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Urban Forestry's New York City Roots


It was 84 degrees in Manhattan with humidity just under 80 percent, but the hikers wouldn't know it standing in the middle of Inwood Hill Park.

With trees rising as high as 140 feet in the air, blocking out sunlight while leaving just enough head room to catch the occasional wind draft, they could feel the summer warmth, but didn't have to wear it like a blanket. Manhattan might as well have been a thousand miles away. But of course, it wasn't. Inwood Hill Park is in Manhattan.

"I'm pleased with it," said Tim Wenskus, a biologist with the New York City Department of Parks Natural Resources Group and the man in charge of making sure this forest in the northern tip of the island remains tranquil.

"You should be," said Mark McDonnell, associate professor and divisional director of the Australian Research Center for Urban Ecology. "You've done a great job."

Both Wenskus and McDonnell are urban foresters, a small but growing group of scientists who believe habitats such as this one are just as deserving of study and protection as anything you'd find in the Amazon rainforest.

The four men on the hike were having something of a reunion. In the 1980s, Mark McDonnell helped dig and document the many plots the group is now revisiting, in the city that provided a North American launching pad for the field of urban forestry 20 years ago.

"Traditionally, ecologists never looked at cities," said Richard Pouyat, who now works at the Forest Service. "We always looked at areas where people weren't living. Mark was really a pioneer of looking at cities as their own ecosystems. Twenty years later, people have come around to his point of view."

Trees do more than provide an aesthetic backdrop in city environments. Urban environments, once denuded of native vegetation, become dangerous heat conductors, a phenomenon called the "heat island" effect. Coupled with the heat displaced by air conditioners, urban environments like Manhattan average daily temperatures 10 degrees hotter than surrounding regions.

"If you want to see the effects of global warming, just look at any big city," McDonnell said. "At a local scale, it's just pure environmental change."

The first sign of change, notes McDonnell, is the rapid loss of native species evolved to survive in a more temperate climate. In Tokyo, the disappearance of birds and insects has prompted some businesses to install outdoor speakers to supply the missing sounds. Here in New York City, native hardwoods such as oak, hazel, sassafras and the tulip tree, a fast growing eastern giant that can age up to 300 years, are giving way to invasive immigrants such as ailanthus, Norway maple, and a host of exotic vines and worms.

Then again, the central paradox (and saving grace) of urban ecology is the fact that urban forests often provide the most faithful glimpse of what primeval forests once looked like before industrialization.

The reason is simple: City dwellers, starting in New York City, were the first to witness the consequences of rampant overdevelopment. To maintain a semblance of contact with nature, 19th century civic leaders pressed for parks development, effectively creating a museum of native ecosystems. In terms of species distribution, the trees you find in Central Park and Inwood Hill offer a more authentic glimpse at the pre-Columbian ecology of North America than most upstate forests, where logging and agriculture continued unabated until well into the 20th century.

"It's a worldwide phenomenon," says McDonnell. "All cities have older trees than the surrounding countryside because that's where the protection started."

This paradox is the chief explanation for the "Lord of the Rings"-like canopy here at Inwood Hill. Though its 200 acre habitat is microscopic compared to state preserves like Adirondack or Catskill Park, it exudes a majesty that puts other northeastern forests to shame, with towering trees that in upstate forests would have been cut down and hauled off to the mill a long time ago.

Such majesty puts pressure on forest managers like Wenskus, however. Every time a giant oak or tulip tree dies, there is a natural rush to fill the gap. Invasive species like Norway maple and porcelain berry enjoy an advantage in this race because they can smother out smaller plants' sunlight, killing off the plants that help make soil chemistry favorable to natives. Biologists and managers with the parks department's Natural Resources Group use a variety of tactics to keep invasive species at bay. Still, Wenskus says, they can only do so much. Forestry is not gardening, and even if the group had the resources to treat it as such, native species must ultimately fend for themselves.

As proof of that stoic philosophy, Wenskus pointed to a fist-thick porcelain berry vine running all the way up a middle-aged oak and shook his head sadly. Only two outcomes are possible at this stage: Either the vine will die on its own or the tree will succumb because of diminished sunlight.

"Porcelain berry grows so fast," he said. "It's a bad customer."

If invasive species share a common characteristic, it's their ability to grow fast and look good doing it. Porcelain berry, for example, is a relative of the grape and can quickly transform a backyard into a leafy arbor. Norway maple throws out a dense, low-to-the-ground leaf cover, perfect for sun baked sidewalks, less perfect for native woodlands. Lately, however, the tree has come under attack by yet another immigrant, the Asian longhorn beetle, diminishing migratory pressure on local woodlands.

Other young, upwardly-mobile plant species include European White Poplar -- "Robert Moses's favorite," grumbles McDonnell -- and ailanthus, a scrappy weedlike tree sometimes known as the "tree of heaven."

For a patient forester, however, the signs are encouraging. Twenty years ago, wrecked cars littered the undergrowth and periodic fires killed off promising adult trees in Hunter Island, part of Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, which was the next stop on the group's tour. Now the forest is protected by firebreaks and barred to vehicle traffic. Native plants are getting a chance to push the canopy upward, allowing room for a thick underbrush. It isn't Inwood Hill Park but in a few more years you might be able to find yourself visiting this corner of the city and wondering if it has been untouched since the 17th century.

"In all honesty, the best stuff is the stuff you can't tell apart from nature," said Wenskus, summing up his work and the general goal of the Natural Resources Group. "If it looks like nature made it, I figure I did my job right."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Filtration Plant In Van Cortlandt Park


The city is moving quickly to build a controversial water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, now that a final environmental study just released by the city's Department of Environmental Protection has chosen that site as its preferred location.

If everything goes according to plan, the construction of the plant - which would be built underground in the southeast corner of the park beneath the Mosholu Golf Course driving range - would start this summer, said agency spokesman Charles Sturcken. But community groups and park advocates vow to continue fighting against the park site. They say that a park adjoining a densely packed residential area is the wrong place for an industrial facility, especially when another location is available. In addition, they say that the means used to obtain the parkland sets a disturbing precedent that puts other city parks at risk.

The city needs to build the plant because it is under a court order to filter the 10 percent of the water supply that comes from the Croton watershed to meet federal drinking-water standards. For nearly a decade, it has been trying to put a filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park. After opposition groups sued, the state's highest court ruled in 2001 that the city could not take over, or "alienate," parkland for the plant without the approval of the State Legislature. Because such approval had never been granted before without the assent of the local Assembly member and because the area's representative, Jeffrey Dinowitz, strongly opposed the park site, many believed the Van Cortlandt site was out.

Last year, however, Mayor Michael Bloomberg brokered a deal with Bronx politicians to bypass Assemblyman Dinowitz by promising $200 million in additional funding for Bronx parks.

The State Legislature made its approval to change the use of 28 acres of Van Cortlandt Park contingent on a "Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement" examining the park site as well as two alternate sites, including city-owned land in a Westchester industrial park. It also required the legislative leaders and the city to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" specifying the amount of money that would go to the Bronx to "perform capital improvements to existing park and recreational facilities" and detailing a list of projects it could be spent on.

Opponents of the project say the city never seriously considered the alternatives, particularly the Eastview site in Westchester, which has almost no residential neighbors. "Very few people honestly believed that this [impact statement] was anything other than rigged," said Dinowitz, noting that the city let out contracts to bid for the construction earlier in the spring. "A close reading of the [impact statement] reveals that the impact of building in Van Cortlandt Park is much greater that at Eastview because it is surrounded by a densely populated community and we'd lose a significant piece of parkland."

ENGINEERING ADVANTAGES

The Department of Environmental Protection prefers the Mosholu site because of engineering, security, and cost advantages, among other considerations. It is closer to existing tunnels and other water infrastructure, necessitating the construction of fewer miles of tunnels. In addition, because it is nearer to the distribution system, filtered water would go directly to users without further chlorination. If the Eastview site were used, for a number of years until a new tunnel is built, filtered Croton water would be directed through the same tunnels as water from the Catskill/Delaware system, making the entire water supply vulnerable to one catastrophic event. Putting the filtration plant in Westchester would also consolidate the city's water treatment facilities in the same location, because the city intends to build an ultraviolet disinfection plant at that site for the rest of the city's water supply, from the Catskill/Delaware watershed.

Agency studies also estimate that a plant at the Mosholu site would cost less to build and operate, with total capital costs of $1.235 billion versus $1.247 billion at Eastview, although questions have been raised about the accuracy of those numbers.

Another factor in favor of the Mosholu site, according to the agency, is that the jobs and economic benefits would go to city and Bronx residents and businesses. For this reason, city construction unions have vigorously supported building the plant in the Bronx over Westchester. Their members have shown up in force at public hearings, including an event where they shouted down plant opponents. But, Dinowitz said, there are still no guarantees that "one single Bronxite will get any of the jobs." Sturcken said the agency could not comment on how it will assure that Bronx residents have preference for the jobs or whether there will be an effort to hire minority workers.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS

Jerome Avenue, where the #4 train rumbles by on elevated tracks, is all that separates the filtration plant site from blocks of tightly packed six-story apartment buildings. About 25,000 people live within a half-mile radius, in the working class, largely minority Norwood area. The site also borders a worn corner of the park and a new playground. The city plans to bury the filtration plant underneath the current driving range. Construction would require tearing down a 1914 golf house, which was designed as a smaller version of the genteel suburban golf clubs of the time, as well as a grove of towering sweet gum trees.

The city has promised to rebuild the driving range on top of the underground plant and to put up a new golf house and maintenance building. Two acres would remain fenced off for parking and for buildings to receive and store chemicals. Rock walls resembling the existing walls along Jerome Avenue would incorporate louvers venting the underground heating and cooling systems and also function as vehicle barriers. Park users wonder, however, whether the city will really allow them back on the site because of security concerns.

During the expected five to eight years of construction, residents would be subjected to the noise and dust of construction, including blasting 85 feet into bedrock, and the pollution and traffic from trucks as well as hundreds of additional cars trying to find parking spots in the neighborhood. The city says it can reduce the impacts by using noise barriers and dust controls, restricting trucks to routes away from residential neighborhoods, improving a nearby highway interchange, and relocating the driving range so it can continue to operate during construction. It has allocated $43 million to restore the area and other parts of Van Cortlandt Park. The study also considered as mitigation the $200 million to be spent on other Bronx parks.

Building the plant in Van Cortlandt Park also requires substantial work at the nearby Jerome Park Reservoir, across from the Bronx High School of Science.

The Eastview site is grown-over farmland in an area of Westchester that is being developed as a commercial park for industrial, medical, and municipal facilities and has virtually no residential neighbors. The impacts to neighbors would be minimal, and the land will eventually be developed, whether or not the filtration plant goes there. The site lacks highway access, however, and the environmental study, which looked at 27 interchanges on local roads, determined that it was not possible to mitigate the combined traffic impact of constructing the filtration plant concurrently with the disinfection plant.

FOR PARKS, SOME TROUBLING PRECEDENTS

Whatever the pros and cons of the Mosholu site, park advocates have raised serious concerns about the process by which the city obtained the site. It sets precedents, they say, that could weaken protection for parks citywide.

Because parkland is held in the public trust, a city or town cannot take it away for another use, no matter how critical, without the approval of the State Legislature. In the past, the Assembly has traditionally deferred to the member representing the park area, giving the community a voice in the process. Now a precedent has been set to alienate parkland against the wishes of the local Assembly member. In the future, it could be easier for the city (or any municipality in the state) to take over parkland without regard to the concerns of local residents as long as enough other lawmakers get something for their constituents out of the deal.

The law also generally requires that when parkland is taken away from the public and turned over to another use, it must be replaced by new parkland nearby of equal or greater fair market value. When parkland is traded for money, however, it is much more difficult to guarantee that a fair exchange will actually happen. Will the money actually be spent to benefit parks in the affected area and not redirected to marginally related projects? And will it supplement, not replace, regularly budgeted funds?

There has already been an attempt to grab some of the money for other projects. A Senate bill introduced in June would broaden the types of projects eligible for the $200 million to include new recreational facilities. On a recent Bronxtalk television call-in show, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said the bill would "expand beyond parks to the kind of facilities that our young people need, like youth and recreation centers, sports facilities." Among the projects he said he would like to see developed are ice skating rinks and boathouses. The authorship of the bill is unknown - spokesmen for Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg claimed no knowledge of its source and the office of Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno was not able to provide the information. The general consensus is that the bill won't move, but park advocates are wary. "This pulls so far from the original intent of the mitigation funds, you really have to wonder if this is becoming a free-for-all with these funds," said Paul Sawyer, executive director of Friends of Van Cortlandt Park.

As for whether the $200 million will really be additional funding, "we're all going to wait and see," said Christian DiPalermo, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks, the citywide parks advocacy group. "We'll see in the next several years, if projects that weren't slated to be funded are now going to be funded." According to a parks department official, the city spent an average of $28 million a year in capital funds on Bronx parks over the last five or six years.

Opposition groups also charge that the city is ignoring its own zoning regulations in the effort to site the plant. They say that parkland is unzoned, so when the city takes parkland and makes it something else, it needs to create zoning that allows for the intended use. Furthermore, the kind of zoning required for an industrial facility includes a buffer area separating it from apartment buildings. Karen Argenti, a community activist who has spent the last decade fighting the plant, says that if the city doesn't go through the usual land-use process to get the appropriate zoning, "that means that every place in New York where there is a park where there are people living across the street, there could be manufacturing put in the park."

Charles Sturcken of the Department of Environmental Protection said, "I think all the appropriate approvals will be in place so that we can go ahead and build," but would not comment further on the zoning issue because of expected litigation.

"You are engineering major infrastructure in an urban environment, so you have normal land use issues, within a political context. It's a classic kind of dilemma for government," Sturcken said. "But at the end of the day, what you are doing, you're providing clean water that meets the standards of the federal government and the State of New York."

THE BATTLE IS NOT OVER

The next step toward building the plant is for the City Council to ratify the Memorandum of Understanding with Governor Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. The memorandum will include a list of projects that could be funded, although community groups say there has been no public input on what these should be. The City Council is expected to vote on this soon. Once the memorandum is approved, the city must submit its plans to the federal court that has ordered the filtration plant to be built.

Opponents continue to fight to keep the filtration plant out of the park. According to Paul Sawyer, Friends of Van Cortlandt Park and several other groups are considering lawsuits on a number of grounds, including zoning and environmental justice issues. He said, "It's not exactly a done deal. This can still be stopped." Assemblyman Dinowitz said, "As far as I'm concerned, this battle is not yet over. While the Legislature and Governor have acted, the third branch has not. "

Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Park and the People


 

Elizabeth Blackmar, co-author of Park and the People: A History of Central Park and Gotham Gazette’s Reading NYC Book Club recently discussed the Central Park Conservancy, protests on the Great Lawn, and what lies ahead for the park. Read an edited transcript below (or click here for a full transcript.)

A PLACE TO PROTEST?

Joshua Brustein: One thing that everyone is debating about Central Park right now is whether demonstrators should be allowed to have a large scale protest on the Great Lawn. Ms. Blackmar, what do you think about that issue, and how does it relates to some of the themes in your book?

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: It’s not an easy issue. I was in Central Park the last time a million people gathered there, for the anti-nuclear demonstration in 1982. It was a very powerful demonstration. It had the expanse of Central Park for a million people to gather. But since then there has been a major restoration of the park, under the auspices of the Central Park Conservancy. The Conservancy has successfully restored the effects of the natural 19th century natural romantic design, and it is true that massive demonstrations are very hard on natural landscapes.

That being said, one can also observe that, of course, other public gatherings have been permitted in the park. These events have had either a cultural dimension or a commercial dimension, whether it’s the metropolitan opera or a popular concert – Dave Matthews, for example – that then raises money to be distributed to other sites.

So in part it depends on whether or not you think a million people will show up to protest the Republicans, in which case it will tax the park landscape. And if one hopes for that, then maybe the park isn’t the best place for that to happen. Now if it’s not a million people, it seems to me that the natural landscape probably could withstand a gathering on the Great Lawn. But I think that it won’t happen, because of the precedent that it would reopen. Basically, the rules have been rewritten to clearly keep political actions and protests out of the park, to make it unlikely that it would be open.

 

Betsey Grover McGrath: What other venues are available for that many people?.

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: Actually the plan that has been made has been to close off the streets south of Madison, basically in order to keep the protestors in the streets with boundaries.

 

Mickey Blum: A very, very small area.

 

Zoe Schneider: I was at the St. Patrick’s day anti-war demonstration and we were cordoned off into small pens. That was not just to be orderly, but so that when news and helicopters came to take photos, to show people participating in the protests, it would look like there were fewer people participating. They had these pens that were only one block long. And they only had a couple hundred people per pen. So each pen was virtually empty. So from above, it basically looked like an empty street. So they were trying to say, “nobody is protesting here!”

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: I think of the whole history of demonstrations and gatherings, from the 19th century in Tompkins Square and then in Union Square, such gatherings were centered on neighborhood parks. There was an “I am an American Day” in the late 40s actually, which was one of the first direct politicizations of Central Park’s use as a place for a mass audience. And I think that was because of the commerce. During the 1960s, the park was claimed by the anti-war movement, and was linked to the counterculture.

 

The idea with the Republican National Convention was to focus on the traffic, and how it would endanger the park landscape. Before there was a restoration it really seemed like they could manage it; it was in bad shape and now I think the Conservancy has really established a kind of plan of landscape design.

 

Joshua Brustein: You mentioned the difference in treatment between political events and commercial and cultural events. How differently are these treated in the park rules?

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: I’m sure the rules don’t read that way. But to have any large gathering in the park, you have to have a permit. Certain uses that can’t be managed have a kind of customary claim of the space. But commercial concerts are an interesting case. When the restoration movement came, one of its goals was to end commercial concerts in the park. It’s only in the last decade that they’ve come back, and they’ve come back with this kind of quid pro quo. Not only do the concert organizers have to promise to clean up, but they make a contribution to the Citywide Parks Foundation, which then can benefit other parks in the city.

 

And it’s a way of funneling the money out of Central Park because, of course, commercial concerts can sell the videos. They have another life on television and commercial media, so they are profiting even from free concerts. That seems to me to have been a shift in policy that came once it was decided, in effect, that the park could handle those special events.

THE CENTRAL PARK CONSERVANCY

 

Valarie Sarris: Is the land in Central Park owned by the city of New York proper or the Central Park Conservancy?

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: The land is owned by the city. The conservancy, most importantly, raises money for restoration. It’s an interesting problem in terms of preservation. The question is “Do New Yorkers value preservation?” If they do, then the issue is how you add that to the definition of the public good, and how do you raise the public money to maintain that kind of continuity with the past.

What the conservancy is doing is basically taking on the burden of historical preservation in Central Park. But it has to always do it in a political context. It’s publicly owned land, it is a public recreation site, and there are lots of features in it that do not conform to the original plan, which is also always a challenge. So we will see repeatedly questions about, for example, what will happen to the skating rink. We’ve seen Wolman, but Lasker skating rink has to become obsolete. Who makes that kind of a decision, when that’s a sort of public recreational facility that has nothing to do with what’s being preserved in the landscape? So what are different public places? I think we have lots of very interesting problems, in spite of what’s happened to the public domain in the aftermath of the 1970s.

 

Joshua Brustein: In terms of the conservancy’s role in management, is that different from how parks in other parts of the country are managed?

Elizabeth Blackmar: It has become the model for major landscape city parks around the country. In other words, the parks in Chicago, St. Louis, some of Boston’s parks, have moved into public-private partnerships of some kind. The problem with this is always that some city parks can have a constituency, and can divide the money that supports the partnership, and other city parks can’t. So the cities have to show a commitment to parks that don’t have a constituency with money to help support them. In a lot of cities, this is an ongoing issue.

The great landscape parks in the Olmsted and Vaux tradition have embraced this model, because it has worked as a tactic of preservation. I think the level at which parks are being maintained really varies widely in cities across the country right now. I haven’t been to Detroit, for example. I don’t know what shape the park is in, but my guess is that it is not so great.

 

Mike Miscione: Well you also have the wealthy people living on the perimeter of the park. The Conservancy, I think, goes beyond a money purpose. It manages the park and makes decisions. It is a key player in Central Park. It is unlike a foundation, which attracts the bucks and doles them out. I don’t think anybody denies the fact that they are attracting money, but with it goes that slavish, slavish relationship. It’s questionable.

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: We raise these questions in the book, as to who formed the conservancy, but the thing that I myself am not clear enough about is whether New Yorkers have a commitment to public spaces. Is there that same kind of commitment to public spaces today from the larger public as there was in the earlier period? Is there the democratic will of ordinary people to actually engage in things that involve public spaces? I’m not sure; there have been major cultural changes in our society. If there isn’t that will, then the question of who is committed becomes a different problem.

 

THE PARK’S FUTURE

Valarie Sarris: You were speaking earlier about the private partnership arrangement and the design of Central Park, and I think we all have an interest in it. How do you think it’s likely to play out; are people committed to public space? I think you have a more pessimistic view than we’d all like to hear, but at least we’d like to know what you think about it.

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: Well I don’t see there being a real change in the park.

 

Valarie Sarris: Despite how private interests might or might not try to affect it?

 

Elizabeth Blackmar: In other words, I think that the conservancy will reclaim governance of the park. I don’t see the political situation that would in effect restore the park to the department of public parks, Central Park or Prospect Park. That’s because of the fundraising. You could say that private fundraising could dry up, but when private fundraising dries up we'll be in another fiscal crisis as well, so I don’t know if I see the government taking back the park.

What do I see in terms of how different kinds of pressures to permit uses or not? I think that’ll always be in flux.

I am very interested that Christo is back. In 1980, they said “this is completely inappropriate, you cannot have Christo’s gates, this is not what a public park is for.” And Gordon Davis, the commissioner of the park at the time, wrote a very eloquent statement about why this is an inappropriate use of the park in 1979. Davis recently wrote a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining about how we are in a different moment, and Christo is not going to harm things.

What that reminds you is just that there’s always constituency out there. So on that level, I think there will be negotiations, but I don’t think there will be a change in the government. I just don’t see what the political process would be to dismantle the authority. It becomes a very utilitarian argument, which says basically this is the best arrangement for the park that generates the greatest good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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