Fitting thanks for Elizabeth Berger

One of the most scarred spots on the island of Manhattan, beaten up by its history, sitting on landfill with very little to remind us it was once the city’s Millionaire’s Row, the area’s Golden Age circa 1790-1840, it plunged into the degradation of poverty, the exploitation of tenements rife with gambling, prostitution, and misery. Chopped up and crisscrossed twice by the elevated trains that preceded the subway system, then indeed dug out underneath itself by no less than four subway lines, scraped of any sense developmentally by the unsightly, insanely overwrought entrance and exit ramps of Robert Moses’ ugliest accomplishment the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and then nearly blown to smithereens by the attacks on the nearby World Trade Center, it had been my least favorite part of Manhattan, a patch of land so mismanaged I’d seen absolutely no potential to reclaim it usefully let alone aesthetically. 

But there are far better imaginations than mine. 

This little patch of land one must traverse to get from the Rector Street Subway Station to Battery Park is now a bit of a meadow, dotted with wildflowers arranged amid undulating paths of fieldstone and circled with a most elegant hip-high wrought iron fence. Named for the woman who devoted her life to the humane development of Manhattan’s more challenging  neighborhoods, Elizabeth Berger Plaza sits high on my list of the things I can’t wait to show you.