The Bowery is in flux. Decades of demolition and erection of structures have excluded, extracted, and exploited the area’s historical and cultural significance. When Sara D. Roosevelt Park opened in September 1934 it provided a much-needed amenity: a green park and recreation space for the Lower East Side, in a sense, a form of damage control to the violent eradication of 375 tenement houses.
The damage control consists of the introduction of a central distribution system and seven other prototypes to give agency to the Bowery collective–to protest, defend, connect, store, ferment existing or embryonic social activities in the park. The project proposes figures, follies, structures that create mysteries of space and form to provoke thought, sense, and and life. What is proposed is not something forever stable and unchanging, but rather resting, or treading lightly on the grounds of a sensitive terrain in New York City.
