Fort Tryon Park is a public park. However, human interaction is very measured: you can only walk on the defined roads, and sit on the grass and benches they’ve specially made. It’s natural, but clearly human engineered. The flowers, grass, stacked rocks, and gravel path placement were all intentional. The Fort Tryon Park trust upkeeps it, making sure everything stays just as it was intended when it was designed by the Olmsted Brothers. The average user is +35 years old, white, with either a cane or a toddler. When we walked around the park, it was evident we were some of the youngest people there. As we looked down and saw Dominican children playing in the city beneath us, I questioned why this was. Other users include squirrels, Lantern Flies, and other bugs that live in the area. Although a public park, you have to pay to get into the MET Cloisters (this doesn’t apply if you’re a NY resident). The Cloisters is a castle housing gothic art from the 13th and 14th century. Its architectural inspiration is that of Christian Monasteries during the Middle Ages. While you’ll find much more diversity in the MET Cloisters, there’s still an air of exclusivity about this beautiful park.
With vibrant colors and picturesque views, Fort Tryon Park looks something like a sanctuary, yet while walking around the twists and turns of the land, it was evident that there is a disconnect between the park and the surrounding community which it inhabits. It has always had a history of exclusion. Before it became the beautiful park we know it as today, the land was owned by Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings, a wealthy philanthropist and horse breeder. He bought the land because of its proximity to the Speedway, where he would race his horses. On the hilltop estate, he built a mansion which he named “Tryon Hall''. To add more to his displays of opulence, he built a 25,000 square foot trotting stable on the property, with a cost totalling $200,000. Today, the cost of his stable would be $6,773,000. In 1917, John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought the property from Billings with the hopes of developing a park that could do justice to the stunning views of the Hudson River and Palisades. The sons of the famous Frederick Law Olmstead designed the park. They implemented terraces, wooded slopes, promenades and pedestrian paths, aimed to highlight the natural beauty of it. After Rockefeller bought George Barnard’s collection of medieval art, The Cloisters was opened in 1938. Its inspiration comes from Romanesque monasteries, and has an array of cloisters taken from actual French monasteries. Although it includes two playgrounds, neither are on top of the hill, where most of the park and people visit. It was never designed to be a community space, sold from one right white philanthropist to another. Now, you’ll sparsely find people from the surrounding area interacting in the park, why would a largely immigrant, dominican population want to look at European medieval art.It’s target audience are its attendees: majority white, older people who sit and look at the Hudson River, and the collection of medieval art at The Cloisters. The park itself is on a hill, closed off from its surroundings, once again creating a divide between the communities of the area. .
Today, Fort Tryon Park is a space of exclusion. Rooted in a history of white ownership, the park was originally curated for an elitist audience, with an emphasis on aesthetics rather than functionality, resulting in the current disconnect between the park and the surrounding communities of Inwood and Washington Heights, something we observed on our site visit. In our future, Fort Tryon Park is reimagined through the lens of critical care theory to become a dynamic space that promotes community by embracing the essence of the interconnectivity of all life forms. To encourage a connection between the park and the surrounding communities, while challenging the norm of a park as a space of passive interaction, the space would be redesigned to become home to a community garden. The garden would implement indigenous farming techniques such as intercropping, crop rotation, and water harvesting, promoting food sovereignty and fighting against the failed current Industrial Food Chain. Imagined plants would include crops such as The Three Sisters (a compilation of corn, beans, and squash), plants for traditional medicinal usages such as Blood Root and Red Cedar, and cover crops such as Clover. Coffee grounds would be donated and used as fertilizer. The garden would be a space for the community, and cared for by them, similarly to how the Reti Center is structured. Rather than attempting to control nature by viewing each plant as a separate organism, the park would be designed to guide ecologies with a thorough understanding of how ecosystems work as a whole. Our future is modeled from the past, embracing the concept that nature is the most intelligent engineer. The garden would be in the shape of Vesica Piscis, a type of sacred geometry discovered within nature that explores and explains the energy patterns that create and unify all things. Through visualizing our future space in this layout, the reimagined dynamics between humans and the environment are physically ingrained into the design, serving as a reminder of the values of the space while also continuing the tradition of spirituality in this park. How we interact with each other as humans is directly related to how we interact with nature. Thus, to reimagine our food system to allow for community-based farming that accounts for the interdependence of living systems, we must first understand that humans are an integral part of that system and are thus, too, interdependent.
Our future object is a pot made out of coffee composite, a biomaterial that consists of recycled coffee grounds, glycerol, vinegar, and sodium alginate. In the process of designing our object, a plant pot, we embraced the ways in which the composite would crack, leaving a texture that looked remarkably similar to soil. The rugged appearance of the object adheres to our vision of a future in which a single story of beauty is transcended. The pot, with edible sprouts growing within it, is representative of the future design of a community garden within Fort Tryon Park. The garden would integrate the surrounding communities of Inwood and Washington Heights as users of the space while promoting interconnectivity and food sovereignty. As the plant grows, it will decompose the pot, illustrating a future where nature is neither controlled nor exploited. Additionally, the decomposition of the pot symbolizes breaking down shackles that contain society, as our relationships with each other as humans are inextricably linked to our relationships with the environment.
