Anarchy in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Where Anything, It Often Appears, Goes

So much for victory laps!

Scarcely a week after the city again cleared out the notorious Manhattan Bridge Plaza shanty town—this time with emphasis, including stenciled signs reading “NYC DOT Property No Trespassing”—a resurgent homeless settlement at the southern end of Sara D. Roosevelt Park has sprawled to life.

At press time, at least one persistent, and very messy unhoused person had moved back into the Plaza’s north side colonnades as well.

Here at SDR Park, just a few quick downhill steps from the Plaza, there are tents, sleeping bags, garbage bins filled with personal belongings and other more diffuse mounds of trash difficult to distinguish from the litter that pervades the whole area. There’s an abandoned bicycle and a dog. In the morning there are a couple tents on a soccer field, though their inhabitants were considerate enough to remove themselves by later morning.

Elsewhere on the park’s perimeter are more discrete signs of the homeless, including cardboard boxes, plastic bags and tarpaulins secreted amid fencing, dirt and benches.

Located at Canal Street between Chrystie and Forsyth Streets, this section of the park has long been a place of mixed uses.

Foremost, it’s a gathering place for the people of nearby Chinatown: middle-aged and elderly men playing cards and smoking; men and women playing table tennis; women doing group dance exercises to Chinese-style music on the artificial grass soccer field; and women playing cards among themselves.

Chinese and some other people also do laps around the miniature, 1/10th of a mile track (it’s too short for anyone but kids to run on) and at various times, the mini-soccer field is actually used for that purpose; the goals are there, ready to be pushed in place.

During recess at Pace High School, which abuts the park just steps to the east, teens abound, doing all the things teenagers do.

So far, so good—and a testament to the foresight of city officials, including Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, who, in 1934, named the linear park, which stretches up to Houston Street, after the mother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

There was no thought of this being Chinatown then, because it wasn’t. Chinatown was much smaller then and centered around Doyers and Pell Streets. The new park was a much-needed boon, however, for the people of the Lower East Side, mostly Eastern European Jews and Italians (including some from nearby Little Italy) but with smatterings or more of others, from Poles to Puerto Ricans to Russians to Ukrainians and beyond.

Times change and so too did the Lower East Side and SDR Park along with it. By the 1970s, it was a byword for the neighborhood’s decline, and a place to buy—and use—drugs. This trend was arrested though far from eliminated, with the Lower East Side’s dramatic revitalization from the 1990s onward.

So-called “gentrification” has its issues but so too did the era when one’s apartment was robbed multiple times, people were often mugged at knife or gunpoint, and that doorway with the junkie passed out in it (is he dead? OD’ing?) might be your own.

Should anyone miss the bad old days, well, come to Sara D. Roosevelt Park and here they are. Indeed, some of these issues are so glaring and longstanding even the New York Times noticed in the summer of 2022.

The density of the homeless camp today— and the immensity of the trash strewn all around the park’s perimeter, including discarded drug paraphernalia—represents a new level of not-so-benign neglect.

However charitable one might feel towards the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill and to others who prefer to live al fresco for free, does the ceding of a public park used daily by thousands of people, from children to old folks, advance the public good? How does it help anyone— except the drug dealers who profit off perpetual addiction?

There is an organization, the Sara D. Roosevelt Park Alliance, but how much can one small group of volunteers do in the face of what often seems official abandonment?