Granite steps up from 53rd Street into the original vest pocket park: seventeen honey locusts on a grid, vertical lawns of ivy, Bertoia wire chairs and Saarinen tables, and the water wall drowning the traffic, a portrait in every tree bay.
Paley Park opened in 1967 on East 53rd Street, the original vest pocket park. Robert Zion of Zion and Breen Associates designed it on the site of the former Stork Club. CBS chairman William Paley provided the site and dedicated the park to his father, Samuel Paley. It covers one tenth of an acre, with a 20 foot wall of water at the back and seventeen honey locust trees planted on a grid above movable wire chairs and marble tables.
Source · The Cultural Landscape Foundation ↗
The 1967 park by Robert Zion of Zion and Breen, a tenth of an acre on the site of the Stork Club, seventeen honey locusts on a grid, English ivy on both side walls, a twenty foot water wall across the back, 20 Saarinen tables and 60 Bertoia chairs, a kiosk at the entrance. Mood: dappled noon. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.