The Very Tiny Fight Over a Midtown Park’s Locked Garden

Photo: Christopher Bonanos St. Vartan Park, a two-and-three-quarter-acre slice of Murray Hill that’s bordered on one side by the entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, is not exactly what you would call bucolic. It’s well loved and lively, but it’s mostly paved, with basketball and handball courts and a busy playground.

The more he learned, the more frustrated O’Keefe became. During the Depression and World War II, he learned, the plot had served as a vegetable garden, which at the time was as much about boosting morale as producing food. It isn’t clear when access was restricted, but the Parks Department said that “to our knowledge, the area has always been closed.

“Everyone thinks that my mother magically built this gate,” sighed Antonella Sturniolo, Soichet’s daughter, a 24-year-old Johns Hopkins medical student. “That garden space has been gated since the 1930s.” Sturniolo says she’s presenting her mother’s case to me because Soichet, as a Parks Department employee, can’t speak without Parks’ permission.

As for the Tom Brady business, that was one more example, Sturniolo says, of people trying to twist her mother’s love and care of the garden into something nefarious. Through a family friend, Tom Brady heard about the garden. “His wife” — Gisele Bündchen — “is super into nature and donating trees,” and they sent their son over to check it out. “He went there to scout the space to see if his mom would like to donate some trees,” said Sturniolo.

Sturniolo turns that logic around, arguing that people don’t need to visit this one little garden when they have access to other areas — like, say, Bryant Park, about a 20-minute walk away. She also, perhaps disingenuously, points to the giant vacant development site between St. Vartan and the United Nations, a four-block-long parcel that developer Sheldon Solow purchased in 2000 with plans for a $4 billion megadevelopment and five acres of public parkland.

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