A week at the Sara D. Roosevelt Park

One of my favorite parks, while interning for the Parks Department over the summer, was the Sara D. Roosevelt Park at the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Extending from East Houston Street, between Christy and Forsyth Streets, all the way to Canal Street, the park welcomed a diversity of people. The M’Finda Kalunga garden; the boys playing soccer, basketball, and handball, and skateboarding; the elderly Chinese women doing their exercise routine at the soccer field next to Pace High School, the children having fun in the recreational areas; and the people seating on the park benches around noon made the park a lively one.

Over the five days I spent surveying trees at this park, people asked me about the job I was doing. Their curiosity increased as they saw me measuring trees and jumping over fences. One of the park’s staff, unaware of who I worked for, asked me to “get off the fenced area, since it was not open to the public”. With a measuring meter and a tree guide titled “New York City Tree Guide” on hand, I explained that I as an intern for the Parks Department my job was to collect tree data for a tree citywide inventory. The majority of people further asked me how old the trees were, thinking that I was a tree expert. I couldn’t answer to their question since I wasn’t a forester. I wish I knew how old these trees were, but it was this particular question that lead to consider forestry as my possibly focus for Graduate school.

Despite the fact, that the park was being well utilized by people of different group ages, the northern section of the park between Delancey and Broome streets was the least attractive and organized. Not only were the fenced areas filled with trash, but the different trees that have been in this section made it look horrendous. Species ranged from evergreens to the ubiquitous London Plane trees (found in most places around New York City.) Whoever decided to plant all these tree species probably did not have any idea of how disorganized and unattractive this section of the park was going to look like once the trees will have grown.

During my internship with DPR, whenever I couldn’t find a tree species in the tree guide, I took a picture of the tree’s leaves and bark and texted it to my supervisor. He then told me, if it wasn’t in the guide, what species it belonged to. He was a quite man and not much older than me, but he was very accessible. One particular tree I had difficulty identifying at the Sara Roosevelt Park was a Flowering Cherry. Not only did this tree had a similar bark and leaves as that of a Japanese Zelkova (Zelkova serrata), but its pink flowers which blossom in the spring time wither in the summer. Other than that, and the unattractive section I mentioned before, I dare to say that so far Sara Roosevelt Park is one my favorites in NYC!