New Herrick Park

New Herrick Park, Empowering the Community — East Hampton Village

The Park as a Unifying Urban and Social Hub

Our analysis of current conditions at Herrick Park in East Hampton Village and our subsequent design proposal for its improvement -as a park and as urban tissue- are less suggestive of a finalized design solution and more an effort to empower the community to tackle a critical urban deficiency.

Living and working in the village, and experiencing first-hand the design stalemate that has prevented meaningful improvements, we took it upon ourselves to create this set of documents to help the village board and the community envision possibilities and demand productive outcomes. We hope to show that incremental changes, when focused on long-term urban solutions, can have a transformative and regenerative impact over time --restoring the village forward.

Technically speaking, Herrick Park is a segregated outdoor space. Both its various usages within, and its connection to urban adjacencies outside, are driven by mutually exclusive factors that often act in conflict. For example, a large portion of the park is used as athletic fields by the Middle School across the street; but participation of the general community in game-watching or use of those fields are unsupported -- therefore non-existent. Conversely, the recreational portion of the park, fronting Newtown Lane, is devoid of necessary amenities such as proper pathways, benches, support amenities and attractions for the general community; and is, therefore, mostly empty. And finally, while the park sits between two village hubs, its luxury retail core and a burgeoning light retail and affordable core, because of its poor infrastructure, the park fails to act as connective tissue between them, and fails to spread foot traffic and thus reduce congestion. Were it to succeed in overcoming these challenges, East Hampton Village would restore its sense of community, and retain its traditional role as a congenial and functionally active center of the larger Town of East Hampton.

We started this process by asking ourselves: “In what kind of town do we want to live?”

In these pages, we begin to imagine, and invite the community to envision with us, the place we would all like to live.