’Hood Intentions

Volunteers Needed to Organize This Fall’s Block Party

Community leader and longtime Battery Park City resident Rosalie Joseph has partnered with the Battery Park City Authority to revive a cherished local tradition: the BPC Block Party, which was a rite of autumn from 2002 through 2017. This year’s event is slated for Saturday, September 14, but community involvement is urgently needed between now and then.

“Why do we want to do this now?” muses Ms. Joseph (right, with Anthony Notaro). She and the late Mr. Notaro co-founded the event a year after the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. “Anthony and I joined forces with a committee of a dozen-plus friends and neighbors. We originally envisioned the block party as a way to acknowledge the resilience and rebirth we were seeing everywhere in Lower Manhattan.”

“But it was also meant to celebrate the bond between neighbors,” she reflects. “Today, all these years later, we’re a new and very different community. But all the people who’ve come here in the decades since the first block party should experience that same connection with each other. It’s time to come out and celebrate again.”

“This is partly about rebooting the original and celebrating the sense of community that made the Battery Park City Block Party so meaningful to so many,” agrees Craig Hudon, the BPCA’s vice president of Parks Programming and Community Operations, who will help oversee the event. “But there is also a sense that it’s time to have a new block party. We’re excited to put a new spin on this beloved neighborhood tradition and bring it to life this fall.”

Preliminary plans include children’s games and family activities, along with live musical performances, offerings from local vendors and restaurants, contests, prizes, and maybe even a pet parade.

The new version of the event “will reflect Battery Park City’s evolving identity,” Ms. Joseph predicts. “Some elements from the original will be revived, but we’re also going to incorporate a lot of new ideas. But for those new ideas to happen, we also need some fresh blood.”

In this context, one of Ms. Joseph’s goals is to recruit a new cohort of volunteers to help manage the event. Anyone interested in participating should contact Ms. Joseph via email, at bpcblockparty24@gmail.com

On a personal note, she says, “this year’s BPC Block Party will be in honor of Anthony Notaro, who served this community for decades in so many roles,” such as the chair of Community Board 1 and founder of the neighborhood’s Community Emergency Response Team.

Recalling the theme that came to define the event (“the best small town in the Big Apple”), Ms. Joseph says, “my favorite memory is when, at the end of the first year’s event, we stood on the stage singing our closing traditional sing-along of ‘Downtown’ and ‘New York, New York.’ I looked out at all my neighbors, looking happy once again, celebrating after experiencing a long and very challenging year. And as we sang the lyrics to ‘Downtown,’ many of us onstage and in the audience in front of us had tears in our eyes. Our community was back and stronger than ever.”