Hidden Community Treasures
Helping Neighbors Access Unused Buildings in NYC Parks
After two decades of local advocacy, 2017 has seen
rapid progress in a community campaign that aims
to create useful public space in the long-inaccessible
Stanton Street Building of Sara D. Roosevelt Park. We
supported the Sara D. Roosevelt Park Coalition and the
Stanton Building Task Force in advocating to reopen this
public building during our the pilot of our NYCommons
project in 2016. In Spring 2017, Manhattan Borough
President Brewer and Council Member Chin announced
funding to create public restrooms in the space, which
are slated to open to the public by 2019. Building on
the momentum of this win, we are supporting the
community’s advocacy to open the rest of the building
to the public as a social resiliency community center
that will respond to and mitigate the impacts of climate
change in a part of NYC that is adjacent to, but outside,
a flood zone.
There are dozens more inaccessible buildings like the
one on Stanton Street, strewn throughout NYC’s parks.
We are continuing to build tools to support community
campaigns to reactivate these long-shuttered public
buildings and make them useful for the community.
In May 2017, we launched a new round of research
to support this effort, continuing to inventory unused
Parks Department buildings in order to identify
more potential community resources. So far we have
identified thirty-nine more sites with the potential to
become hubs of community activity and resilience!