I'm Michael Kimmelman. I'm the architecture critic for the times and the founder and editor

at large for Headway. Headway is a new initiative at the New York Times that I started which

is focused on global challenges and paths to progress. It's intended really to try to

promote a kind of constructive conversation around big issues to get away from some of

the 24-hour news cycle and focus really on how we as a newspaper and we more broadly as

a society can think about these problems in the long term. We can promote a conversation

that looks across time and not just about what's happening the next day.

The story is about a park in Lower Manhattan called East River Park. I see the park as a

kind of parable about democracy and how we make decisions today. Very often our system

sort of grinds to a halt and with challenges like climate change where the scale and pace

of them is so great. I think the park is an example of the problem we face. How can we

begin to think differently and how can we examine some of these systems we have in place?

We have to begin by seeing how the system works or doesn't and this is I hope what the

park helps to show.

So East River Park was built in the 1930s by Robert Moses. Much of New York City as we

now know it was created by Robert Moses. Not all of what Moses did was good much of it

destroyed old neighborhoods especially poor black and brown neighborhoods but one of the

better things that he did was to build parks like East River Park that would benefit one

of the poorest parts of the city. The park is essentially a ribbon a kind of promenade

that runs along the highway and on the other side of the highway are the housing projects.

On a beautiful day or in the evening it's just an astonishingly wonderful mix of New

Yorkers from different communities who come together in that park. It's one of the most

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