Well-hidden and stuck between the Grosvenor Neighborhood House YMCA and the West Preparatory Academy on 105th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue is the Bloomingdale Playground fitness equipment. This relatively small but useful site is on the grounds of a children's playground and can be relatively difficult to find especially if you choose to enter through the Broadway side of the park. If you do enter from Broadway do make a left at the children's jungle gym and head up the small set of stairs to the fitness equipment. The 105th Street-side entrance to the park is often locked especially on weekends.
The the fitness equipment available to adults at this playground is not at all mentioned on the Parks Department webpage. The equipment is all at adult height and men from the neighborhood usually workout there on weekends and in the evenings after work.
Most of the equipment is made of metal and appears to be somewhat older. As the paint is wearing off, I do hope those responsible for the maintenance of this equipment give it a good paint job soon. With that said everything appears sturdy and I had no complaints as to the apparent structural integrity of the facility.
In the middle of this site you can a relatively high set of parallel bars that rest over 5 feet off the ground. Most people will have to jump just to mount the bars. The bars are approximately 7-8 feet long. They are ringed on the northern side by a horizontal ladder/monkey bars as well as two pullup bars. To the east side of the parallel bars are another set of horizontal bars that are perched at least 7 feet off the ground. They are great for doing hanging leg raises without having to bend your knees. The beginning part of this ladder is at a decline angle. At the southern end of the horizontal ladder is a pole that you can shimmy across to a large jungle gym. This jungle gym contains all sorts of bars that can be used for pullups as well as lower bars for rows. There is also a 15-20 foot pole that one can use for the purposes of climbing. It did shake quite a bit when I climbed it.
Pros
- Sturdy fitness equipment including pullup bars, parallel bars, a pole and low hanging bars.
Cons
- During the summer neighborhood children may commandeer some of the equipment for their own fun and games.
- The equipment is aging and could use a bit of maintenance.
All doors to the area are locked from 8-4 currently and have a sign saying it's for the school use during those hours. I don't know if that will change during the summer when school is out of session, but at least for know it's like that during school.
ReplyDeleteThis workout area has been targeted for demolition by Community Board 7, with funding from Mayor de Blasio's "Community Parks Initiative," so enjoy it while you still can!
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ReplyDeleteThe plan to get rid of this fitness area is outlined here, though not very honestly: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20160907/upper-west-side/new-uws-playground-dubbed-gold-standard-of-accessibility-for-all-kids
DeleteIt is presented as a plan to build a playground for children with disabilities, rather than a plan to remove the fitness area, the trees and most of the basketball courts. The one remaining basketball court, judging by the graphics in the above-linked article, would have to be closed if a tennis match were scheduled! This whole plan is probably just an excuse to get rid of people from the neighborhood and nearby housing projects who are black and/or not wealthy, or at least to make them invisible.
There is a large playground next to this fitness area, and it could easily be made handicapped-accessible (if it isn’t already), and actually the adjoining school is *not* handicapped-accessible because it has no elevators, so the kids who would actually use this special playground would have to come from somewhere else. There are countless other playgrounds in this area that could easily serve the same purpose, but somehow it’s this one that has been targeted, even though outdoor fitness areas are relatively rare in this city.
Oh well, many thanks to Skyhopper for trying to list them all on this blog! A blog about the struggles to preserve these valuable public spaces might also be in order, as it seems unlikely that the Bloomingdale Playground workout area is the only one charted for removal. “Save our park” campaigns are a fairly routine part of life in New York, as are capitalists who decide that a local park must have something built in it that nobody else wants.
The latest news (see the updated graphics in the DNAinfo article above) is that some much smaller and flimsier fitness equipment will be included within the children's play area, rather than off to one side where it is now. Generally, equipment that is part of an NYC children’s playground cannot be used legally by adults or teenagers who are not parents or guardians accompanied by their children.
Image #6 in the article is captioned “The playground will also include fitness equipment, an element community members requested.” No, the fitness equipment has been there for decades, and has been used by generations of people in this neighborhood! We didn’t “request” it, we demanded that it not be removed! We spoke at meetings and were told to shut up, and we also wrote letters, made phone calls and talked to people in the fitness area. Not one person that I spoke to there was in favor of it being demolished.
Anyway, this place is still open today, so once again, enjoy it while you can!
Update: The parallel bars, pull-up bars and all other workout equipment in this fitness area were cut down and removed about a week ago. Many members of Community Board 7, the Parks Department and other “stakeholders” (none of whom ever actually used this fitness area) wanted all exercise equipment permanently removed, and the latest computer rendering of the park they have envisioned (posted on-site) does not appear to show any exercise equipment at all.
ReplyDeletePreviously, because of delays in the planned demolition, some fitness area users had been growing optimistic that perhaps the shadowy powers financing the destruction of our fitness area had gone bankrupt and would finally leave us alone. A few of us even dared to hope that perhaps our protest movement had given them pause. Perhaps they had actually heeded our numerous phone calls and emails to Community Board 7 and Parks Department officials, or our attendance at their long-winded “public” meetings (where we were never allowed to utter more than a sentence or two, even though we were usually the only people in the room who actually frequented the park in question). Oh well, now their bulldozers have finally given us a definitive answer.
New York is becoming even more unequal than before. Bill de Blasio referred to this situation as “a tale of two cities” when he was on the campaign trail, but since he took office, the 50,000 New Yorkers sleeping in homeless shelters on any given night have become over 60,000. Accordingly, his Community Parks Initiative, which just destroyed our fitness area, has now insured that people who cannot afford a gym membership will have one less place to exercise.
A new fitness area with no shade was opened a few weeks ago on 108th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, next to the soccer field of a middle school named after Booker T. Washington -a man who, with funding from Andrew Carnegie, famously advised black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This new workout area is small, but it has more than enough space for a set of adult-sized pull-up bars and parallel bars, which are the basic necessity for a good outdoor fitness area. Installing such simple equipment is not rocket science, but of course what the Parks Department and/or its corporate sponsors actually put in is something else entirely- three little contraptions far more costly than pull-up bars that will not be of much use to anyone, disabled or otherwise: a sort of seated bench press machine that allows you to bench press up to about 20 pounds, a squatting machine that you can’t use at all because it is padlocked, and a very thick, very narrow pull-up rack that tells the world that pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is still your best option, as you probably won’t be able to do any pull-ups on it at all unless you are under 4’10.” This rack is also built in such a way that if you raise your knees to avoid the ground, you will probably bang them against the frame.
Conclusion: our right to exercise in public is under attack! A friend of mine who spent some years in prison told me that his fellow prisoners had to use stacks of magazines to do their biceps exercises after weights were banned by the prison authorities...
This was a great fitness area, and they need to replace it. My son attended P.S. 145 this year, and I often got a good workout in while he played with his friends after school. Sometimes I even got a few sets in after dropping him off in the morning. The kids loved this area also and were encouraged to do strength-building activities like monkey bars and climbing by all the dedicated adults making use of the bars. This was a great space for the community, and the city needs to put it back.
DeleteI agree with everything written here. The comments are spot on regarding the fitness areas in this entire “Morningside Heights Community”. At least provide our sector with ONE good exercise area in any of the parks. We are not requesting much equipment or space. Please provide the right things for a growing fitness community.
ReplyDeleteFor reference, the Adventure Playground in HighBridge Park (Edgecomb and 164th) is being redone as part of the Anchor Parks program by the same firm that is doing the Bloomingdale Playground. Their proposal for equipment to install was rejected by CB12 (I think its CB12) at some meeting I was at about a year ago because the attendees strongly felt the equipment was useless. The same crap (as what was rejected for Adventure Playground) is planned for Bloomingdale Playground. Adventure Playground has pullup bars similar to the what was recently removed from Bloomingdale. You can see photos of that equipment on Google Maps. I will try to find some appropriate email and snail mail addresses so the powers that be can get the message. Steve Simon is one person I'm familiar with who ran an early scoping session for Bloomingdale Playground.
ReplyDeleteAnother update: At the moment, the Parks Department seems to have removed all photos and descriptions from the “Fitness Equipment” links for every NYC park that currently has fitness equipment. When you click on any of these “Fitness Equipment” links now, all you get is a tiny stick-figure man standing on the ground and trying to do a pull-up on a bar that is no higher than his chin! This is the future of the outdoor fitness movement as envisioned by the city government!
ReplyDeleteKnowing what deals are made in back rooms is impossible, but my guess is that there is a plan for most or all of the old workout equipment in New York City to be removed and/or replaced with “exercise machines” that are completely useless, like the ones proposed for Bloomingdale, and like the ones that were just installed on 108th Street, and also at the Waterfront Park in Dumbo, which has about a dozen of them. I don’t know who sells these expensive-looking contraptions to NYC or how much they charge. The firm overseeing the “renovation” of the Bloomingdale Playground is called MKW and Associates, and their Facebook page says that what they are doing now at Bloomingdale is the result of a “creative and productive collaboration” with the Parks Department, CB7, etc. If you are an investigative journalist, perhaps you can follow the money trail behind this story and find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!
For everybody else: if you use one of the public workout spots so thoughtfully listed on this blog by Skyhopper, be prepared to defend it!
Final update: I looked up one of the companies that sells the strangely useless devices being installed as fitness equipment all around NYC, then I called them on the phone, posing as a potential client. For some reason, they don’t list prices on their website, and I wanted to find out how much the city is paying for this junk. The woman who answered the phone told me that this shiny contraption, https://www.playlsi.com/en/commercial-playground-equipment/playground-components/healthbeat-chestback-press/ including delivery and installation, costs roughly $10,000!
ReplyDeleteParallel bars and pull-up bars are much cheaper, -too cheap, I guess, to make anyone rich. Is that why they are being removed and/or not installed anywhere, even though de Blasio’s Community Parks Initiative has a budget of $285 million? The world may never know.
On December 11th, 2018, there was a semi-public meeting about the ongoing Bloomingdale Playground renovation, and when asked whether the fitness equipment cut down by the city would ever be replaced, a Parks Department official by the name of Steve Simon replied that the meeting was not about the fitness area, and he added that in any case there had never been any fitness equipment in Bloomingdale Playground. Bulldoze it, then claim that it never existed. Genius!
Anyway, once again, the moral of the story: If you have a public workout area near you, photograph it, publicize it and be prepared to defend it.
Good news! Though the workout area at Bloomingdale Playground is probably gone forever, a new one has just been built next to the Traveling Rings. It is in Riverside Park, next to the West Side Highway, at about 105th Street. Amazingly enough, the fitness equipment there is large enough for adult use, and it includes two pull-up bars (low and medium height) and a beautiful set of very sturdy parallel bars that are close to five feet high. I don't know why the city can't build more stuff like this. Oh well, enjoy!
ReplyDeleteBloomingdale Playground re-opened one month ago. The new workout area, which even according to DNAinfo exists only because we “requested” it, has two pull-up bars, one of which is high enough for adult use. There is also a doubled set of parallel bars, which is OK unless you fall off the higher set. Instead of hitting the ground, you would hit another set of parallel bars!
ReplyDeleteThe total size of the new fitness area is about 10-15% of what it was before, and it is now right on Amsterdam Avenue, about ten feet from the bus stop, rather than being nestled comfortably in a shady spot between two buildings on a side street, as it was before. The overall redesign of the playground seems to have been done with an eye to social control. There are signs all over the place announcing various regulations and jurisdictions, and what used to be empty space is now crowded with massive and unsightly new concrete structures that have no dark corners to hide in. The many new homeless-proof benches are all carefully placed under bright lights so that no one misbehaves.
Oh well, if outdoor fitness is your thing, you should probably invest $30 in a pair of gymnast’s rings and go elsewhere, but the workout equipment in this place, though only a shadow of what it used to be, is definitely better than nothing, so enjoy it if you have time during the hours when it isn't padlocked!