New York’s largest Pride flag returns to Roosevelt Island’s Four Freedoms Park

New York’s largest Pride Month flag is back and better than ever this year. Found in Roosevelt Island’s Four Freedoms Park, the 2022 Progress Pride Flag measures more than 100 feet long by 30 feet wide and features added colors to be more inclusive of the LGBTQIA+ community. The installation, which will be featured on the park’s monumental staircase throughout the month of June, first debuted in 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and is back for Pride Month 2022.

Dancers from Ballet Hispánico on the Grand Stairs. Photo by Steven Pisano

The installation, curated in partnership between the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy (FFPC) and the state’s Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, launched this week with Ballet Hispánico, a leading Latinx dance organization.

“Four Freedoms Park Conservancy’s mission is singular and simple: we create public programs, commission public art and produce installations to ignite conservations about basic human rights. President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, articulated these, in what now seems stunningly prescient: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear,” Howard Axel, CEO of FFPC, said.

“This is what The Progress Pride Flag stands for – inclusion means inclusion in all the freedoms from economic security to freedom from fear and of course freedom of expression.”

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park opened on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in 2012, 40 years after it was first envisioned by late architect Louis Kahn. The four-acre park celebrates four essential freedoms laid out in a 1941 speech by President Roosevelt.

The Pride flag serves as a reminder of the “collective progress needed to achieve these freedoms,” as a press release describes. The installation is part of a series of public events commemorating the 10th anniversary of the park.

The park is free to the public and open Wednesdays through Mondays from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. 

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• Where I Work: The Four Freedoms Park team talks Louis Kahn, FDR, and preserving a legacy