Why I Love the Park

New York City, for all it's reputation as a mecca of spontaneous adventure, can feel like a highly claustrophobic and rigid place. Surveying the island of Manhattan from across the East River, it looks more like a hive than anything else, shiny, massive and machine-efficient, envy of ants everywhere. Once inside, you're trapped on the grid; x,y and z, all of us locked into the same current with one another. With few exceptions, you can follow the streets in a strict basic compass formation within a comparatively tiny strip of sidewalk, then choose to go up or down to a predetermined space on the z axis. This space (you or your friend's apartment) is probably depressingly small and stepping outside it's limits would result in instant spacial displacement and probably death. So few ways to go.

This is why I love the parks. They are our City's great emerald jewels, from Central Park's gleaming 770 acres to the the tiny community parks, the specs of flora on the map poking through the concrete shell. In there you can move any which way you want. In the open fields and little knolls, people move in a whole new directions. No more right angles. People sit in circles and tight clusters. They drape themselves over one another in in displays of affection and friendship. They run on green fields and signal their bodies: “Awaken, Mighty Muscles of mine! Carry me forward!” Inside green walls, the techno-lord loosens his grip and people look up from there whiz-bang iDoodles (my grandpa calls them “fuck-screens,” after the affection he's see us youngsters lavish on such devices).

I frequent Tompkins Square Park as much as time allows. It's a modest 10.5 acres, but it provides all the freedoms I consider necessary to maintaining the will to live. It has a field for loafers to stretch out like beached sea lions, basket ball courts and an enclosure where dogs and their owners can run and play together. The people often look just as happy as their canine companions. Space is the key. Want a real rush? Gear up and tough out a torrential rainstorm in the middle of the knoll. An empty park is simultaneously unnerving and cathartic as you feel for the first time in months that you are actually alone in the city. There is no one on the other side of the wall, no one sleeping ten feet below you. Breath deep.

The park even has it's own long term inhabitants to brighten the scenery, tribes staking their claim over the verdant land. By the southwest corner, the bums, derelicts from all walks of life, cluster by the concrete chess tables. They trade incomprehensible and irreverent stories about the harm done unto them by society and give advice on how to improve each other's chess game. Then there's crusty punks, young anarchists hermits whose facial tattoos make them look like a post-apocalyptic tribe of scavengers, who've staked out their own territory along one of the pathways. No pedestrians venture between the two rows of benches, afraid of either their fearsome appearance or the scent of 30 unwashed bodies.

My favorite place is always the monkey bars. Children and adults alike climb and swing up, down, under and around, shaking the slumber from their pale bodies. From the top of the iron structure you can look out and take in all the life around you, all the people remembering bits and pieces of a life we once had, when we could go anywhere. Just like old times. Humans can be humans here.