The parking lot and plaza south of the New York City Civil Court and across Centre Street from the Criminal Court is scheduled to be transformed into Collect Pond Park beginning next year.
Collect Pond Park, located between Centre and Lafayette Streets, was once a 60-foot-deep freshwater pond fed by an underground spring.
According to the Parks Department, the waters got their name from 17th century Dutch settlers, who called it "kolch" meaning "small body of water." The name was subsequently corrupted to "collect" and became a favorite spot for picnics and ice-skating.
According to the Parks Department:
"In 1796, John Fitch (1743-1798) launched one of the first experimental steamboats on its waters....By the early nineteenth century, however, New York City had transformed the sparkling waters into a communal open sewer. Disgusted, local authorities initiated a project to fill the sewer with earth from an adjacent hill. In 1805, in order the drain the garbage-infested waters, designers opened a forty-foot-wide canal that today is known as Canal Street...."
"A neighborhood known as Paradise Square soon arose over the pond's previous site. Unfortunately, due to the area's extremely high water table, Paradise Square began to sink in the 1820s. The neighborhood also began to emit a foul odor....By the 1830s, Paradise Square had became the notorious "Five Points," an extremely poor and dangerous neighborhood reknowed for its crime and filth....The squalid conditions of the 'Five Points' soon began to end after the 1890 publication of 'How The Other Half Lives' by Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Riis' work was a revealing account of slum life on the Lower East Side that disturbed late-nineteenth century reformers. Within four years of the book's appearance, the City of New York had condemned nearly all the tenements that comprised the area....This revived area is know now as the Civic Center, due to the presences of many governmental offices."
Last July, the Parks Department announced it wanted to convert the parking lot and barren plaza to into a lush wooded square using $4 million from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
The first design for the park was presented in October, 2008 and it showed a large lawn in the center but the City Art Commission urged a redesign to pay tribute to its history. The new design has an hour-glass-shaped pond bridged by a metal walkway. According to an July 11-17, 2009 article by Julie Shapiro in the edition of the Downtown Express, "the ponds will be flat and very shallow" and "water misters will cool and moisten the air."
From May 27 2008 to October, 2009, it was the site of "A Clearing in the Streets," an art installation commissioned from Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith by the Public Art Fund consisting of a ten-sided plywood structure housing a meadow 15 feet in diameter with the inside of the walls painted to resemble blue sky.
Collect Pond Park, located between Centre and Lafayette Streets, was once a 60-foot-deep freshwater pond fed by an underground spring.
According to the Parks Department, the waters got their name from 17th century Dutch settlers, who called it "kolch" meaning "small body of water." The name was subsequently corrupted to "collect" and became a favorite spot for picnics and ice-skating.
According to the Parks Department:
"In 1796, John Fitch (1743-1798) launched one of the first experimental steamboats on its waters....By the early nineteenth century, however, New York City had transformed the sparkling waters into a communal open sewer. Disgusted, local authorities initiated a project to fill the sewer with earth from an adjacent hill. In 1805, in order the drain the garbage-infested waters, designers opened a forty-foot-wide canal that today is known as Canal Street...."
"A neighborhood known as Paradise Square soon arose over the pond's previous site. Unfortunately, due to the area's extremely high water table, Paradise Square began to sink in the 1820s. The neighborhood also began to emit a foul odor....By the 1830s, Paradise Square had became the notorious "Five Points," an extremely poor and dangerous neighborhood reknowed for its crime and filth....The squalid conditions of the 'Five Points' soon began to end after the 1890 publication of 'How The Other Half Lives' by Jacob Riis (1849-1914). Riis' work was a revealing account of slum life on the Lower East Side that disturbed late-nineteenth century reformers. Within four years of the book's appearance, the City of New York had condemned nearly all the tenements that comprised the area....This revived area is know now as the Civic Center, due to the presences of many governmental offices."
Last July, the Parks Department announced it wanted to convert the parking lot and barren plaza to into a lush wooded square using $4 million from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
The first design for the park was presented in October, 2008 and it showed a large lawn in the center but the City Art Commission urged a redesign to pay tribute to its history. The new design has an hour-glass-shaped pond bridged by a metal walkway. According to an July 11-17, 2009 article by Julie Shapiro in the edition of the Downtown Express, "the ponds will be flat and very shallow" and "water misters will cool and moisten the air."
From May 27 2008 to October, 2009, it was the site of "A Clearing in the Streets," an art installation commissioned from Julie Farris and Sarah Wayland-Smith by the Public Art Fund consisting of a ten-sided plywood structure housing a meadow 15 feet in diameter with the inside of the walls painted to resemble blue sky.
Architecture Critic
Carter Horsley
Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.
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