Adventures of Urban Life

Katherine Pimentel

Activity 8 : group member field trip

For our first field trip we visited Riverbank State Park on 137^th Street. It was a breezy Sunday and I assumed that there would not be too many people outside but to my surprise the park was being put to much use. Upon entrance the first thing I saw was the basketball courts, they were all being used by young men. Adjacent to the court was the large track .Around the track there were a few people walking and jogging and the interior part of the track was full of teams playing football and soccer. The park itself is very large and aside from the courts and track center there is also an indoor pool, skating rink, sprinkler, children’s park and regular grass space. I noticed that the park had little plots of land intended for gardening. There were a few women here with their children teaching them how to plant flowers and vegetables. I am not sure if these plots were rented or if any one cold go in and plant, but I found it to be an interesting option for those who live in the city because there is obviously a lack of space for that in the typical New York City apartment. Jane Jacobs describes the use of the park in her book and she states that the people in the neighborhood make it either successful or not. “Generalized parks can and do add great attraction to neighborhoods that people find attractive for a great variety of other uses… The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its every day streets, the more successfully, casualty (and economically), its people thereby enliven and support well located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity”(Jacobs,111). I would have to say that Riverbank is a successful park because even during a windy and cloudy day, people still found reason to go and use that park. Not only were people there for recreational purposes but they were also there with teams from the community thus making it a fully functioning neighborhood park.

The second field trip the group chose was Yankee Stadium, we could not go see a game or go on one of the tours but we walked around the neighborhood and made observations. There was a game on Sunday when I arrived at 161^st and all of the Yankee fans were outside ad they were very excited because apparently the Yankees had won. the people range from the old to the very young. There were mostly groups of males, couples and families going to spend their Sundays together. People were very swift to leave and they rarely stayed to hang around the area. There was a lot of pride amongst all of the Fans including those from the opposite team. I noticed many tourists who came for the experience of watching one the United States most popular baseball teams. The area surrounding Yankee stadium is very Yankees oriented, there are bars, restaurants, a bowling alley and many shops that cater to the Yankee fan. The site of the old stadium is clearly visible to the public and it brings much attention to the people who visit the area therefore they take time out to take pictures After about a two block radius the neighborhood was just residential of Hispanic and Black residents. “There’s no pretense, however, that they are anything but false fronts. The souvenirs shops and snacks emporia within extend into a backstage retail space out of all proportion to their facades. The object is clearly to make room for as many customers as possible in order to move massive volumes of cheap merchandise off the shelves”(Kunster,220). I chose this quote from Kunster because the are surrounding the stadium is full of shops catering to those who see the game and who are die hard fans, yet there I nothing there for the residents of the community. They are of primarily low income and many times cannot afford to go to any of the games. Every time there is a game they have all of these outsiders roaming their streets who are not part of the community and cold careless what goes on there.