Queen Anne's Place

There’s a fairly new “arts project” in Lower Manhattan and a story about it in The Times recently caught my eye. It’s a “donated” space of about one city block (37,000-square-feet at the northwest corner of Canal and Sullivan) and is being used as an outdoor exhibition space for various art and sculpture installations. It is being called “LentSpace” but this is what caught my eye, and interest:

The land is owned, and was recently cleared of a bunch of old buildings, by Trinity Church (on Wall Street) and its development company, Trinity Real Estate. Since the real estate market is so depressed right now, they decided not to rebuild (yet) and have “donated” the land to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. As the Times put it rather snarkily, “in addition to the public spiritedness of the gesture – and to the tax write-off it earned the company” it has been given to LentSpace for a “generous length of time.”

All well and good and nothing too surprising here. But what did bludgeon me over the head was the fact that this site is one of several totaling about 300 acres of “farmland” along the west side of Manhattan that was given to Trinity Church by Queen Anne in 1705! Say what? Queen Anne ruled England for a fairly short time at the beginning of the 18th century and, somehow, despite what we call the American Revolutionary War a bit later, Trinity somehow hung on to the property. Well, hey, I guess it paid off to be Protestant at that stage of the game and I suppose I could research this transaction but, well, I’d just kind of rather take it for granted that some royal butt-kissing worked out for all concerned.

Certainly LentSpace has benefited and, presumably, the cultural life in our city too, even though some of the art has already been defaced with spray-painted protests. Ah, the joy of outdoor art. What I want to know is just who is growing tomatoes on the rest of this farmland. And are they paying taxes on it?