A great thing about parks

Terrible photo taken with my camera phone, sorry!

Every Saturday morning I walk to my yoga class at Dance New Amsterdam (formerly Danspace). I always have to try to figure out the least depressing way of walking through the Federal district and Foley Square, which seems to be filled with jersey barriers and chainlink fences that block off alternative entrances and extend curbs without any sidewalks. The green spaces seem gratuitous and the Marth Schwartz concentric-circle-seating-as-landscaping a pathetic antidote to all the gray that screams security, as much as I like the garish colors to break up the monotony.

When I walked down today, there were policemen milling about and setting up for something. There was a mobile stage and the streets were closed off. A concert? A police memorial?

I could hear the crowd even before I left the building after class. There were thousands of people walking down Centre Street, carrying flags from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Mexico, Irish - these were just the few that I caught as they waved by. They were protesting the anti-immigration bill going through Congress.

The first major demonstration in which I took part was with my parents, in Taipei during a visit when I was in high school, and the 100,000 or so people with whom we walked could only converge at an intersection at the closed gate of a government building. The parks were closed to the demonstration, and the national army was posted along the route, not to protect the demonstrators, but to control them. It was the first time I saw machine guns. By nature of the design, the crowd had to break up at the endpoint. There was no place to gather.

By contrast, I could hear the loudspeakers in Thomas Paine Park (the link takes you to the Parks Dept page - there's apparently so little to say about the park that there's actually nothing to say) before I could actually see the park. Walking by the demonstration, I got a little teary thinking about how great it was that in New York City, anyone - citizen, immigrant, legal or not - could demonstrate and then converge on a City park and continue to interact and speak their mind. Where would they go to be heard if not for Foley Square and Thomas Paine Park in the middle of the Federal district?