When a bike polo league started two years ago in the Lower East Side’s Sara D. Roosevelt Park, the polo players often sparred with local kids over who got to use a flat space of blacktop called “the pit.”
The kids wanted the roughly 7,000-square-foot multiuse space located just south of Delancey St. to play baseball and kickball while the group of bike messengers and other cyclists wanted to expand the emerging street sport.
“There was some conflict over who was here first,” said Dave Currence, an organizer and player in the polo league. “But we patched those things up.”
So much so that they recently formed an ad-hoc coalition that brought together the city’s bike culture and Lower East Side grade school boys to raise opposition and help defeat a proposed dog run planned on the site of the pit.
