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Art & Design|M. Paul Friedberg, Landscape Architect Who Celebrated the City, Dies at 93
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/arts/design/m-paul-friedberg-dead.html
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He made his mark as a designer of experimental playgrounds in New York City and then used the same ideas to reinvent urban parks across the country.
March 3, 2025, 12:21 p.m. ET
M. Paul Friedberg, a landscape architect whose playgrounds, pocket parks and plazas transformed once-gritty areas of New York City, using familiar urban materials to do so, died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 93.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by Dorit Shahar, his wife.
Mr. Friedberg grew up in rural Pennsylvania, but he believed in the promise of cities — their diversity and density — to create happier, healthier societies. Like his friend the sociologist William Whyte, he felt that public spaces were successful only if people used them, and that parks and plazas should be as inviting and flexible as possible.
“A wall is an obstruction, and a ledge is a place to sit,” Mr. Friedberg liked to say, quoting Mr. Whyte. He was bullish on ledges and steps, and used them often.
His early work was part of a wave of civic reform in the mid-1960s, led by Mayor John V. Lindsay and his parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving, who wanted to make the city’s parks and public spaces more inclusive and fun. When Mr. Lindsay took office, Mr. Friedberg had already designed an innovative park and playground for the Jacob Riis Houses, the public housing complex on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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He was inspired by the adventure playgrounds springing up in Europe, where designers had observed children playing in the rubble after World War II. “They realized children really didn’t need formal play environments,” Mr. Friedberg told The New York Times in 1995. “They gave children saws and drills and boxes and called them adventure playgrounds.”
