Passannante Ballfield – New York NY

Description

According to the NYC Parks website: “The site of this ballfield was acquired by the City of New York for the construction of the Independent Subway whose line curves from the Avenue of the Americas to West Houston Street. In May 1934 the Board of Transportation granted the Department of Parks a permit to develop for playground purposes four parcels on West Houston Street. The park at the northeast corner of West Houston Street and the Avenue of the Americas was one of thirty-eight new playgrounds added to the Park system in the first four months of Robert Moses’s twenty-six year tenure as Parks Commissioner. It opened on September 14, 1934.”

Although neither this source nor the 1934 press release announcing the opening explicitly mention federal involvement in the park, federal funding for laborers, materials, architects, landscapers and engineers employed on Parks projects is acknowledged in about 350 press releases from 1934 to 1943. As researcher Frank da Cruz explains here, from these and further sources, it can be confidently stated that all New York City parks projects from 1934 to 1938 and almost all from 1939-1943 were completed in whole or in part with New Deal funding and/or labor.

Given the early date of the ABC Playground project, the CWA most likely played an important role in its development. From 1935 on, the WPA became the primary agency involved in NYC park development. A December 1943 Parks Department press release summed up the massive amount of work accomplished on playgrounds alone with federal funding by the end of the New Deal era, saying, “In 1934 there were 119 playgrounds in the five boroughs, 67 of which have been reconstructed. There will be, with this new addition [of a playground on Brinckerhoff Avenue in Queens], 489 playgrounds in the park system.”

In 1998, this ballfield was named after William F. Passannante (1920-1996), a longtime Greenwich Village resident and New York State Assemblyman.