After a battle with thyroid cancer, Vincent Michael said he built back strength doing pull-ups on “Barbara” — his beloved exercise bars in Tompkins Square Park.
On Saturday he and Los Iglesias, co-founders of a fitness program called Finding Barbara that operates in the park, in Manhattan’s East Village, filmed a video rallying supporters ahead of an Tuesday community board meeting on which Barbara’s fate hangs.
The meeting is a critical step for a Parks Department $10 million plan to renovate the northeast corner of the park around the intersection of East 10th Street and Avenue B. The plan would expand a children’s mini-pool to a larger in-ground one. About two-thirds of the funds would come from the state. The balance would come from the city and would improve storm-water drainage, modernize benches and fencing and replace workout equipment.
For months, a devoted group of calisthenics enthusiasts have been pressing officials not to let the workout bars join the mournful roll of bygone East Village social spaces.
“It displaces the community,” said Mr. Michael, 44.
The bars’ potential demise is not purely due to the pool expansion, the Parks Department says. They are “at the end of their expected useful life,” Alex Kozar, a landscape architect for the department who is managing the project, told the community board’s park committee on Oct. 15. The committee approved the plan, paving the way for its advancement.
The bars’ blue, red and green paint is chipped. A few bolts appear to be missing, and some joints have sharp edges.
At the meeting, the Parks Department said its plan — which includes installing new, shorter parallel and pull-up bars, as well as an arm bike and a chest press — would also make the area safer and more accessible to people of diverse abilities.
Mr. Kozar stressed that the department intends to honor the existing bars. Using 3-d modeling, he said, contractors will construct new fitness bars in the exact geometric likeness of the four sets of existing ones: same heights, widths and placements of pull-up bars; same hand-ladder arching like a rainbow on the largest unit; same general feel of playgrounds from the 1980s. The only material difference, Mr. Kozar said, will be that the units will be spaced farther apart to allow better access.
Quintana Clemente, a 30-year-old East Village native, said she worries the alterations will strip the area of “part of its charm.” The bars, with worn paint and colorful stickers, complement the park’s atmosphere, she said. It includes a nearby mural of the songwriter Joe Strummer and the red-tailed hawks perched above in the tall oaks.
Danny Kavaldo, 52, a personal trainer, said he welcomes accessible equipment and shares Ms. Clemente’s concern.
“People don’t come here to get the newest, shiniest equipment; people come here because it’s Tompkins Square Park,” he said. “There’s an energy you can feel, it’s gritty, it’s punk rock, it’s the East Village.”
At the committee meeting, Steve Simon, Parks Department chief of staff for Manhattan, said that designers developed three different plan options. The first would complete all the projects in 18 months. The second would take 24 months but would renovate the fitness area in only nine months. The third option would leave the fitness area alone. The first option is the one advancing.
Salo Coslovsky, an associate professor of urban planning at New York University, lobbied the committee for that rejected third option.
“The Parks Department sees an old, decaying, noncompliant place,” said Mr. Coslovsky, 53. “We see versatile, high-quality, high-performance equipment.”
On the park’s fences hang signs that read “Save the Bars” and “Nobody Asked for This.”
Harvey Epstein, the City Council member for the area, pushed the Parks Department to hear from as many Tompkins visitors as possible.
“I think the gym equipment should be left alone,” Mr. Epstein said in an email. “And I think the Parks Department should focus on the rehabilitation of the pool.”
The fitness area dates to around 1990, according to the Parks Department. That was shortly after the notorious Tompkins Square Riots of the late 1980s, when protesters clashed with the police, who were enforcing a curfew to prevent people from spending the night in the park. The riots catalyzed a change in the park’s culture.
The bars weren’t the only point of contention at the committee hearing. Basketball players were upset that they wouldn’t have their favorite courts to play on during the renovation. Neighbors complained that a shorter fence would mean more basketballs bouncing onto East 10th Street.
The argument that seemed to sway most committee members was for more accessible exercise equipment.
“That’s a need,” the committee chair, Trever Holland, said at the meeting.
At nearby Hamilton Fish Park, Gen Hall, 29, a trainer, taught a workout class Saturday in a sparsely used fitness area recently reconstructed with the kind of equipment slated for Tompkins Square Park. Ms. Hall said both parks together, in their current states, serve the area’s needs for both -accessibility and tradition.
“I love that this is here, but Tompkins is so iconic,” she said. “They should both coexist.”
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