Below is an application to the Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark the calisthenics area of Tompkins Square Park amidst the Parks Dept's plans to demolish it. In the last section "History" you will find a brief account of Marty's Court and the extraordinary story of the man still referred to as "The Philosopher of Tompkins Square Park", a history little known among new residents of the neighborhood. Along with the history of the Young Lords, Charas, the homesteaders and squatters movement, this is a modest attempt to record the unique and heroic history of our place, buried in silence under the noisy monetization of every inch of the Alphabet City today.
I encourage additional anecdotes and historical additions to the text in the comment box.
Landmark Application: Tompkins Square Park Fitness Bars
Design Significance (uniqueness)
The Tompkins Square Park calisthenics equipment, installed in 1991 during the Tompkins Square Park comprehensive renovation, consists of 125 horizontal bars, 41 vertical bars and 2 arched bars, arranged in four stations: three highly complex arrangements and a pair of free-standing parallel bars.
These bars are no mere calisthenics or body weight training bars as one finds elsewhere in the city. The Tompkins bars were constructed and installed with the rarest of all design features, randomness – incompressible randomness in all three dimensions. That is, no algorithm can predict or account for the disposition of the bars. Because of this unpredictability throughout the layout, they are ideally suited to any aleatoric play or exercise relying on impromptu, innovative, creative movement in real time including parkour, pole ‘noodling’, ‘freestyle’, combinatory gymnastics and child’s play. This is not just rare in city parks. It’s unique.
While they admirably serve for traditional body weight training – their horizontal high bars are significantly wider than bars in other calisthenics parks, allowing the widest possible grip – they are also ideal for parkour flow (dynamically maneuvering the body through interstices, under, over and around the bars), pole ‘noodling’ (similar to silks but on resistant steel in multiple dimensions), and every level of movement from toddlers grasping and hanging to freestylers break-dancing on the highbars and parallel bars. Unlike all other calisthenics equipment, random bars encourage innovation and creativity, challenging users to invent and discover and experiment on their own.
Calisthenics parks are administratively designed for repetitive motion (sets and reps), not creative innovation. The Tompkins set-up encourages and challenges the mind to invent, experiment and play. Their limits are bounded only by the mind of the user. The City had one other set of these aleatoric bars on Amsterdam Avenue at 104th Street, but destroyed them several years ago despite community opposition. Now the TSP bars stand alone as the only creative, innovative, challenging equipment left in NYC public parks.
The heavy weight steel and the genius of connected equipment explains the extraordinary stability of the bars. Each piece is supported by other bars attached in all three dimensions. Both the heavy weight and the connectedness also allow the extraordinary width of the bars. In other words, these bars reflect a conflation of brilliant design features the interactive synergy of which has either been lost or is no longer understood: heavy weight, graspable thickness, connectedness, three-dimensional support, and most unusual of all, incompressible randomness.
Innovative Significance (inventions, draws and popularizations)
Noodling
Because of the unique and brilliant design (see “Design Significance” above), the Tompkins equipment has drawn movement innovators to the park. Among their innovations are ‘pole noodling’, flowing through the interstices of the bars in a kind of slow-motion, controlled tumbling, with much of the movement upside down using, hands, crook of the elbow, feet and knee-crooks to stabilize and propel the body in motion. It’s a kind of three-dimensional ballet practiced mostly by women, but there are male practitioners as well. Noodling was invented in and for the Tompkins bars. Practitioners still travel notably from Brooklyn, Harlem and Washington Heights, among other far flung neighborhoods, to noodle on these bars, unique in the City.
Instructional YouTube calisthenics
In 2009, a fitness trainer, Al Kavadlo, started a YouTube channel, “We’re Working Out”. After initially recording in gyms, Kavadlo discovered that Tompkins’ was the ideal equipment for his instructional and inspirational channel. As one of the very first YouTube calisthenics instructors, with few competitors his channel spread far and wide, reaching across the world. The “yellow bars” became familiar throughout the calisthenics community, famous all over the world and a Mecca for calisthenics tourism. Twelve years ago, an Australian couple, in answer to the question, “What brings you to visit the East Village?” answered, “To see the yellow bars!” Today you can see a video of two Parisian visitors and a couple of Russian visitors saying the same.
The Tompkins bars’ global fame is real, and it is largely due to Al Kavadlo’s innovative channel, his illustrated books and his globe-hopping exhibitions, retreats and training sessions. Today there are hundreds if not thousands of calisthenics instructional youtubes and instagram channels.
It all began with Kavadlo in Tompkins.
The Fitness Run
Another innovation began with Finding Barbara. A local ex-fireman came up with the idea of holding a meet-up to work out in a calisthenics park, then run together to another calisthenics park, work out there and then run to the next park. He named his group Finding Barbara, tagged the rubber surface under the highest high bar in Tompkins, and began an inspirational movement.
Since then the work-out-and-run has spread to other boroughs as a winning combination of aerobics, strength training and a lot of enthusiastic socializing. A genius idea, and Tompkins was at its center and origin.
Parkour in NYC
Parkour was, of course, not invented in Tompkins Square Park, but it has found a home in its bars, and the bars are responsible for the spreading popularity of parkour beginning in the late 20 naughts. For several years, local and non local parkourists held meet-ups, competitions and exhibitions at the bars, a favorite for ‘precision’ – balancing on a bar and leaping from it to another bar sometimes as far fifteen feet or further away to land upright on two feet, an astonishing cat-like accomplishment. The bars were also a favorite for ‘flow’, similar to noodling but faster, more dynamic and directional.
Parkourists continue to visit Tompkins regularly and their example has seduced many sets-and-reps exercisers to experiment with movement, agility and flexibility. Tompkins is a center of parkour activity to this day.
Capoeira in New York
In the 1990’s, capoeira – a distinctive Brazilian martial art – arrived in Tompkins Square Park. Mestre Ombrinho, a capoeira master, visited every Saturday with his berimbao – the single-string musical instrument associated with capoeira – and his team of students to practice and demonstrate this quasi dance, slow motion tumbling and stylized combat.
The Tompkins fitness area was alive with capoeira enthusiasm among young and old. Prior to Mestre Ombrinho’s arrival, capoeira was largely unknown in NYC as a martial art. It was popularized in the Tompkins Square Park fitness area by his students.
Freestyle Friday
Freestyle – impromptu jumping, twisting, twirling, and flinging about the high bars and the parallel bars – had long been a staple of Tompkins. Its right-angled high bars, and narrow, high parallel bars are uniquely suited to freestyle. In 2023, a young and ambitious freestyler from the Bronx (originally from Brooklyn) brought his crew to a kind of all-inclusive exhibition cum competition cum challenge cum free-for-all. Anyone at any level was welcomed, cheered, encouraged and celebrated. This became Freestyle Friday, a weekly feature at Tompkins. That summer and the next, freestylers developed their skills inventing moves ex tempore, challenging one another with novel twists and twirls. The organizer, Calisthenicsprince, would perform aleatoric riffs out of his head, unpredictable, never seen before and never to be seen again. The inspiration was turned up to 11 and then off the scale.
As his and his crew’s instagram reels spread to the calisthenics and freestyle community, other groups formed in parks across the city, notably McCarren Park in Brooklyn on Sundays, Motivational Monday at Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx and most recently in the new Maspeth Park.
Again, it all began at Tompkins.
Global and Domestic Fame
There are many designated landmarks with unique designs or historical or aesthetic significance, but few are world famous. The Tompkins Square Park fitness bars are.
We’ve already mentioned the Australians, Parisians and Russians who’ve come to the East Village especially to see or use these famous bars. They are not alone. Ukrainians, Lebanese (the handstand world record holder, for example), Kiwis and Swedes, Norwegians, Germans and Egyptians visit. The bars draw freestylers from every borough and are used by, for example, a world-renowned mathematician who teaches at the Sorbonne (84 years old and still mounting the bar like a gymnast) and a variety of PhD holders alongside recovering substance abusers, finance bros, rappers, DJs, art curators, yoga practitioners, poets, cartoonists, martial arts students, girls learning gymnastics, toddlers whose parents have to physically pull them off the bars so much do they love climbing, grasping and hanging on these bars.
It’s the bars’ extreme versatility – that incompressible randomness again – that draws anyone and everyone to them as no other bars in the US can. Justifiably, New York City, among the greatest cities in the world, has these bars, among the greatest bars in the world. In its humble way, it’s as much a landmark and insignia of New York’s global greatness as the old Penn Station was before being demolished prior to the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
It is greatness to the greatest.
History
“The Philosopher of Tompkins Square Park” and Marty’s Court
Every gentrified neighborhood is comfortable in the same way; every abandoned slum must struggle with its own distinct desperation.
When the Tompkins bars were first opened in 1992, New York City was still emerging from the bankruptcy of the late 70’s. While the South Bronx was the international symbol of American urban failure, it was little known that Manhattan had its own abandoned neighborhood, Alphabet CIty. A third of the properties in it were either abandoned by its owner or demolished. Rent strike banners decorated building after building, a sign of landlord indifference and lack of services. The poverty was so extreme that the storefronts were occupied with residents and squatters, all commerce having fled from a place without money. The only working people were the drug dealers, panhandlers and the street sex workers. The streets were crowded with VietNam war veterans, ex-cons, drug-runners, marginalized and dysfunctional. Nowhere could be found a suit and tie, an education, employment and a moment of normalcy. Vagrants wandered into and out of unsecured buildings, sleeping on landings, under stairways, in burnt out rooms with the plumbing and electricity pulled out of the cold walls.
Into this lost environment came a Bard College graduate, Marty Liebowitz, in the 1960’s. His first employment was as a basketball coach for the local kids in school. But he soon found himself a unique source of culture, education, literacy, history and wisdom. When the Park reopened in 1992, Marty held court every morning without exception, first at the bars warming up with fifty pull-ups, then talking to the young people who’d found him as a spring of inspiration, knowledge and difference from the dark, desperation of a cold home and tough streetlife on el bloque. He cultivated students, teaching classic and modern literature, the western heritage of ‘classical’ music, renaissance painting, ancient Chinese poetry, philosophy and painting, the philosophy of existentialism and Hegelianism, the psychology of Sigmund Freud. And not only students: Marty adopted patients as a lay Freudian analyst. He organized museum trips to the Morgan Library where he guided his students through the exhibits. All the while, he remained a fixture at the bars and in the basketball courts.
An extraordinary and incomparable man, he believed his dignity stood above God, and chose to dispense with his life as Hemingway did following the reasoning of Dostoevsky’s character in The Devils, Kirilov, demonstrating to all that taking life in his hands showed his fearlessness of the deity by jumping off the Williamsburg Bridge in an act of human defiance against fate.
This most remarkable man held court every day without exception at the fitness bars until he chose his own end. “Truth is strange” says Byron, “stranger than fiction” and Marty, remembered still as “The Philosopher of Tompkins Square Park” was larger than life or fiction. These bars was his court.
Martial arts
Along with the legendary Marty, Roberto Sharpe, a pre-eminent martial artist, held classes every morning next to the fitness bars. The same space was occasionally occupied by Mestre Ombrinho, a capoeira master, and his students at a time when capoeira was largely unknown as a martial art. It was popularized in the Tompkins Square Park fitness area by his students.
The Street Workout, Parkour, Gymnastics and Freestyle
In the 20-teens, the “street workout” arrived at Tompkins Square Park with Rick Seedman (“Slick Rick”), a tumbler cum gymnast cum body-weight trainer. This was a moment of unprecedented activity in the fitness area. Drawing parkour flow and precision practitioners (Angel, Modesto, Christian, Rishahd, Sebastian, Milo among others), the mime and silks master known as Savage, the bars became a Mecca for parkourists, gymnasts, street workout enthusiasts, and exhibitions for freestylers as well as sets-and-reps challenges. The Bronx BarStarz held exhibition-competitions, the Barbarians were frequent visitors, even a freestyle club from Staten Island made the pilgrimage every year.
The Fitness Run
In the late teens, Finding Barbara began their fitness runs, which originated at the Tompkins Square Park fitness bars. Vinnie’s idea was to meet-up at the fitness area, workout there, then run to another park, workout there, and run to another. Since Finding Barbara, workout runs have been imitated widely throughout the city.
It began with the TSP bars.
Post Pandemic
Following the pandemic, free yoga classes occupied the fitness area and adjacent handball court Friday evenings. Between 2022 and 2024 there was a resurgence of gymnastics and freestyle among software engineers and finance bros, the newest residents in the East Village.
Then in 2023, Calisthenicsprince brought his crew from the Bronx to create Freestyle Fridays, an inclusive free-for-all any-level exhibition-competition-sharing event that went viral with the calisthenics community, spreading to McCarren Park on Sundays, Macombs’ Motivational Monday, and most recently Maspeth Park.
It began with the bars
Tompkins Square Park fitness area has played a central role in all these movements, trends, methods, innovations and viral developments, from its extraordinary start with Marty’s Court, The Philosopher of Tompkins Square Park, to Vinnie’s Finding Barbara, to Jesse Danger’s parkour group, to the Kavadlo brothers’ instructional youtube, to Calisthenicsprince’s Freestyle Friday. The Tompkins bars remain a draw from members of the calisthenics community across the globe, and are frequented daily by locals and visitors alike.
Above all these unique features of the Tompkins bars, they have provided for generations of young and adult and elderly locals a safe haven and escape from dietary abuse and unhealthy habits, a place for physical and mental therapy for the injured, a liberation from the oppressive tedium of the workplace, a rescue from gang “friends” and their drugs and violence and prison destination – a vibrantly social space of a welcoming, loving and joyous community of self-improvement and sharing.
There can be no price on that tag; there can be no architecture sturdier nor no design more beautiful.
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