I recently attended a Brooklyn Community Board 1 meeting where the Parks Dept gave a presentation on the McCarrons Pool project...if all goes as planned it should be restored to it's previous beauty and functionality...
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ANY doubts whether Julius Spiegel, Brooklyn’s commissioner of parks since 1981 and ostensibly forever, is capable of overt bossiness are dispelled the instant one squeezes into the passenger seat of his city-issued Prius. “Buckle your seat belt,” he orders, unfurling the suave Canadian accent he’s retained since moving here from Montreal four decades ago to earn a master’s degree in sociology from the New School for Social Research.
Left of left is how this son of two Holocaust survivors, activists in the Jewish resistance to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, describes his politics. A civil servant hailing back to the Lindsay administration (he started as a budget analyst in 1973), Mr. Spiegel is a proud, if mildly surprised, survivor of the Giuliani administration. “I was on what was known as the Giuliani Hit List,” says Mr. Spiegel, who was named Brooklyn’s first parks commissioner by Gordon J. Davis during the Koch era. How did he hang on? “It’s who you know,” he says. In his case, everyone. He’s even “buddies” with Charles Barron, the maverick councilman; they collaborated on Linden Park in East New York.
“I think I’m about to crack Robert Moses’ longevity record of 26 years and 100-something days with the department,” he says. So he is much relieved that the bane of his tenure, the decrepit pool at McCarren Park, the grandest of the city’s necklace of pools, created by Mr. Moses in 1936 but shut down since 1983, will finally undergo a $50 million renovation and reopen to the public in 2011. The pool was awarded landmark status last summer, and last week Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg confirmed that the city would foot the repair bill.
“Giddy is how I feel about this pool being brought back to life,” says Mr. Spiegel, whose attempt to rejuvenate it in 1984 was halted by community unrest. “Literally the day the contractor showed up to do the repairs, a group of residents chained themselves to the fence. They didn’t want a public pool in their neighborhood; it came down to racism. You couldn’t say that then, but that’s what it was.” The $50 million restoration includes a diving pool, a skating rink, performance space and year-round recreation centers.
“It had been a major civic embarrassment and absolutely an embarrassment for me,” he says. “Fixing it was the No. 1 ‘ask’ on my wish list for years, but there was never enough money.” Now it will again be a Brooklyn jewel. And there are others.
WITH all seat belts secured, Mr. Spiegel, his turquoise cuff links flashing as he grips the wheel, zooms off toward J. J. Byrne Park, a rundown park in Park Slope “probably named,” he says, “after some nondescript borough president.” Deference is not a Spiegel forte, but correctness is: Mr. Byrne was indeed a borough president, circa 1926.
A name change and a renovation are imminent, but worry not, traditionalists. Even after raking in a $2.5 million park improvement contribution from the developer of the hulking high-rises on the Fourth Avenue horizon adjacent to the park’s Terrapin Playground, Mr. Spiegel does not possess the authority or inclination to name the park in his own honor. “Our rule is you can’t name anything after a living person,” he says. “And since Jews can’t do that anyway, it’s a double whammy for me.” He does not sound deflated.
After its face-lift, the park will, he predicts, be rechristened Washington Park. It’s hard to argue with that, especially since its centerpiece, the Old Stone House, played a bit part in the Revolutionary War. “But don’t quote me,” he says. “I’m Canadian; my knowledge of American history is shaky.”
As is his knowledge of trees. Mr. Spiegel, 61, confesses that no matter how many of Brooklyn’s 140,000 street trees come into view, including the new one in front of his Bay Ridge row house, anyone expecting him to identify them by name because he is a, uh, parks commissioner, will be disappointed. “I’m a bureaucrat, not a tree-hugger,” he says. “I know the names of maybe two trees, and certainly not any of them when they aren’t in leaf.”
Back in his circular office in the library of the landmark Litchfield house, the 1857 Italianate villa on the fringe of Prospect Park, he settles into a wooden chair that complements the room’s antique mahogany bookcases. He straightens the tropical tie, patterned with butterflies and exotic flowers, that his wife, Suzanne Wolbers, a science teacher at Poly Prep, selected because their first choice, his dragonfly tie, didn’t match his suit. They have two teenage sons, both crack numismatists, and Mr. Spiegel, now that his tennis knees are giving out, has taken to collecting coins and medals related to Brooklyn.
He enjoys art, which made his notorious shutdown of a Brooklyn College art show at a city-owned war memorial in 2006 all the more bizarre. Mr. Spiegel deemed two items in the show, a phallic sculpture and a composition of graphic text, objectionable. The building was locked. The exhibition was moved. There was a lawsuit against the city that concluded in a settlement last year and an apology signed, but not written, by Mr. Spiegel. “I know as much about art as I know about trees,” he says, “and I bet I’m more left wing than any of those students. This wasn’t about art. This was about the school breaking a promise about content. But it’s over, done, we move on.”
As for the war memorial, no more art shows. Mr. Spiegel says the veterans hated them. He hopes to turn the building into a museum. But first on the project list now that the McCarren pool is to be saved? Fix the Coney Island Boardwalk. All he needs is $200 million
