Aerial view of Bogardus Plaza (photo via Friends of Bogardus Plaza).
By Mark Chiusano
What the visitor to Bogardus Plaza sees is the welcoming kiosk selling pasteis de nata, the tables and egg-shaped seats, and the raised platform that hosts a dog show, one of 8-10 events in the plaza each year. The passerby may notice the elegant paving stones, the antique 17-foot cast-iron clock, and the way that this plaza carves some public recreational space out of what used to be part of Hudson Street in Manhattan’s Tribeca.
What visitors don’t see is the constraint of the London plane trees — their roots meant the platform had to be raised the way it was. They don’t see the challenges of finding a successful kiosk operator, or the choices about what events to hold, or even the decision of how bumpy to make the cobblestones: smooth enough for heels and strollers but with enough traction to gently ward off skateboarders. In short, visitors don’t see all the work it takes to reclaim a small part of a New York City street and run a pedestrian plaza, dozens of which dot the city. These public spaces help to enliven neighborhoods and offer new stopping points for pedestrians, with the help of labor done by committed volunteers like Victoria Weil, president of the nonprofit Friends of Bogardus Plaza.
“What I’ve learned with public space,” Weil said during a recent visit to the plaza, “you sort of think you’re done and you are never done. You are never done, ever, ever, ever.”
The city’s plaza program launched in 2008 as a way to transform underused areas across the five boroughs and give more people access to open space. More than 80 percent of residents now live within 1/4-mile of a park, Department of Transportation plaza, or Open Street, according to the 2025 update of the NYC Streets Plan. Yet as some of the burst of pandemic-era public space programs falter — from cash-poor Open Streets to disappearing outdoor dining setups — advocates and policymakers are grappling with the future of New York’s streetscape in real time. Among the challenges is a deeper realization that public space needs support to be maintained.
Bogardus is a good example of the long road to create a successful new gathering spot. A portion of the triangle had once been a gated garden named after James Bogardus, a 19th-century builder and inventor. The green space was mostly cared for by local artists, said Weil, a former opera singer. When she moved to the neighborhood with her family she got involved and was tasked with calling the plumber to turn the water system on and off: “That was my big job,” she said wryly.
In 2010, Weil helped spearhead a push for something bigger: a more robust plaza, to be maintained by a newly incorporated nonprofit.
The city’s Department of Transportation made the plaza a temporary, barebones reality out of a stretch of Hudson between Chambers and Reade. Then the real work began.
Weil remembers sit-downs with the community board and elected officials, and going to cocktail parties with PowerPoint presentations. There were design meetings in Queens, talking about materials. All of this, of course, was unpaid.
A decade later, the plaza officially opened, with then-DOT Commissioner Hank Gutman nodding to the ongoing pandemic in his valedictory statement: “Over the past difficult year, New Yorkers have learned the precious value of our shared open spaces,” he said, “which makes today’s official opening of Bogardus Plaza so especially well-timed.”
To keep the space precious — or even just clean — means a lot of work by volunteers, however. Even on regular days, the plaza is busy, with hundreds of people passing through or lingering, according to recent pedestrian counts. Weil notes that it takes approximately $90,000-100,000 a year to run the space, money that is raised by her nonprofit. Half of that sum pays for setup, trash removal, watering, and similar services by ACE, a group that employs high-need people. Then there are the costs of pest control, insurance, and events like the plaza’s jazz lunch Thursdays, dog shows, or spring block party, featuring facepainting and math games.
Much of this ends up being coordinated by Weil or a few others.
This kind of reliance on volunteers is common for many public space initiatives in New York, and often results in those initiatives petering out if the most committed volunteers move or simply get too exhausted by the unpaid work. City funding sometimes covers just a fraction of what’s needed even for highly-used programs, such as the Vanderbilt Open Street in Brooklyn, and advocates commonly call for more support or even more workers hired as public space stewards.
Weil says that paying a part-time executive director for groups that maintain public spaces like Bogardus could help. “This needs to be professionalized,” she said.
Options for acquiring that money could include commercial kiosks that perform very well, Weil notes, or becoming part of a Business Improvement District that takes on some of the necessary labor. These entities, business associations typically more substantial than small community nonprofits, take on many tasks and currently run more than a dozen city plazas such as Fowler Square in Brooklyn and Herman Hochberg in Queens.
A more stabilized maintenance method would mean someone could take on all the thorny tasks of keeping a plaza open and welcoming. That could, in the case of Bogardus Plaza, be testing how bright the lights should be to keep the triangle safe but avoid annoying the neighbors, or experimenting with a steel wool-style material underneath plants to deter rats (both real issues in Tribeca).
Weil hopes Bogardus can continue to thrive through the challenges. “It’s such a boon to the community,” she says. “Most people don’t even realize that it doesn’t just magically happen.”
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Mark Chiusano is a Senior Fellow in New York Law School’s Center for New York City and State Law and the author of The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.