Vendors Thumb Nose at City Restriction by Colin Moynihan - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

Read original...

One of many artists who protested in Union Square on Monday over new city regulations for artists in parks. Photographs by David Goldman for The New York Times

New rules for selling art in public parks went into effect on Monday morning, and in Union Square Park little was going as planned, at least from the city’s point of view.

The park is one of four in New York, including Central Park, where the city will restrict the number of sellers of paintings, photographs, books and sculptures.

Another artist wrote a passage from the First Amendment on the sidewalk.

The parks department had installed plastic medallions the size of silver dollars and emblazoned with the words “Expressive Matter Vendor” around the perimeter of Union Square Park to designate places where the selling of fine art, photography and other materials would be permitted. But more than 100 artists who showed up at the park on Monday ignored those markers and instead milled at the southern end of Union Square, where they brandished signs and shouted their disapproval of the new rules.

“We’re going to stay inside this park and away from the marked spaces,” said Robert Lederman, an organizer of an advocacy group called Artist. “We’re going to defy the mayor and we’re going to defy the parks department.”

The rules, which the city announced a few months ago, limit the number of artists allowed to sell materials in or near Union Square Park, Central Park, Battery Park and the High Line. At Union Square, for instance, 18 artists are permitted to set up tables and sell on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The number of available spots there will rise to 58 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the regulations were necessary because the artists were causing congestion. The artists denounced the rules as chilling free expression and challenged them in court. But on Friday a federal judge in Manhattan, Richard J. Sullivan, ruled that the rules seemed reasonable and that the city could enforce them.

Artists said they hoped to appeal, but in the short term they said they would move their battle to the court of public opinion. As knots of police officers and parks enforcement officers stood by on Monday morning the artists held aloft paintings and placards. They made speeches and chanted slogans. One man used chalk to write a passage from the United States Constitution on the sidewalk.

Jessica Hollander, a 34-year-old painter from Ridgewood, Queens, held a sign that read, “Bloomberg thinks artists have no value,” and she said she had been selling paintings in Union Square for about 18 months.

“I think this is a fight worth fighting,” she said. “It’s a tragedy to limit the number of artists out here and it’s scary to think of everything here becoming corporate.”

Nearby, John Conn, 61, a photographer from the Bronx, said that he thought the city was trying to squeeze artists out of the parks in deference to business interests.

A brief thundershower sent the artists running for the protection of a subway entrance overhang, but the sun soon emerged and the painters, photographers and sculptors returned to the southern plaza and began using umbrellas to ward off the glare from above.

Mr. Lederman surveyed the crowd and pronounced the event a success.

“We turned this almost into Woodstock,” he said. “This place is livelier now than it has been all year.”

Parks and Real Estate Values: The Key to Understanding Why They Want Street Artists Eliminated by Robert Lederman...

When you look past all the lies about congestion, vendors "commercializing parks" and false claims about public safety, you get to the real deal about why the city wants street artists eliminated from it's parks. It's all about real estate values. They want more special events, concessions, Greenmarkets and revenue producing things - at the cost of free speech, artistic expression and public safety. They want to eliminate artists to make room for bars, restaurants, corporate advertising and anything else that makes BIG money. What I mean by BIG money, is not a fee for artists; it's is things like this: "The park [Central Park] added $17.7 billion in incremental value to surrounding properties."

Here in their own words, from a front group for the Parks Department, is a report explaining it in detail:

Excerpt from the report:

Commerce and Central Park (the report goes into many other examples as well) The park added $17.7 billion in incremental value to surrounding
properties; the average value of these properties grew 73% faster than control group properties over the past decade...The relationship between a park that is in good condition and real estate values is a special case that could be used to match some direct benefits to costs. There are clearly direct beneficiaries from what economists would term the positive externalities of parks. Property values are directly impacted by parks, and property owners realize easily measurable gains, including higher lease and rental rates, longer tenure of lessees, and an increase in property values that is realized at the time of the sale...there is a growing body of evidence that there are measurable monetary gains for those who own property within close proximity of a park. In fact, two of the lessons learned through the New Yorkers for Parks/Ernst & Young study [see page 10 sidebar] were that strategic parks investments correlate with an increase in real estate values and that the proximity of parks that are in good condition affects private sector real estate investment decisions.

For the full report see:

Supporting Our Parks - A Guide to Alternative Revenues June 8th - pdf

Or here:

Supporting Our Parks - A Guide to Alternative Revenues - June 8th - scribd

Artists Fight Public Hearing on Vendor Restrictions in Parks with Freedom of Expression by Adam Lisberg - NY Daily News

Read original...

Artists selling their works in Union Square Park as they face proposed limits where they can set up an art display in a park and how many artists can set up in each park. Smith for News

Hundreds of angry artists crammed into a Chelsea gym Friday to jeer a plan limiting how many of them could sell their work in crowded city parks.

The Parks Department says vendors selling paintings, photographs and other "expressive matter" have clogged park sidewalks, creating a hazard and nuisance.

Every previous attempt to curb them, though, has been shut down by artists who claimed their First Amendment rights were violated - and won in the courts.

The city is proposing new rules that would allow only 18 artists in Union Square, 24 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nine in Battery Park and four at Columbus Circle.

At a five-hour public hearing on those rules, several community boards and neighborhood groups said the move would bring order to a chaotic scene.

Artists, though, cheered wildly when painter Robert Lederman - who has led the battle against regulation - said the real crowding comes from special events that pay money to the Parks Department for the privilege of using the space.

"What about your giant greenmarket? What about your giant holiday market?" Lederman asked. "And yet you want to eliminate us under the guise of protecting public safety!"

City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan), who is chairwoman of the committee that oversees the parks, said she has serious reservations about the plan because it would allow just 81 artists to sell their work in places where 300 or more now make their living.

"The city needs to find a better way to balance these interests," she said.

The Parks Department is expected to decide within a week how to proceed, but any final rule is likely to face a legal challenge - which Mayor Bloomberg said he expected the city will win.

"There are places where there are so many vendors that you can't get down the sidewalk," Bloomberg said on his WOR-AM radio show. ""We think the courts will be sympathetic in some parks and narrow places where people come together."