Washington Square Park in progress

After years of protests led by the Open Washington Square Park Coalition, Justice Joan A. Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan approved Washington Square Park’s renovation plan in early December.

The work includes moving the park’s fountain, shrinking the central plaza and raising it to street level grade — transforming the park into a garden-style pass-through mall, surrounded by a four-foot fence, which critics claim will make the park less hospitable to spontaneous gatherings.

I remember a time when the “spontaneous gatherings” were mostly drug dealers, pouncing upon and offering their wares to every junior high schooler who happened to cut through the park.