Brooklyn Bridge Park is a truly joyous addition to the neighborhood. I’ve always been jealous of those cities with jogging and biking paths along their waterways: Chicago along Lake Michigan, San Diego along the Pacific Ocean, and Boston along the Charles River. A decade ago Manhattan’s lower west side from the Battery to 14th Street became an open pathway but from our front door you did a mini-marathon to use it (I exaggerate for effect!) Now, we’ve got BBP and there are runners and walkers galore working out in the early morning breezes off the harbor and the East River.
To put icing on the already delicious cake, visitors to the park are currently able to enjoy two art exhibitions within the waterside area. One, called We the People, is illustrated, in part, below. It consists of a series of copper sculptures that duplicate selected sections of the Statue of Liberty, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi in 1886. They are complete with the structural underpinnings originally designed by Gustav Eiffel. Fascinating to see the colossal statue brought into minute focus. Hurry down to the park; the copper is already beginning to oxidize. The artist Dahn Vo also has several sculptures on display in City Hall Park, across the river. For more on Dahn Vo and We the People follow this link.
The second exhibition in the park is called The Fence and is a display of the work of forty-two photographers. They each show six photographs, printed in large format on plasticized photographic mesh, on subjects as diverse as State of Union, American Girls, and Minor League. For an up close view of many of the photos and an introduction by the photographers not available on The Fence itself, go to the Photoville web site. The exhibition, now in its third year, is judged and curated by a large group of serious photographer types, most of whom work as professional photographers. It runs for 1,000 feet (I didn’t measure it, but that’s what I read) and is worthy of any museum curated photography exhibition. It’s almost too much to take in at one viewing and I’d say it’s worth a few visits.
-Deb Markow
