They are New York City’s nearly 600 secret oases: plazas, courtyards, rooftop gardens and patches of greenery carved into private buildings. Privately owned public spaces, often referred to as POPs, are free and open to the public — at least on paper. But controversially, they’ve often existed in obscurity.
As with many conundrums, there’s now an app for that. New York Public Space is a years-in-the-making civic experiment developed by Chris Whong, a mapping-software developer who used to work in the city’s planning department and has spent time thinking about what constitutes a public space.
“To me, it comes down to, ‘Can I just be there?’” Whong said. “There’s lots of wide sidewalks that have benches and seating and stuff that function as a place where you could go relax and hang out. But they’re not on anybody’s list.”
The app, which was released last fall and is free of charge on both the Apple app store and Google Play, contains about 2,800 public spaces, including the roughly 600 privately owned ones. Whong said he aims to offer users a menu of places that are technically free and open to the public, even if private owners might want to dissuade heavy usage.
He said he envisions his app as a “consolidated map of public space.” Users of the app are invited to provide feedback, allowing them to become the ultimate arbiters of what public spaces are worthy of a marker on the map.
The app recently got a promotional assist from Matthew Wing, a political strategist who worked for former Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. His current roster of clients includes City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who, like Cuomo, is running for mayor.
As a hobby, Wing recently started filming a series of videos for “Hack NY,” an Instagram account he created.
Wing, who is a native New Yorker, said he had been thinking about doing an episode on privately owned public spaces when he stumbled across a LinkedIn post from Whong inviting people to test his app. He then decided to shoot a mini-movie that captures scenes of industry and one man’s quest to slow down and discover the city’s quieter beauty. He made the video for $2,000 with two friends, Julian Klepper and Adam Janos, who features as a wandering New Yorker.
“For he knows we can discover new spaces without paying a cent,” the narrator intones.
Wing said all his videos that promote the city are meant to stand out and be “weird.” Although he said he’s happy to finance them for now, he’s angling for city and state governments to one day hire his company to promote their programs.
His latest depiction is a romantic vision of public space in New York City that leaves out difficult and ugly battles that have cropped up over the years. Privately owned public spaces, a planning trend began in the 1960s, have long had a bad rap for being less than accessible. Critics have pointed out that real estate developers can leverage the spaces to their advantage — getting the city to sign off on extra square footage in exchange for cordoning off sections for the public — whether they make the public spaces easy to find or not.
Wing said he isn’t overly concerned about the debate over whether cities and developers should make such deals in the first place.
“We could sit and we could complain,” he said. “Or we could just say, ‘Let’s take it back for the public in every way we can,’ and that’s what Chris did.”
City officials have expressed openness to that kind of thinking. Ya-Ting Liu, who Mayor Adams appointed as the city’s first-ever public realm czar, said these initiatives help solve a common problem cities have when it comes to public resources.
“There’s endless maps and information available,” she said. “The issue is, is it being used? Do people know about it?”
“More is more when it comes to coming up with creative or user-friendly solutions to get information out,” Liu added.
On a recent weekday morning, Wing and Whong climbed up to a rooftop plaza at 50 Water St. in the city’s Financial District. The tranquil green space, reached by a short flight of stairs, is one of many surprising public finds listed on Whong’s app.
At one of the tables, a man sat sipping a cup of coffee. Below, a ferry carved a path through the gleaming water.
Whong marveled at the view and something else that had dawned on him. As a planning student, he remembered this spot being mentioned in a presentation about privately owned public spaces. He used to work in the neighborhood.
“I probably walked within a block of this, you know, hundreds of times,” he said. “But I’ve never had the occasion to actually come here. And it’s beautiful.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
