Riverside Park

The Daily Plant : Wednesday, March 5, 2003

PARKIES DONATE BLOOD TO HELP SAVE LIVES

Last week’s Blood Drive in the Arsenal Gallery was a great success. On February 27 and 28, a total of 117 units of blood was donated by Parkies. The leading contributor to the drive were employees from the Manhattan borough with 47 people donating blood. All employees who donated blood were granted 3 hours of Comp Time. 17 potential donators were unable to give blood for reasons such as having recently traveled to a foreign country or having recently given blood. Many thanks to the New York Blood Center for partnering with Parks & Recreation for this blood drive and Hedi Piel for leading the effort. Below are the totals:

Manhattan Borough 47

Arsenal 27

Central Park Conservancy 19

Arsenal West 11

Arsenal North 7

Visitors 2

Olmsted 1

Wildlife Conservation Society 1

The New York Blood Center sites the following reasons why donating blood is both important and crucial:

• Blood donations provide life supporting treatment to victims of accidents, to surgical patients, and those who need special blood components and derivatives during treatment for cancer and other diseases.

• Cancer treatment now requires vast quantities of platelets and other blood components.

• Treatment of hemophiliacs will continue to increase in proportion to the increase in their life expectancy.

• The number of sophisticated surgical procedures like open-heart surgery and organ transplants has increased dramatically.

• Recent studies point to possible breakthroughs in cancer research through the use of materials made from blood products.

To donate blood, please call the New York Blood Center at (800) 933-2566. Parkies can donate blood at other blood drives and still be given credit as a Parks & Recreation employee by using the Group #1325. Donors must be at least 17 years old, weigh at least 110 pounds and not have donated blood within the last 56 days.

This excerpt comes from a book of essays by Daniel Drennan called The New York Diaries, available in the Arsenal Library.

"There is a woman in Riverside Park who walks around bent over looking at weeds—poking, prodding, picking weeds, looking at them, and then eating them—and who makes a ponderous face as she chews, as if wondering whether that is the weed she thinks it is. I think perhaps this is one of the authors of the book about identifying and harvesting edible and medicinal plants, whose coauthor was arrested for eating dandelions in Central Park."

"For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference

of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly,

made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still."

(1913-1993)

Know Before You Go

Riverside Park

West 79th Street Boat Basin

Riverside Park (79th Street)