mcnair park background

On my first day at Parks, I was asked to think about ideas for the new McNair Park in Harlem. This parcel was purchased by the city about 20 years ago. This was shortly after the Challenger disaster of 1986, so the Powers That Were decided the park should be named in memoriam of Dr. Ronald McNair, an astronaut on that flight.

Dr McNair had little direct connection with Harlem (although I have heard that his uncle owned an auto-body shop near the new park), but he was an appropriate choice nonetheless. Despite being born in a poor town in rural South Carolina, he worked hard at his education and ultimately graduated with a doctorate in physics from MIT. He joined NASA in 1978 and was the second African-American in space on a previous Challenger flight in 1984. Among other scientific duties aboard the shuttle, he operated the large mechanical arm that placed and retrieved objects in space. He was also an accomplished saxophonist, and had expected to make the first saxophone recording in space while on the 1986 flight.

This being my first assignment, I was asked to serve as a sort of second in command to veteran landscape architect Nancy Prince. She came up with the "big idea" and general design of the park. It was great working with her on this. It was within her rights to just relegate the more tedious bits of production to me, but instead she got me involved in all aspects of the design, from the very beginning of the process all the way through. This was very generous of her. I'm sure my inexperience didn't speed things up at all, and we had significant time pressures on this job, even more than usual. Anyway we got through it and I was able to help a lot on the production of contract drawings and presentation boards.

Dr McNair had a passion for science, which Nancy reflected in her design. The underlying structure is mostly driven by the proportionate sizes of the planets, with Saturn being represented by a large circular seatwall, and the other planets marked in granite or precast concrete. We also selected play equipment in this vein -- for example we worked with a manufacturer to custom-design the largest piece to look like a circular space station (like the one in 2001).

OK, enough of that... here is the plan. This is one of the boards we showed to the Art Commission and other public meetings. I think you can click on it to make it larger.


Anyway you can see the forms inspired by the planets, also the entry paths swoop off like the arms of a galaxy.

That moon climber in the bottom center is really cool... It was Nancy's idea, she tried to explain it to the play equipment manufacturer who said it was impossible to build. they just couldn't visualize it. I thought it was such an interesting idea that I created the image you can see on this board to get them to understand, and then they said, oh, sure, we can build that.

The planet walk idea in the lower left corner was developed jointly by Nancy and I; they had a really cool planet walk in Ithaca that inspired us. Basically each planet is represented by a small marker laid out at distance proportionate to reality, so you get the idea as you walk along it of how far away Pluto really is. It worked out here to something like 1 foot = 1,000 miles. Anyway everybody loved this idea, the Art Commissioners were crazy about it, but alas we have now run afoul of DOT sidewalk regulations and it will probably not be built. Score one for bureaucracy.

This project is well under way... next post, some construction photos.