In New York’s West Village, preservationists are ringing alarm bells over two community staples currently under threat. In July, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) announced tentative plans to demolish the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center. The historic building shares a hardscape plaza with Keith Haring’s Carmine Street Pool Mural from 1987, an Art in the Parks commission.
The Tony Dapolito Recreation Center was designed by Renwick, Aspinwall and Tucker; and completed in 1908. Together, the historic building at 388 Hudson Street and bespoke Haring mural form the perimeter of Walker Park and its swimming pool—a WPA project from 1939 designed by Aymar Embury II—which has long suffered from budget cuts.
NYC Parks said in a statement the recreation center, which is over 100 years old, is too expensive to repair, and so it may be torn down. The mural by Haring isn’t landmarked, and NYC Parks is technically within its rights to destroy it, despite its historic value. Many people worry about what the recreation center’s surmise could mean for the mural.
“As a non-binary kid growing up in New York City in the early 1990s, creative events for gender-diverse people like Wigstock in Tompkins Square Park, and public parks art like Keith Haring’s mural were often the only positive representations I saw of queer people living joyful, open lives,” said Royal Young, an artist who grew up in the Lower East Side. “To erase these invaluable artistic creations is to erase the vibrancy and diversity which has always been the beating heart of New York,” Young told AN.
Today, Haring’s painting of epic proportions embodies queer New York’s struggle against the Reagan administration during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The mural—which measures 18-feet-tall and 170-feet-wide—was finished in just one day by Haring the hot summer of 1987.
That year, then-New York Mayor Ed Koch was working hard to close bathhouses and gay bars in Lower Manhattan to supposedly combat the public health crisis. Instead, the persecution did virtually nothing to save lives and just pushed vulnerable people further to the margins.
Indeed, Haring’s Carmine Street Pool Mural celebrated New York’s LGBTQIA+ community at a time when NYPD clashed with ACT UP, and “Silence=Death” posters could be found on countless street corners. Haring himself tragically succumbed to HIV/AIDs when he passed in 1990, three years after completing his painting at 388 Hudson Street.
While preservation groups in West Village pressure NYC Parks to reverse course and save the recreation center, city officials have said they will do their best to save the Haring mural, and the public pool just beneath it. No plans have been released however for what would be built in the Dapolito Recreation Center’s place, or how the mural will be saved.
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