“Parks are secular cathedrals,” muses the city’s parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, and there is something to that. In a city like New York it helps to have a place for meditation on civic faith, where the doors are always open to everyone.

There have been some schisms in the church of late, among those who are entertained by debates about the U.N. permanently occupying New York City park space and about what a Parks Department press release calls Christo and Jean Claude’s “7,500 gates bearing hanging saffron colored fabric panels lining 23 miles of pedestrian paths in Central Park.”

At times like this, I like to head downtown, where a comparatively quiet parks renaissance has been taking place block by irregular block.

The latest permanent installment was officially opened last week. The ribbon-cutting for the Governor Alfred E. Smith Park and Playground was attended primarily by students from P.S. 1. “The Happy Warrior” of the Lower East Side would have smiled to see the crowd of children playing tag around the foot of his statue off Catherine Street, one block from the river. The neighborhood has changed since Irish immigrants called this home a century ago, but the striving spirit is still the same.

The new basketball court offers a startling view of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sheltering trees were shedding autumn leaves, but the pathways were now clean, the fences literally mended – all part of a nearly $2 million dollar restoration funded by the city, private sector donations, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

The Al Smith park and playground is one of 13 such restorations under way throughout Lower Manhattan. This regreening in the heart of our city’s most historic district has proven to be one of the few bright spots to emerge from the darkness of September 11.

That fall, the Tribecca-driven rebirth of Lower Manhattan seemed to have been stopped in its tracks by terrorism. The neighborhood had been a night-and-weekend ghost town for decades, but lower crime and rising values had recently brought a new generation into the area.

The restoration of City Hall Park five years ago captured some of the renewed optimism of the time. It was an ambitious project, costing more than $30 million at a time of record surpluses, with the intention of reclaiming City Hall Park from paved-over anonymity. The city’s central civic space had been ignored. What had once been the center of town seemed almost a shameful afterthought, with few trees, decrepit benches, clusters of pigeons and scattered people. The idea behind the George Vellonakis-designed park was to bring back the history and the glory of the site – to make it a proud destination again.

When it was completed, not all critics were pleased – almost by definition, critics never are. It is interesting, however, to look back at their complaints and see how dated and out of touch they seem. Even before September 11, Mayor Giuliani had ordered the designs to include measures to protect the building – just two blocks from the World Trade Center – from terrorist attack. Although the sunken delta barriers, marble fountain and historically accurate but reinforced fence are among the most architecturally subtle terrorist deterrents imaginable, this did not stop the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp from referring to the design in 1999 as “paranoid schizoid urbanism.” Fernando Ferrer, who was then president of the Bronx, fired off a letter to the Times complaining about the security measures, while Norman Siegel of the New York Civil Liberties Union protested in the pages of Newsday. But then that was before September 11.

The new park was covered in ash, and as fires burned on at Ground Zero, the hopes of the resurgent neighborhood felt cut off in mid-stride. But lower Manhattan rallied. The physical clean-up took months, the psychic job is still not complete, but the public and private sectors came together in a triumph of optimism backed by capital.

Walk around lower Manhattan today and you see that, beyond the 16-acre hole in the ground, the neighborhood is improbably more vibrant today that it was five years ago. The parks are a small but important reason for this.

Even City Hall Park, once controversial and then nearly destroyed, is now simply beloved. Featured in films, a standard backdrop for newlyweds treading from the Municipal Building, it feels like it has been a part of our city forever.

Now, City Hall Park designer George Vellonakis is working on two of the new designs for downtown: Wall Street Park will develop the street’s promenade with flowering trees, and a glass fountain, while the new park on Coenties Slip – the site of New York’s first City Hall, which was located in a colonial tavern – will feature bluestone paving and a bronze fountain. Other parks under development include a majestic new space in Battery Park, Sarah D. Roosevelt Park near Chinatown, the Allen Street Mall, and Washington Market Park.

In the end, this generation of New Yorkers will have succeeded in making Lower Manhattan better than we found it – a rebirth despite, and in part because of, the attempt to destroy us. These leafy secular cathedrals scattered throughout the area only reinforce our appreciation for all its history, especially in a place where we sometimes need to meditate on our shared civic faith.