Today @ Madison Square Park

The objective today was introducing myself to this specific park with my team. I will call our team, Team Gandalf for no particular reason. Probably because I uploaded a picture of Gandalf to our class google drive as a member of our team. 🙂 So, welcome Gandalf. This project will come in a series of posts as part of the PROCESS and evolution of main objective, which is to produce a psycho-geographic map of this particular park. In essence, we will create some kind of graphic overlay of our park that will hopefully give any viewer enough information about our park. Good parts, bad parts, fun parts, ugly parts..whatever.  At least this is my understanding of how this works.

This is the first time I have ever been to the park which is good because my impression is clean.  Upon arrival, I noticed a statue at the SW entrance. Also there seemed to be a gathering already assembled near a stage that had a band playing some kind of rock concert. The gathering was not to big, nor was it too small.  I preceded to the SE corner to see if there were other statues at the corners. There was. It was another statue of some old white political figure. Not sure what this means, but ok.  Also by the stage is a corporate business (Shake Shack) operating just inside the park feeding patrons like a pigeon gathering.  Towards the center of the park were several art installations of over hanging mirrors that were built over the sidewalks.  Ok, I guess that’s cool. Continuing north there was a playground for children that was filled with playing kids and overseeing parents. I couldn’t help but to see if there was another old white political figure immortalized in bronze standing on the NE corner. There was, another unrecognizable figure.  The center of the park had a weird concrete pond. No water spout, no lights, no fish. Just a mere shallow concrete pond with stagnant water. Another statue stood at the north of the pond. I’m over these statues by this point. The NW end of the park was more quiet and the focus was the people lingering, wandering, or sleeping. Occasional trash blowing around on the ground was observed. Definitely the unpopular end.

Overall the park was nice and manicured. The grass was fenced off for curing which cut off all the great features of the park, especially the open center.  I felt restricted as a visitor.  There was a little dog park on the west side but I just glanced over for a second.  The landscape was like a donut. The perimeter of the park was covered in tall branchy trees and beautiful plants, but the center of the park has a sky view of the surrounding buildings.  I just might put a donut in our graphic. With sprinkles to represent trees. Who knows. That’s how I roll.