Fighting for a Pocket Park, One Flower at a Time

New York Times
Neighborhoods: Hamilton Heights

Fighting for a Pocket Park, One Flower at a Time
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

Alida Palma, still yearning for a Parks Department flag.


By SETH KUGEL
Published: July 3, 2005

The framed photo on the end table of Alida Palma's immaculate Hamilton Heights living room shows Ms. Palma, "of a certain age," as she puts it, and elegant in a crisp green suit, standing between a beaming Adrian Benepe, the city parks commissioner, and Mayor Bloomberg.

Ms. Palma, who runs the Montefiore Park Neighborhood Association, may be elderly and sometimes cranky, and she may speak surprisingly halting English for someone who has lived in the United States for half a century. But since she began fighting to clean up her downtrodden neighborhood a decade ago, she is proud of the many connections she has developed. Henry Stern, the former parks commissioner, nicknamed her "Flower Hill," and the photograph of her with the mayor and Mr. Benepe dwarfs the picture of her only grandchild.

But as of late, her political connections seem to have frayed. The other day, she lamented the fact that things have gone downhill since Mr. Benepe was promoted from Manhattan parks commissioner three years ago and, she said, stopped returning her calls. "Back in the day, he was my friend," she said. "But now, I don't know."

The last time the two spoke, she said, was in 2004 at a ceremony at Parks Department headquarters. In a recent call to his office to complain about conditions at Montefiore, the pocket park outside her window, she says, she was told to write a letter.

A department spokeswoman said Commissioner Benepe maintained a good relationship with Ms. Palma, adding that department staff members had been in touch with her regularly and were surprised that she was upset.

But she is. The park's lights, she said, have been unlit for months. Fast-growing weeds are mowed haphazardly. Vagrants leave behind the stench of urine. And there is still no park flag, though Ms. Palma has been lobbying for one since last winter. The Parks Department has told her it doesn't have the money.

Ms. Palma was particularly disturbed by the fact that during the citywide "It's My Park! Day" in May, the city delivered only three flats of yellow perennials and some nonflowering plants to the park, at Broadway and West 138th Street. "Little tiny flowers, and little green plants? Why? No one's going to see them."

The parks spokeswoman said the park had received five flats, the same as last year, although Ms. Palma has photographs from 2003 that show volunteers planting seas of white, blue and yellow flowers. By the next day, she said, even the new flowers were gone, presumably uprooted by vandals.