January 2010 Updates

In early December, we met with Manhattan’s Deputy Borough President Ms. Pierre-Louis and their Director of Budget & Grants Susannah Vickers. They were positive about our efforts and offered some good suggestions, but were unable to commit capital funding at the time; we hope that with some more success in the future, they will see Gulick Park as a priority.

We still plan to meet with Councilmember Rosie Mendez and hope to soon follow-up with newly elected Councilmember Margaret Chin, with whom we last spoke after her primary victory.

We are continuing to work with Assembly Speaker Silver’s on his proposal to get our elected officials together, in an effort to us meet help our lobbying and funding needs.

Finally, Senator Daniel Squadron continues to sound positive about allocating capital funding in the near future. He even came to our January steering committee meeting to see where we are and what our plans are.

Please visit us at https://gulickpark.org. There is a history of the park and of our group, pictures of events and the park, information about the steering committee and ways to volunteer. If you have any suggestions or comments either leave them on the site or e-mail info@gulickpark.org. We owe thanks to the generous efforts of now former Councilmember Alan Gerson and his associate Jeremy Horland, for initially getting this site up and running.

Several of our members have decided to capture the history of Gulick/Sheriff Park by recording the memories and stories of our neighbors. Initially, we are looking for 3 or 4 people who’ve lived in the area and would like to share their memories of Gulick Park in its younger, livelier days. If you would like to participate or want to suggest someone, please e-mail us at history@gulickpark.org

As mentioned last time, we had a successful bulb planting in early November. But two weeks later because there was so much energy to make the park greener and greener, there was a last-minute tree and bush planting with many evergreens and a few flowering shrubs going into once-empty tree pits. As a result we’ve had an even greener winter in the park’s sitting area (see picture attached) and even more color in the spring.

We are also in touch with Parks and Recreation’s Deputy Chief of Operations, Rick Zeidler, about removing greater areas of concrete and stone to create a larger planting area. We’ll keep you posted as things move forward.

As always we welcome our neighbors to help out in between major events. Our Web site has descriptions of the tasks we work on; if you would like to help in one of these areas, e-mail us at info@gulickpark.org. Right now, we are specifically looking for someone who could help us with communications: sending out these newsletters, working with a designer for a logo (the process is already going), helping price an outdoor banner. Not much really and others in the group will help out.