Tompkins Square Park
City park · East Village ·
Public park with playgrounds, dog runs, basketball courts, and events
Public park with playgrounds, dog runs, basketball courts, and events
"From the folks behind Angelo's Pizzeria and actor Danny Cooper, this East Village spot makes a perfectly splittable picnic lunch cheesesteak. The chewy, crusty, sesame-studded hoagie is baked in-house, and the mish-mash of beef and onions inside is just cheesy enough, and speckled through with black pepper. Tompkins Square is right across the street, but the sandwiches hold up well if you need to travel further." - willa moore, will hartman, bryan kim, sonal shah
"Tompkins Square Park has had a bad rap in the past but we had to include it on our list. Being the biggest public park in the neighborhood, Tompkins has undergone a lot of improvements in recent years. There are new playgrounds for the kiddos, a dog-run, and a few basketball courts. On the weekends you’ll see people laying out or enjoying the Farmer’s Market on Sundays." - Champions
"Opened in 1850 and designed as a circular Victorian promenade, Tompkins Square Park contains three children’s playgrounds, a temperance arch (installed 1888), a memorial to the 1904 General Slocum sinking, and a central grassy knoll where people picnic; heavy‑metal musicians often perform on the park’s southern end, and it’s a pleasant place to relax after touring St. Marks." - Robert Sietsema
"I read photographer Christian Rodriguez calling Tompkins Square Park “Coachella in the city” to illustrate how openly people drink and socialize there, a contrast he draws with the nearby Avenue D public housing where “there are no alfresco dinner parties in the projects” and where, he writes, residents learn young that it’s okay for some people to play outside and not okay for others." - Luke Fortney
"A neighborhood mainstay for decades, Odessa was a long-running late-night diner that I came to think of as my place in the 1980s: frequented by working-class stiffs and counterculture types, famously open 24 hours on weekends, and located right across the street from Tompkins Square Park. Named for the Black Sea port and reflecting the neighborhood's Ukrainian immigrant population, it blended a Greek-diner standard menu with a strong Ukrainian co-specialty that in 1980 dominated the offerings — breaded veal and pork cutlets, stuffed cabbage, potato pancakes, pierogies and blintzes, and the cheap, comforting steam-table mains ladled with brown gravy. Mike Skulikidis bought the restaurant in 1980 and later became its landlord; the original location closed in 2013, and the remaining space was shuttered in mid-March for the pandemic, briefly reopened for carryout, and has struggled since — it will serve its last plate of potato pierogies with sour cream and applesauce on Sunday, July 19. I never expected chefly food there, and it could be inconsistent, but the combination of convenience, familiarity, and low price was irresistible; on my last visit in 2015 the tuna melt was fine but a bit tired, while the Odessa special ($13) — tomato-drenched stuffed cabbage, a crisp potato pancake, four fried pierogies, and a hank of kielbasa oozing paprika oil and garlic — was fantastic, a true time capsule and love letter to an earlier East Village." - Robert Sietsema
