School Playgrounds & Barnett Newman Triangle Score Participitory Budget Triumphs

And the votes have counted!

This is the exclamation downtown residents have been waiting to hear about the 2025 Council District 1 participatory-budget balloting, presided over by Council Member Christopher Marte.

Balloting began, both in person and via a downloadable phone “app,” on Monday, March 30, and concluded on Sunday, April 6.

This week of ardent poll-watching was preceded by a months-long public process of proposing projects that would get a share of Marte’s $1 million-plus participatory-budget booty.

In the end, there were nine projects up for the public’s consideration, with the top four vote-getters being the winners. It will be noted the participatory-budgeting electorate is much larger than either a primary or general election. No pre-registration is required, kids 11 and up can vote, non-citizens can vote—even non-residents of the district can vote if they work there.

If this sounds like a variation of writer and director Preston Sturges’s 1940 satire on participatory politics, “The Great McGinty,” things aren’t quite that fraught, or funny, and as far as non-partisan poll-watchers can tell, the guardrails of downtown democracy remained firmly in place.

One person, one vote, nine possible winners.

As for the losers, it doesn’t mean their projects aren’t worthwhile, nor that they might not be funded in some other ways. Rather, it’s that, for now, the people preferred not to prioritize:

Which leaves us with the winners. Drumroll, please:

PS 124 at 40 Division St. is getting a $1-million playground renovation, including repairs, new equipment, and an ADA-compliant ramp. PS 124 was this year’s top vote-getter also, with 2,078 out of nearly 7,000 voters choosing it.

“We are thrilled to finally have a schoolyard that reflects the excellence of PS 124,” enthused Yi Law Chan, principal of PS 124. “Our hardworking students are so deserving of this new playground after many years of playing in an open concrete space. We are especially proud of the way that our community came together to support our school. Our families were charged with spreading the word, and several 11-year-old 5th-graders even cast their votes!”

Over at 71 Hester St., PS 42, the second-most-popular cause among this year’s electorate, got $250,00 to upgrade its playground.

All over the district, one will see new tree guards, thanks to that proposal’s strong showing.

Most intriguingly—some might say shockingly—is the $250,000 funding coming for the beleaguered Barnett Newman Triangle. Wait, the what?!

That’s right, art fans, the great abstract expressionist whose first home was at 480 Cherry St. (site of Vladeck Houses today) has a sort-of park named for him.

The reasons for its obscurity are manifold, not least being that it wasn’t named for Newman until 1999, and since then it’s mostly been a dump: a thin and mostly forgotten wedge formed from the convergence of Sixth Avenue and Church Street at Franklin Street to White Street, which forms the triangle’s base, a short block away.

Among Newman’s various studios in his career, in 1968 he had one at 35 White St., which is the southeast corner of Church and White.

Besides his passion for art, Newman also had an abiding interest in politics, which suggests he’d appreciate the honor of the park and the process of participatory budgeting. A former substitute teacher, Newman wrote about the civil service and, in 1936, he published the debut issue of The Answer—America’s Civil Service Magazine, after which it failed, but at least he tried.

In 1968, Newman wrote an introduction to a new edition of Memoirs of Revolutionist by the great Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, published by the Greenwich Village-based Grove Press. Recalled Newman in words that still resonate today:

“In the twenties and thirties, the din against libertarian ideas that came from shouting dogmatists, Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, and Trotskyite alike, was so shrill it built an intellectual prison that locked one in tight. . . . The reissue now of this classic anarchist literary masterpiece at this moment of revolutionary ferment, when the New Left has already begun to build a new prison with its Marcusian, Maoist, and Guevara walls, is an event of importance for the thinking young and their elders.”

Said Alice Blank, vice chair of Manhattan Community Board 1 and C]chair of the Friends of Barnett Newman Triangle: “This is responsive government in action: listening to constituents and investing in public spaces that reflect our shared values.

“After 11 years of sustained advocacy, this funding marks a transformative step in turning an underused site into a vibrant public space that honors Barnett Newman’s legacy, improves environmental sustainability, and brings lasting cultural and communal benefit to our neighborhood.”

Added Council Member Marte, “When we listen to the community, everyone benefits.”