Actual T-shirt is short sleeve

We are now giving away our Friends of Gulick Park t-shirts, when you donate $15 to become an official Friend of Gulick Park. All t-shirts are  short sleeve and gray with green logo. Please follow the link for instructions.

The Friends of Gulick Park will also have a table at this year’s National Night Out Against Crime, where we will have surveys available. The 7th Precinct is hosting this community block party on Tuesday, August 3rd from 4:30 to 8:30pm. Other community groups will table, there will be food, drinks, a petting zoo, rides, face painting, and more! Stop by East Broadway between Clinton, Jefferson, & Henry Streets. Flyer is linked below; more information about NNO here. Thanks to the Grand St Settlement’s teen program for helping us staff the table.

National Night Out Flyer (.doc)

Donations:
On-line donating is live. Should you like to financially support the Friends of Gulick Park, you can visit our donations page to begin filling out the form that will be completed at nycharities.org. This form can support recurring donations, memorial donations and honorary donations.

Your donations will help us keep the park green, reach out to the community, host in-park events, and advocate for a community responsive re-design.

The mailing address for sending checks is also on our donations page.

So we are hosting a Weeding and Watering Wednesday on July 21st from 5:30 to 8:00pm–in the area long Willett St. A few plants and seeds need to go in; the new flowers, trees, and shrubs are very thirsty this time of year and need to be cleared of weeds. We’ll take a break for some pizza and drinks. Come by to meet your neighbors and help care for your park. As always children are welcome.

Funding Success
We are happy to announce that $1,050,000 in capital funding has been allocated to Luther Gulick Park. City Council Member Margaret Chin secured $550,000 in this years city budget and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, $500,000. This combines with $360,000 in previous City Council funds and $100,000 from State Senator Daniel Squadron to total $1,510,000.

Input on the Renovation
The Parks Department has indicated that the design process will begin when earmarked funding reaches two million dollars. Meanwhile, we have more time to gather our neighbors’ ideas for the park, process these into a report, and work with Parks’ design team to make the renovation responsive to the community. The Friends of Gulick Park is finishing organizing this input and will begin drafting a report by end of summer. Expect to hear more about this as it happens.

As always, we will continue to engage our other elected representatives to secure the rest of the funds needed to make Gulick Park some truly special. We have also recently approached The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to see if we can work together on improving our park space.

Donations
We have also established a new fiscal sponsor: The Open Space Institute. They will allow all donations to the Friends of Gulick Park to be tax deductible. Your donations will help us green the park now, hold events in the park, etc. Checks can be made payable to “OSI/Friends of Gulick Park” or “OSI” with “Friends of Gulick Park”  in the memo field. In the next few weeks I will update the Web site so that donations can be made securely on-line.

The Ping Pong table returns! Today or tomorrow the table that graced Take Back Our Park Day will be re-installed. Thanks again to Henge Tables and Alan Good for working with us on this. We still need to fund-raise for this, but will get back to you with details about this.

Lastly, The Lo-Down covered the Hester St Playground’s ribbon-cutting ceremony last week. They report that Council Member Margaret Chin “playfully encouraged [Parks Commissioner] Benepe to publicly throw his support behind another park project, the revitalization of Luther Gulick Park, on Willett Street.” We greatly appreciate Ms Chin’s continued support. I was invited as an official representative of the Friends of Gulick Park and we were mentioned in the opening address by Commissioner Benepe. We’d like to thank Parks for the recognition and exposure.

Come out this Saturday 6/12 (tomorrow, or Sunday 6/13 if it rains) to Gulick Park and help us plant some flowers for the summer and clean up and repaint the fence around the water sprinkler. We’ll be there from 10am to 2pm, please come for however long you wish. Materials and equipment will be provided, as will some cold beverages.

Also, check out the Lo-Down’s great article on our partners The Hester Street Collaborative and the People Make Parks program. Our large event in May was a pilot run for PMP and it was central to the success we had collecting your input about the park.

We will be out in the playground side on Saturday June 12th from 10am to 2pm, fixing up the fence around the water fixture. Parks has asked us to give it a fresh coat of paint. (Should it rain, we will reschedule to June 13th, 10am to 2pm.)

We will also be planting flowers on the other end of the park, by Willett Street. We will provide all the tools, materials, and some cool beverages.

(We also want to let you know that The LES Ecology Center is hosting a “Celebration by the East River” this Saturday, June 5th–tickets are still available. The Reverend Billy will be presiding and they will be honoring ecologically forward businesses and individuals in NYC, including one of our neighbors and friend of Gulick Park! The LES Ecology Center has been supportive of our efforts and they do great work in another of our community’s parks, East River Park.)

Assembling your input
Over the next month or two, we will be organizing your ideas for Gulick Park. We’ll go through the models, your comments about them, the wish fish, the surveys, pictures of the stickers, the interviews, and the annotated map, in order to produce a report expressing the variety of ideas and the main thrust of people’s wishes. Once the report is ready, we will bring it back to the community for comment and send it along to NYC Parks & Recreation as well as our elected representatives.

The survey is still available on-line, if you didn’t get a chance to come by last Sunday or didn’t get to fill it out.

We’ve posted some pictures on our site, as well.

Thanks to our representatives
We also want to thank our elected representatives for taking the time to show support for our neighborhood and our park. Our thanks go to  Speaker Silver, Senator Squadron, Borough President Stringer, Council Member Chin, and Representative Maloney.

Our Sponsors and Donors
Raffle prizes were supplied thanks to Elizabeth (a core member of The Friends of Gulick Park), Donnybrook, and Roots & Vines.
The ping pong table was provided by Alan Good and Henge, Inc. We are hoping to find funding to return the table to the park and will keep you posted.
The Doughnut Plant donated some snacks. The Abrons Arts Center provided the tables. Evan Forsch donated his time as a caricature artist. We thank them and hope you do to!

Much thanks goes to Partnerships for Parks (especially Kirsti Bambridge and Jordan Pender) for helping bring this event together. The same is true of The Hester Street Collaborative (especially Anne Frederick and Dylan House), which developed many of the activities we used.

Professor Scot Pobiner and his students built and developed the interview booth, as part of a course project on community stake-holders, at Parsons The New School for Design.

Finally, we’d like to thank The Lo-Down, The Grand St News, The Educational Alliance, Asian Americans for Equality, Good Old Lower East Side, CB3, and St Mary’s for publicizing the event.

Wi-Fi
In other news: You may have noticed we’ve outfit the Willett Street-side of the park with free wireless internet! Thanks to our neighbor Matthew Quezada for helping set this up.

Many elected representatives will attend: Speaker Silver, Senator Squadron, Borough President Stringer, Council Member Chin, and possibly Congresswoman Maloney. Many of these will be here around 3pm. Come hear them say a few short words.

There will also be entertainment for children: face painting for part of the time, a caricature artist from 1-3 and possibly longer, and sidewalk chalk—not to mention model making and drawing and such!

We will raffle a family membership to the Museum of Natural History, along with some gift certificates to Roots & Vines and a pizza restaurant for people who complete all the different ways of sharing your ideas about the park.

Finally, the outdoor Ping Pong table will be installed for the day! Come play a game or watch the short tournament. There is still time to donate toward the final installation on June 7th.

Light refreshments will be available.

See you tomorrow!

However, we need help to pay for this fun addition. Please donate what you can, any amount is helpful, by visiting this site (click on the picture).

For donating at certain amounts there are prizes, like getting your name engraved on the table, access to a ping pong tournament on 5/16, free t-shirt, gift-certificates, even a wedding ceremony!

Of course, you can donate to other projects of the Friends of Gulick Park; details are on our donations page, as well.

So come by Take Back Our Park Day, Sunday May 16th between 1 and 5pm to let the city know what you want in a renovated park, play some ping pong, have some refreshments (including a limited supply of Donut Plant donuts), enter our raffle, and more.

Also, please check out the continued good press at the Lo Down. And don’t forget our quick survey.

Call for Help:

We are asking that if any of you would like to volunteer, please e-mail us (info@gulickpark.org). People are sought to assist a main coordinator with the model-making station (helping children and adults model their dream park from craft materials), the story-map (helping people write or draw their memories and opinions of the park on a large map) and other events. Some light set-up help would be great too! As always, we encourage community involvement–make the park your own!

We are also specifically looking for those willing to help with face-painting for children or photography to document the day. If you or someone you know has skills in these areas, please let e-mail us.

Donations now accepted:

Lastly, we have secured a fiscal sponsor to accept tax-deductible donations on our behalf! The Lower East Side Ecology Center will be a conduit for donations to our group. Donations will go toward future events, park beautification supplies such as plants and flowers, the ping-pong table, etc.

If you wish, please write checks to “The Lower East Side Ecology Center” and in the memo field write “to The Friends of Gulick Park”. Your generosity will be greatly appreciated and duly recognized.