NYC Ferry Operated by Hornblower is your new way to commute. We connect New Yorkers and visitors to the city’s waterfront communities – including neighborhood businesses, job centers, and parks. Our new blog series, Community Connect, is another way to connect our riders to these communities by highlighting local businesses, community leaders, and non-profits. Each week we focus on a different neighborhood along one of our four routes and bring you a short story about a neighborhood icon.
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Four Freedoms Park is a park 40 years in the making. It was designed in 1973 by Louis Kahn as a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, specifically to a speech he gave that eventually became the basis of the Declaration of Human Rights. A year after designing the park, the architect tragically had a heart attack in Penn Station and died, supposedly with the drawings for the park in his briefcase. The city was on the verge of bankruptcy and all plans for the creation of a park had to be put on hold. It wasn’t until about 2003 when Louis Kahn’s son, Nathaniel, made the movie “My Architect”, which won an Oscar, and an exhibition of Kahn’s work followed, that the conversation picked back up about Four Freedoms Park. The park was finally opened in 2012.
Four Freedoms Park
The park has two missions – creating educational opportunities for students and having public programs and events in the park. Four Freedoms works closely with residents on Roosevelt Island to make sure that kids here know they have this park in their backyard. Four Freedoms Park also has great ties to the United Nations. The founder of the park was an ambassador at the UN in the 1970’s. Since many families who live on Roosevelt Island work at the UN, they take part in International Day of Peace and other international holidays.
We sat down with Director of Strategic Partnerships and Communications, Madeline Grimes, to discuss upcoming plans for the park. “Because the park is still so young, we’re trying to figure out what kinds of public art we can have at the park that will last outdoors,” Grimes points out that they host kite-making workshops, and this year have launched a photo contest. The contest entitled “Capture Your Freedom” is a joint endeavor with the United Photo Industries. They ran an open call for submissions from February to March and will display the winning photos in an exhibition at the park in June.
“We want to use the space as a blank canvas,” says Grimes, they work with partner organizations such as Scholastic, the Intrepid Museum, and American Architects Institute to activate the space. They host free public programming from April to October in the park.
Four Freedoms Park faces a few unique challenges including accessibility, “People think it’s a lot further away than it actually is,” explains Grimes. With NYC Ferry service added to Roosevelt Island at the end of last summer, they have a better time connecting to people in Queens, especially school groups. Another unique problem is the actual physical space itself – the whole memorial is made of granite, which is super porous and stains quite easily.
“Our greatest strength, is the park itself,” says Grimes. The park is beautiful with sweeping views of Manhattan and is really open to interpretation, “You feel immediately so connected to the city and so far away from it.” It’s a magical place for quiet contemplation.
You can visit Four Freedoms Park by taking our NYC Ferry Astoria route to Roosevelt Island and walking south for 12 minutes.
