September 1, 2023 - Brooklyn Downtown Star

Colorful New Gateway Unveiled at Marsha P. Johnson Park

glendaleregstg on September 1, 2023

A group of around 20 people stand in front of a park gateway, posing for a photograph. The gateway is made of black metal with glass flowers and metal sculptures of flowers in different colors. Large trees with green leaves and light gray skies can be seen in the background.

Attendees pose for a photograph in front of the new gateway.

By Carmo Moniz | news@queensledger.com

Williamsburg’s Marsha P. Johnson Park has a new gateway honoring its namesake, complete with colorful metal and glass flowers and the Trans activist’s famous “Pay it No Mind” motto.

Brooklyn pols, members of Johnson’s family, New York State Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation and local residents attended a celebration of the gateway’s opening on Thursday, what would have been Johnson’s 78th birthday.

The park has also been outfitted with new landscaping and informational panels highlighting Johnson’s life and community. Greenpoint Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who spoke at the event, said that many involved in the project had wanted the park to be filled with plants, which influenced the final design.

Gallagher also said that the community fought the original plan for the park, which called for a large plastic walkway to be built across it and for its pathways to be covered in black asphalt, alongside the Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, which Johnson co-founded.

“This, as you know, had been a garbage dump for a long time, and it had never been treated with the care that the community really wanted when it had become a park,” Gallagher said in an interview. “It was a very basic park, so we wanted something really beautiful, and we were frustrated by that.”

The original plan, which was created under former Governor Andrew Cuomo, stirred controversy among local community members, many of whom felt blindsided and unheard.

The local community was notified that the park would be closed for construction for six months in January 2021, but North Brooklyn residents and activists criticized New York State Parks for lacking public outreach before the design was created.

A community group called Stop the Plastic Park gathered more than 2,100 signatures in a petition opposing the plastic walkway design, noting that the community was only given a few days’ notice of the plan. After pushback from the North Brooklyn community, the Black Trans community, Johnson’s family and local politicians, Cuomo halted construction on the site in early March.

James Carey, Johnson’s cousin and President of the Marsha P. Johnson Family Foundation, said the park’s current design is the result of years of community activism.

“This wouldn’t have been possible without the community,” Carey said in an interview. “We kept coming up here during COVID-19, looking at plans and going through walkthroughs, and as a result this is the fruit of our labor.”

Ryan Kuonen, a member of Stop the Plastic Park, said that pressure from the local community helped lead to more public input in the plan for the park.

“It didn’t feel respectful, it didn’t feel in the spirit, it felt gimmicky, and the one thing this neighborhood wanted, because activists had built this park, they wanted it to be a tribute to the activist that honored her truly,” Kuonen said in an interview. “Then all the groups came together, the family, the Black trans community, our community, and it was a trinity of superpowers that couldn’t be stopped.”

Councilmember from North Brooklyn Lincoln Restler, who spoke at the celebration, said he was pleased New York State Parks listened to concerns from the local community and Johnson’s family over the original design in an interview.

“I was so happy when the state designated this park as Marsha P. Johnson Park, I cannot think of an activist and champion for trans rights and human rights who deserves this recognition more,” Restler said in the interview. “This entrance is breathtakingly beautiful, and the cobblestones and historic nature of the park have been preserved, and Marsha P. Johnson Park looks better than ever.”

New York State Parks New York City regional director Leslie Wright said that the planning and construction of the park have led to a greater focus on public engagement for larger-scale parks projects.

“Every park community acts and feels and behaves a little bit differently,” Wright said in an interview. “This one is home to many, many, many super passionate, extraordinarily dedicated community members, folks who’ve been working to make this particular property a public park for decades. So the feelings, the passions, that commitment runs really, really strong. And we completely respect that and embrace that and this park, and the way it looks today is proof of exactly that.”

Gutiérrez joins BetaNYC and North Brooklyn Parks Alliance in Mapping Equity Project

glendaleregstg on September 1, 2023

A digital map of a housing complex in Brooklyn in light green, grey and different shades of white. Small black spots marking different amenities are spread throughout the map.

Cooper Park Houses, which a group of attendees learned to map during the event, as mapped on OpenStreetMap.

By Carmo Moniz | news@queensledger.com

A program run by BetaNYC, the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance and councilmember Jennifer Gutiérrez’s office is looking to make data on public resources in the city more equitable across communities, making it easier for communities to advocate for their needs.

The program, called Mapping for Equity, focuses on areas that have been mapped in the least detail. The program uses OpenStreetMap, a mapping software that allows the public to contribute to its features, to map amenities like benches, trash cans, playgrounds and more in public spaces.

BetaNYC, NBPA and Gutiérrez’s office held a launch event for the program last Monday, where they presented the results of their mapping efforts thus far.

Karrie Witkin, a representative for the North Brooklyn Parks Alliance, said that the mapping tool could be useful for the organization as it is focused on the maintenance of public amenities in parks.

“We’re very interested in this tool from a planning perspective and figuring out where we need to be and how to get our services equitably distributed throughout the district,” Witkin said at the event. “This is an exciting tool, it makes visible so much that’s invisible in our maps.”

On OpenStreetMap, wealthier areas are often mapped in greater detail than low-income neighborhoods, which can make using data based arguments for better resources in those neighborhoods difficult, according to the BetaNYC website.

Attendees were able to try mapping for themselves during a field section of the event, and were encouraged to later add their findings to OpenStreetMap. Reverend Dr. Katie Cumiskey, a professor at the College of Staten Island who attended the event, said she hopes to replicate the mapping process on Staten Island.

“It’s really important that citizens of our city feel empowered to be involved in how the city comes to understand the neighborhoods that they live in, especially for those folks who live in public housing or neighborhoods that have been historically excluded or underserved by the city,” Cumiskey said in an interview. “BetaNYC has a really fun and cool way for folks to feel like they can engage with how the city interprets and views their neighborhoods.”

BetaNYC has had two cohorts of Civic Innovation Fellows, all City University of New York students who were matched with the fellowship through a university program, participate in the Mapping for Equity program. Together, the two cohorts mapped over 5,100 features in OpenStreetMap, according to BetaNYC fellowship manager Jazzy Smith.

Kinji Donald, one of the fellows who worked on the project, said that once features are uploaded to OpenStreetMap, they take around a week to be visible to the public.

“I feel like I’m actually making a change and helping the public,” Donald said in an interview. “Hopefully we can see certain patterns that will allow us to see areas that may need more amenities, or may have a lot of damaged amenities that need fixing, and we can take care of.”

Noel Hidalgo, BetaNYC’s executive director and a Technology & Democracy fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, said he hopes to work with nonprofit organizations and other community groups to use the mapping data for advocacy purposes.

“The fight for open data is about getting the opportunity for everyone, not just government, take the information and use it for analytical purposes,” Hidalgo said in the interview. “Something that we’re very, very passionate about is figuring out how communities and individuals can take that information and use it for their local advocacy purposes.”

Anya Lehr, Gutiérrez’s senior adviser, said that as chair of the New York City Council’s Technology Committee, the councilmember has seen the inequalities caused by technological infrastructure, and that it can be difficult to make arguments for addressing issues in a community without quantitative data to back them.

“When she started thinking about all the other inequalities, which there are a lot from a long time of not having investments, the thing that we would always do is go ‘well where’s the data?’” Lehr said at the event. “Super excited to be working on this project with everyone, as soon as we saw this, as soon as Jazzy showed us what came out of this, it was like ‘this is awesome.’”

Hidalgo said BetaNYC began working with Councilmember Gutiérrez around a year ago, and that she had continued the work of her predecessor, now Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, in providing funding for the organization’s data literacy work.

BetaNYC has been running literacy classes for OpenData, a government platform that includes public datasets ranging from crime statistics to film permit data, since former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg passed the “Open Data Law” in 2012. The law required that by the end of 2018, all public datasets be accessible on a single portal online.

Hidalgo said that the organization uses mapping to teach how to use OpenData, an idea that arose when gathering in office spaces for literacy programs became difficult due to the pandemic. He also said that the next step in the project is working with BetaNYC’s community partners, such as NBPA, and teaching them to run data collecting events, data entry and how to maintain the data.

“This project is just one rung in the ladder of a very long ladder of data literacy,” Hidalgo said in the interview. “We now have a nuts-to-soup perspective of how to teach and how to collect data, and walk you as the general public into the context of collecting data.”

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