirteen stories of protest that could be forgotten from public memory. These demonstration events vary from civil rights, urban renewal, anti-war activism, sovereignty and fair representation. Each site entry includes recommendations for how to make the stories more visible.
Landmark West! was involved in the consultation and research process for one of the entries, the West 67th Street Adventure Playground and nearby Tarr-Coyne Tots Playground.
On April 17th, 1956, more than fifty Upper West Side mothers, children, “small dogs and several outraged babies in carriages” marched into Central Park to defend a wooded play area near West 67th Street against a bulldozer and a willful Robert Moses, the Parks Commissioner. The Mothers staged a week-long sit-down protest in order to stop Moses and his forces from tearing up the play area to build an 80-car parking lot for Tavern-on-the-Green, a restaurant within the Park. The area in question was a wooded and rocky half-acre site beside the bridle path long used by parents and their children as an unofficial playground.
The ‘Mothers,’ made up of many well-known UWS women such as Fannie Hurst, wrote to Moses pleading their case that “if the playground is surrounded by cars, nothing will grow–flowers or children.” Their frustrations didn’t stop at the destruction of their play area. They were also ignited by the illegal felling of trees for urban infrastructure and the concessions made for a private company using majority taxpayer money.
A court ordered injunction and two civil suits later, Moses, his reputation tarnished, yielded to the Mothers. A decade later, two innovative playgrounds were constructed at the site of “The Battle of Central Park.”
In recent years, both playgrounds have undergone rehabilitation efforts to meet present-day safety standards and, importantly, to retain the Adventure Playground aesthetics. The West 67th Street Playground, whose historic design significance was acknowledged by the Central Park Conservancy (CPC) in response to the advocacy efforts of Landmark West! and others, was rehabilitated in 1997 and again in 2015. Today, the best reminder of the efforts by local mothers in 1956 to improve the city’s playgrounds is the design of the playgrounds themselves. While neither appears as they did at the time of the protest, both reflect the results of ongoing advocacy inspired by the initial protest, and structures like these in the park are catalysts for the continued reinterpretation of the Parks’ lasting and universal significance.
Landmark West! has documented the history of the West 67th Street Adventure Playground in the past with an interview by its innovative architect, Richard Dattner. Dattner designed five of the adventure-style playgrounds in the Park.
CLICK HERE to read the West 67th Street Playground report.