Hamilton Fish Park Play Center
128 Pitt Street | Lower East Side | built 1900
Open on the map5 entries
The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1899
The city hires Carrère & Hastings to design Hamilton Fish Park and its gymnasium building
In 1896 the city's Health Board picked the area bounded by Houston, Pitt, Stanton and Sheriff Streets, crowded with tenements, 17 of them in rear yards, for a new park. Land was bought and cleared, but money for building it came only in 1899, when Carrère & Hastings was commissioned to design the park and a small gymnasium building facing Pitt Street. Work began that April.
- 1900
Park Commissioner Clausen blasts the new gymnasium and its tiny baths
Carrère & Hastings modeled the Pitt Street building on a miniature of Paris's Petit Palais. Park Department president George C. Clausen delayed the planned May 25 opening, complaining that most of the $183,000 spent went into an extravagant building with no gymnastic apparatus. He noted that its public baths had room for only three bathers at a time on each side, one for men and one for women, though the neighborhood had little hot water.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1900
Hamilton Fish Park opens at night under floodlights to 10,000 children
The park opened at 8 p.m. on June 1, 1900, with floodlights, flags and a band. The New York Times counted 10,000 children in attendance. Boys crawled under the grandstand to tug at the trousers of the senators and assemblymen on the platform, and a bass horn player had to empty paper balls from his instrument twice.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1905
Boys elect a mayor of Playground City in the gymnasium building
After the building was closed in 1903, it briefly reopened for a youth election. On September 1, 1905, 600 boys crowded in to watch 16-year-old Nathan Kase sworn in as mayor of Playground City. Other winners became Commissioner of Police, with badges for the park's boy policemen, and Commissioner of Park Cleaning, Samuel Ehrmann, who hoped to stop people throwing fruit skins on the walks.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
- 1911
The shuttered gymnasium reopens for the city's first municipally sponsored dance
After standing unused for years, the gymnasium building reopened on March 4, 1911, with wrestling, boxing and gymnastics exhibitions followed by dancing to a piano, violin, cornet and drum. Parks Commissioner Charles B. Stover paid tribute to John Merven Carrère, who had died three days earlier. He said the building would finally get full use for both the men's and women's gymnasiums.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
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