Locals Bring the Annual Battery Park City Party to Life
On Saturday, September 20, the Lower Manhattan community gathered on Esplanade Plaza for the latest installment in a decades-long tradition: the annual Battery Park City Block Party. Downtown small business, artisans, schools and nonprofits set up tables laden with material and giveaways, kids competed in a bubblegum bubble-blowing contest judged by older kids who had once won the contest, local restaurants served up signature dishes, and talented musicians and singers from the neighborhood entertained the crowd.
A gala ceremony at 11am confered the Anthony Notaro Community Service Award on local leader Jeff Galloway, the Good Neighbor Award on the team that manages the Liberty Community Gardens, and special recognition on local centenarian and opera diva Claire Procopio.
Saturday’s celebration might have been a bittersweet occasion, because the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) plans to begin its North/West Resiliency project before autumn of next year, which will entail a five-year closure of North Cove Marina, as well as shorter closures of the esplanade. This disruption may mean the end of the Block Party for the foreseeable future.
The Block Party was produced by community leader and longtime Battery Park City resident Rosalie Joseph, in partnership with BPCA. The event became a cherished annual tradition starting in 2002, shortly after the last fires had been extinguished in the ruins of the World Trade Center, as a group of Battery Park City residents began to brainstorm about how to reunite a community that had only begun to reemerge in the wake of a far-flung diaspora that took place after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
“We felt that it was time to bring our neighbors together to celebrate the rebirth of our community and support the struggling businesses in the aftermath,” recalls Ms. Joseph, who helped bring the group together. “We wanted to demonstrate and honor our unshakeable spirit, the strength we had shown as a neighborhood, the unity that had emerged through our commitment to Battery Park City.”
Her primary collaborator was the late community leader Anthony Notaro, who died of a September 11-related cancer in 2020. The man whose name is now memorialized in the event’s Community Service Award told the Broadsheet a decade after the Block Party’s founding, “that was a time when Facebook didn’t exist and communities had to be built one person at a time. Rosalie created something that people wanted to be a part of.”
The idea that Ms. Joseph and Mr. Notaro and their fellow local boosters hatched was to hold a block party. “At that time, the feeling of community was palpable and living here felt like we lived in a small town,” remembers Ms. Joseph. “So during the planning, we coined the phrase, ‘Battery Park City: the best small town in the Big Apple.’ That is exactly what living here felt like.”
“What’s unique about our event is that all our vendors are Downtown businesses and organizations. The talent is local. The food is only from our establishments, local companies. And the Battery Park City Authority supports us,” she says. “It is truly a celebration of all that makes this neighborhood so great.”