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by Stephanie Farqhuar

I should start this essay by telling you how I first found Gramercy Park. My friend Margot and I passed the park's south side on 20th street and remarked "what a pretty park" or perhaps I remember saying "now that's a real park" because it had blossoming trees that might have shimmered in the moonlight, and the whole brick frame of surrounding buildings bowed down to its scrubbed-shining perfection. The discovery was a delight, because we had found a jewel in the midst of the often-harsh grey city, a square whose cement-to-greenery ratio was more rural than urban.

The park's garden is everything you think of when you think of Victorians. It's perfect in its slightly rounded edges, but very strict rectangular shape. Tulips on the outside, a nice oval gravel track surrounded with charming green benches, perfectly placed trees. A haven for nurses pushing babies, children playing, people dissolving into a much-loved novel or letter, couples exploring the newness or oldness of their embraces. The space within the iron gates promised an antidote to the beloved but relentless traffic of Park, 3rd, far away 5th, but the night kept us from exploring it further.

With daylight and another trip to the park, I found that this park is indeed a haven, but only for a select elite. It is the last private park in the city. Proudly so, judging from the multiple plaques on the iron gates which no longer seemed decorative but spiteful. Haughty. "Go Home!" screamed the trees and flowers and benches of Gramercy, the statue of Edwin Booth as Hamlet, the modern art tacked-on in the South East corner. Walking by this park brought a feeling of intense discomfort, of unworthiness, of pleasure denied. No bagels allowed. Don't celebrate spring here, flirting with sunbathing. Go to Union Square and learn to live with the honks and the cement. No getting lost in a Fitzgerald story here, unless you have a key. You must have a key. The zoo of key-owning people locked inside the gates for exhibition purposes can do whatever they want, but not you.

It is here that I want to start my essay. For whereas my discussion of a normal New York City park would be made up of little personal details like how I first found the park with Margot, what it means to me, what it means to the millions of people who spend their precious, famously short New York minutes there, I cannot validly speak of my interaction with Gramercy park. Parks like Washington Square, Stuyvesant, Christopher, Madison, Union, these parks are mine for stopping, exploring. A place to eat breakfast or lunch. Enjoy the sun. Read my book in open air. They welcome me as a New Yorker to rejoice in the beauty of this big, spectacularly crazy city.

But New York is kept out of Gramercy Park. The force of six-laned Lexington Ave, of bustling big city uptown, comes rushing down to the border of the park but is stopped at Grammercy Park North. The park holds up its delicate manicured hand and Lexington slams into it head first. Lexington wants to battle the park, swallow it, give it a black eye and a broken leg or pour itself over those two self-satisfied blocks 'til concrete, stoplights and white stripes scream their victorious rebel yells. But it runs into that hand-the steely, effortless, unquestioned hegemony of the park. A penitent Irving Place (the remainder of Lexington's greedy gut-swallowing glory) is born after the park. It's a small street of cute houses and modest proportions because it knows its place in the hierarchy of landscaping.

As I walk around the park for the first time in daylight, I understand that it is this park that people revolt against. The ostentatious privilege of money. Knowing that I cannot go in makes my blood boil-I deserve the right to Seabury Lawrence's willow, to feel "How far the whirling city seems/ Within your graceful, quiet shade-/ A place for dalliance and dreams" (Pine 13). I deserve blossoming trees, sculpted walks, peaceful reading, and a kept garden as much as those residents of Grammercy that Fodor's describes as "well-heeled but publicity-shy New Yorkers" drawn to Gramercy because of its "aura of wealth and understated elegance" (152).

Though they may appreciate its elegance and its aura, the residents do not frequent the park. Smatterings of one or two keyed people are stationed in different corners. "It's not fair!!" I cry to myself as I walk around the iron gates, trying all of the entrances that are not only closed but also locked. "I would love this park! I would be faithful! I would protect it from every gum wrapper, Coke can, pretzel carcass!" Why does money buy you happiness? Marxism, communism, the tradition of toppling pompous hierarchical power structures-this is all making sense. I circled the park, still hoping for a comfortable stoop around its perimeter to sit and observe the landscaping from afar. I realized that the only un-keyed who managed to create a prolonged link with the park were the joggers attempting to offset their discomfort with the sight of tulips. I left to find a public place to sit.

This park and its ghostly character are what Susan Stewart would call the eminent miniature, and its mere existence in New York City defies the absolute triumph of the opposing gigantic: "Whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public and the overly natural" (70). In her essay "The Gigantic," Stewart argues that the miniature is an attempt at imposing an order on things smaller than ourselves so that we are not overtaken and we remain in control, whereas the gigantic laughs at that impulse. The gigantic is our link to the unromantic violence in nature so assiduously avoided by Victorians; it is the untameable, the stormy, the too-big-to-explain. "For while the miniature works, coordinating the social, animating a model universe, the gigantic unleashes a vast and natural creativity that bears within it the capacity for (self-)destruction" (73). Stewart argues that with the advent of the city, this giant force is converted from nature to advertising. Voracious and insatiable consumerism is the gigantic remaking itself to keep up with the times. I would argue that with New York specifically, the gigantic is the oppressive onslaught of images, ideas, people, machines, and buildings. The gigantic is New York. It's the uncontrollable chaos of two million people living on a tiny island that makes itself the center of the world, the center of the modern spectacle.

The miniature and gigantic are warring in Gramercy. The few happy people with books and designer jeans who look as though they haven't a care in the world write in journals, notebooks, on lovely spring days inside the gates, while a disgruntled artsy-looking young man disrupts the symmetry of the knee-high cement wall around the park by sitting on it, and dogs piss pools on the sidewalk around the gates. This war has been known since Samuel B. Ruggles first ingeniously devised the 66 lots and park real estate in 1831 for upper class people to enjoy nature away from the unpleasantries of the rest of the city. Since 1831, the park has been a world-apart aberation in New York, and is increasingly more Victorian London than post-modern Manhattan.

The walls have only been scaled a few times. In 1863, a draft riot exploded in the Gramercy area, along 3rd Avenue from 8th to 46th, and the bodies of dead African-American protesters were hung over lampposts in the park. But unlike Stewart's prediction that the gigantic is unquestionably more powerful, the miniature has remained on top despite these interruptions. After being expelled from the park, the rioters were the targets of cannons on 21st and Gramercy Park East. The trustees thought they were entitled to ask the city two years later (in 1865, at the end of the civil war that wrecked the country) for money to reimburse financial burdens suffered by the Gramercy residents due to the riots.

The unquestioned power of this organization, this elite made powerful by the ability to buy a key, starkly contradicts the ideals of freedom and absence of class structure that we cling to as Americans, even though we know them to be somewhat unrealistic. Despite all of the social and intellectual revolutions of the last century, the miniature still dominates in the mere existence of Gramercy Park. Space becomes power through exclusion. Under any name, some battle between good and evil is waged here, and the terms are defined depending on whose side you are on. The monster is money and class privilege if you're an unkeyed, and evil wins, even though you have to admire its staying power. Or, if you are keyed, the park is the most perfect creation in your arsenal against the gigantic madness and disorder of the city.

Should it matter that this park is private? There are certainly a wealth of other parks in the city for everyone. But in a city whose daily mythic character is created from the interaction of all people from all social classes sharing the same small space, Grammercy Park is a definite slap in the face. My friends and I will never be able to write of this place as ours unless we are famous, wealthy, or connected. Would we want to even then? We are not writing about New York. We are writing about something that refuses to be the real New York, the New York whose "present invents itself . . . in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future" (DeCerteau 91). This park is something which is out of our league, though in front of our face, and the proximity of this hierarchy is maddening. I want to tear it down, climb the walls and do a victory dance in full war paint. But I would never do that. We all pass it and let it go, because it has always been there. We choose to write about our own New York because there have been too many Teddy Roosevelts, Washington Irvings, Cy Fields, Samuel Tildens, mayors, statesmen to pass through this park. We know that it cannot be ours and that cannot be changed.

Works Cited

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

MacCracken, Henry Noble. The Family on Grammercy Park. New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1949.

Exploring New York City. New York: Fodors Travel, 1998.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Pine, John B. The Story of Gramercy Park: 1831- 1921. New York: Knickerbocker, 1921.

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