While a flurry of pedestrians and cyclists stream along a walkway on the George Washington Bridge, time stands still at the tiny park in Upper Manhattan that shares its name.
The slide of a bright yellow and red play set is caked with dirt and surrounded by dried, fallen leaves. Off to the side, a blue dolphin has faded, and the lid on an awkward sandbox warns, “Do Not Stand.” Boat-shaped planters bloom only with unopened bags of Gro-Max soil.
These are the remnants of a neighborhood gem, just out of reach on the western edge of Washington Heights behind wrought-iron gates that haven’t opened for the public in years.
“Nobody didn’t love that park,” said Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, 62, who was chair of the local community board’s parks committee for much of the 2000s and 2010s. “ And a lot of people are wondering, ‘When’s it going to reopen?’”
It was where Cecilia Nucci, 51, watched her children frolic through arcs of water spouting from the dolphin — which gave the playground its nickname, Dolphin Park. Where her children waddled around in diapers under the watchful eye of older children who served as stewards for a modest stipend. And where her now 9-year-old daughter, Marcela, learned to bend the rules in Candy Land.
“I didn’t cheat,” she insisted to her mother and older brother on a recent Sunday morning outside the shuttered park. “I just didn’t want to play the normal Candy Land.”
That was before Covid upended the real world. Before the renovation of the North Walk along the bridge, and before the death in 2021 of Jeanlee Poggi, who willed the park into existence decades ago. The park, which is at West 180th Street and Cabrini Boulevard, is owned by the Port Authority. It closed to the public in 2018 or 2019 during the bridge renovations and has not been open since. Even after the changes were completed in 2023, the park’s gates remained locked.
The park-in-purgatory is a sore spot for the community. But with no neighborhood force of nature stepping up to fill Ms. Poggi’s shoes, and no city or state agencies filling the vacuum, residents, like the park itself, are in limbo.
“You see people walking by with their toddlers, and the kids are looking at the site and they’re like, ‘Wow, look at all that,’ and it’s inaccessible,” said Jean Jaworek, who worked with Ms. Poggi for decades at the West 181st Street Beautification Project, the nonprofit that ran day-to-day operations at the park. “It’s just a shame.”
Seth Stein, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the bridge and the surrounding land, said in a statement that the agency had been “hard at work identifying an organization that can safely and efficiently operate this playground so it can reopen.”
The park was unveiled in 1994 after more than 100 meetings. Why Ms. Poggi latched onto that strip of land is a mystery to those who knew her. In the 1990s, the space was essentially a junkyard, full of trash, rats and paraphernalia of the era’s drug crisis, said Ms. Ritter, who was on the parks committee.
But Ms. Poggi’s ability to deal with people in a sluggish bureaucracy was akin to “that very Zen way that water softens a stone,” Ms. Ritter said.
Ms. Poggi was able to get the Port Authority to provide the $400,000 needed for the park. That’s nearly $900,000 in today’s dollars. “While she was incredibly sweet and engaging, she was like a pit bull with her teeth sunk into the calf of your leg,” Ms. Jaworek said.
She added, laughing, “She shamed everybody into doing the right thing.”
The project became emblematic of a successful public-private partnership, flourishing for over two decades during which the Port Authority revitalized the space and made it accessible to people with disabilities. The agency provided basic maintenance, and the nonprofit handled the daily needs. Adults would lock and unlock the park during limited hours, youth helpers would help with gardening, and everyone was encouraged to contribute to the upkeep.
“We wanted to kind of make it an escape for the community,” said Frank Minervini, the retiring general maintenance supervisor at the George Washington Bridge Bus Station. “I believe in fostering relationships that include the communities that we operate in.”
He worked closely with Ms. Poggi to plan programming in the park and was her primary contact at the Port Authority for most of the park’s tenure.
But there were a few things that “did the Dolphin Park in,” said Arlene Shaner, 67, another volunteer with the Beautification Project.
The coronavirus pandemic and the closing of the park during the bridge renovations cut off volunteers’ access to the park, she said. After Ms. Poggi died in 2021, many of the volunteers felt as though they had no way to continue her work.
Ms. Poggi had left two women in charge of the nonprofit, both of whom moved out of the neighborhood and who, Ms. Shaner said, had made it clear that they were unable to carry on in her absence.
Without access to finances and the network of contacts Ms. Poggi had curated, “we didn’t have a mechanism,” Ms. Shaner said. “And it makes me really sad to say that, because I cared about Jeanlee a lot.”
The volunteers turned to the Port Authority for help. Ms. Shaner and Ms. Jaworek floated ideas: Could the Port Authority find another organization? Could it assume responsibility for the insurance and upkeep if residents would supervise the children?
The responses were vague. “It didn’t address any options,” Ms. Shaner said after rereading an email she and Ms. Jaworek had received from a Port Authority representative in 2023. A line from the three-sentence message read, “We haven’t found another organization yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as that happens.”
“‘We can’t help you,’ is really what it said,” Ms. Shaner said.
Around the same time, Nelly Sanchez, a longtime babysitter, tried her hand at rallying other neighborhood babysitters and parents to push for the park’s reopening.
She, like Ms. Shaner and Ms. Jaworek, said she had been told that the park could not open unless another nonprofit took ownership of it in the same way that the Beautification Project had.
No group appeared to be forthcoming, so Ms. Sanchez, 52, spoke with other parents who all agreed that they would be willing to oversee the park in shifts if the Port Authority could pitch in for other duties.
But, she said, she kept getting the “runaround.”
The struggle to reopen the park played out as the pandemic laid bare inequalities in access to green space across the city. “If this was in a more, you know, a more desirable neighborhood, I think by now, with all the commotion that we’ve tried to stir up, there would have been results,” said Ms. Sanchez, who was born and raised in Washington Heights.
She still pauses outside the park whenever she passes by its padlocked gates.
“It’s just waiting there,” she said. “It’s waiting for somebody to come in and use it. And we can’t seem to get that done.”
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