The Park Bench

World Humanitarian Day: Remembering Our UN Neighbors

Monument to Raoul Wallenberg

Our neighborhood includes a big building known all over the world, whose employees travel far and wide trying to do good. It's the UN, and if you live on the North side of Waterside you can see it out your window. A lot of people who live at Waterside are in fact UN employees, so it's part of the family.

And on August 19, 2003, we lost some members of our family in the terrorist attack on the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, which was housing the UN compound at the time.

At least 23 people were killed in the attack, perpetrated by terrorists who used an old Soviet bomb. Among them were  14 UN staff members and the UN's top envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who also served as the UN high commissioner for human rights. I wrote about his life at the time in an article, "A Humanitarian in Harm's Way." The bombers were "enemies of the civilized world," U.S. President George W. Bush said at the time; regrettably, the terrorists associated the neutral UN with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Hello, Neighborhood!

Waterside Deck Chairs. Photo on Flickr by chrisgcsa

When I think of Waterside Plaza, where I have lived for 23 years, the first image that usually comes to mind is one of my neighbors sitting on the park benches around the landscaped plaza. There are the "regulars" who come out in the evenings to chat, the new parents with babies, the Russians who never lost their habit of the nightly progulka (stroll), the kids playing some version of baseball, teens in a gaggle with their i-pods.

What's surprising about this scene, and which we often take for granted, is that people at Waterside, far from scurrying away from their neighbors and hiding from them actually enjoy going outside and meeting them and hanging out with them. It's a very diverse area with all nationalities and races, with quite a few working at the United Nations 10 blocks away and also the low and middle income tower mixed with luxury towers -- not a combo you often see in NYC.

The enclosed feel of course has to do with the architecture of the place.