In Tribeca where Varick Street meets West Broadway, there is a one-tenth-acre triangle called Finn Square. When the neighborhood was first becoming residential in the late 1970s, it was a stretch of pavement bearing four honey locust trees and little else. In 1998, the city's Greenstreets program remade the space, adding soil and shrubs, and a small group of volunteers became the Friends of Finn Square. 

For twenty years, the Friends of Finn Square have planted flowers, cared for the trees and bushes, and picked up trash. We have raised funds and added a low cast-iron fence and a water stanchion and irrigation system. Each fall we plant bulbs for a spring display of daffodils, hyacinths, and brilliant tulips.

Finn Square provides an island of color and shade in an increasingly overbuilt neighborhood, where all sorts of people stop to rest, eat lunch, or literally smell the roses.