Riverside Park

The Daily Plant : Thursday, October 9, 2003

FREIMER LEADS PARKS TEAM IN CORPORATE CHALLENGE CHAMPIONSHIP

On Saturday, October 4, Parks & Recreation’s Meredith Freimer, Hannah Gersen, Adriana Jacykewycz, and Christina Scully competed in JP Morgan Chase’s Corporate Challenge Championship. The four women, who qualified as a team, finished 13^th in a competitive field of 26 teams. Meredith Freimer, who is currently training for the New York City Marathon, finished first for the team, with an impressive time of 20:39. She placed seventh overall, out of 195 women. Adriana Jacykewycz finished second for the team followed by Hannah Gersen and Christina Scully. The race was the last in a series sponsored by JP Morgan Chase. The course took runners up and down Park Avenue in a grueling loop that went through the Met-Life building and past part of Jean Dubuffet’s recent art installation on the Park Avenue Malls.

Parks & Recreation’s team was organized by Riverside Park Administrator KC Sahl, with help from Sylvia Weeks. KC plans to bring together another championship team next year—start training now!

The Bronx beat Manhattan in the Parks & Recreation softball league championship in a thrilling 8-7, extra-inning game, thanks to a bases loaded "walk-off" smash by Playground Associate Ray Combest. This was Park & Recreation’s first softball championship played at beautiful Keyspan Park, home of the Mets minor-league affiliate Brooklyn Cyclones.

The champion Bronx Renegades finished the season a perfect 11-0. The Renegades were led by Hugo Chance, team manager and Bronx Director of Sports Activities, with four hits in five times at bat. Chance sparked the Bronx rally from two runs down in the bottom of the 7^th inning with a triple. Dwayne Weston, St. James Recreation Center Playground Associate hit a scorcher to right field to bring in the tying run and extend the game to the climatic 9^th inning.

From Donald Barthelme’s essay, "Not-Knowing." Here, we meet "Alphonse, a hypothetical parks employee.

"Alphonse, like so many toilers in this great city, is not as simple as he seems. Like those waiters who are really actors and those cab drivers who are really composers of electronic music, Alphonse is sunlighting as a Parks Department employee although he is, in reality, a literary critic. We find him writing a letter to his friend Gaston, also a literary critic although masquerading pro tem as a guard at the Whitney Museum."

"The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises –

it is a set of challenges.

It sums up not what I intend to offer American people,

but what I intend to ask of them."

(1917-1963)

Know Before You Go

Riverside Park

West 79th Street Boat Basin

Riverside Park (79th Street)