Snow can make parks look like heaven – and roads feel like hell. But it was a previous snowstorm that made it clear how much New York City’s parkways — which are both parks and roads — are in a weird kind of limbo.
Scenic byways prevent the proliferation of billboards |
Mayor John Lindsay had reorganized the city’s agencies so that, when the blizzard of February, 1969 hit, it was unclear whose responsibility it was to clear the parkways – and they remained unplowed for three days, paralyzing the city.
No mayor will ever make such a politically costly mistake again; the Department of Sanitation very clearly now has the job of removing snow from the parkways.
But a complicated bureaucratic system remains in place, which is causing real damage year-round.
Last year, a great stone wall in Washington Heights collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, the most visible evidence of the sinking fortunes of America’s first and once-glorious urban parkway. Last month, a deal to restore the parkway collapsed as well. Even the prospect of millions of dollars in new federal funds for the city was not enough to overcome a system set in place that values roads over parks.
Many people may hear “parkway” and just think “highway.” Others realize that a parkway is in fact a road through a park. But a parkway is not just the road itself; it is also the parkland on either side. New York City’s parkways, a monumental public works project achieved jointly in the 1930’s by FDR, LaGuardia and Robert Moses, were designed as the most extensive urban park system in the world. The Henry Hudson Parkway alone, which runs from West 72nd Street in Manhattan to the top of the Bronx, links together four major parks, nine smaller ones, countless pocket parks and great swaths of untouched nature. Even now the beauty and coherence of the vision is clear to anybody who takes the time to notice—not just the stunning natural and manmade features revealed with each curve and dip of the road, but the details that highlight the character of each section: art deco and rustic wooden guard rails, cultivated wilderness, esplanades for promenading and trails for meandering …and lovely stone walls.
It becomes harder and harder, though, to miss the damage. Concrete jersey barriers cover miles of stone walls and steel hairnets cover natural rock outcrops. Signs and billboards clutter the stone bridges of the Bronx and the skyline of Manhattan.
If that’s the motorist’s experience of the city, the resident’s is even sadder. Pedestrian tunnels and stairs that once led to the waterfront are abandoned. The expressway aesthetic spills over to neighborhoods. Huge parkway entrance signs loom over quiet streets in Riverdale. Harlem residents look out at billboards instead of the river.
Five years ago, I was one of the concerned residents who formed the Henry Hudson Parkway Task Force to reverse its fate. The way we realized this could happen is by getting the state government to agree to designate the parkway a Scenic Byway, under a special program created in 1992 to preserve the nation’s most beautiful roads. Scenic Byways are eligible for special federal funds—and not just transportation funds. When the 8.2 mile Pasadena Freeway (also known as the Arroyo Seco Parkway) was designated a Scenic Byway a few years ago, its state transportation department received a billion dollars in federal environmental funds to restore its landscape and bridges.
The New York State Department of Transportation, which administers the Scenic Byways Program, was enthusiastic about the Henry Hudson Parkway being the city’s first candidate. Besides its historic credentials, the parkway had acquired new importance. It is the site of the Hudson River Valley Greenway, the walking and bicycle trail that will eventually go from Battery Park to Saratoga, New York. Since the city and state are both pouring millions of dollars into building the greenway and revitalizing Manhattan’s west side waterfront, it made sense to include the parkway in the plan.
An example of paths and stairways under the parkways that are neglected (south of the George Washington Bridge).
It leads to the beautiful Ft. Washington Park.
But the application to make the Henry Hudson Parkway an official Scenic Byway was withdrawn. The reasons why are not known to the public: Though the agencies that make these decisions are public, they deliberate in secret.
What is known is that, like all of the city’s parkways, the Henry Hudson is an entanglement of jurisdictions. Decisions about its future are determined by a combination of agencies that meet together as the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which acts as the official regional planning body. The most important agencies within that body are the city's and state's transportation agencies. The most irrelevant agency is the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. Even though the parks department is officially a co-owner of the city’s parkways, it is not a member of the transportation council, nor is it even part of its advisory board. It has the smallest budget and the least political clout. Even if the parks department were part of the transportation council, however, it might not make a difference because the council is organized to protect the fiefdom of each member -- a rule requiring "unanimous consensus" gives each member a veto.
So, apparently, at least one of the transportation agencies involved in the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council got cold feet about the parks-oriented requirements of a Scenic Byways designation.
Parkways are designed to conform to the natural topography. Curves like this are what provide the sequence of stunning views. Unfortunately they are irresistible “straightening” projects for transportation departments in the name of “uniform [higher] speed limits” |
A scenic byway is about design guidelines. One can address the problem of graffiti in a parkway by painstakingly removing the graffiti and maintaining the beauty of the stone wall, or by quickly painting over it. One can mow the daffodils in a field so that they never come up again – or one can mow the field after it has become fallow, and keep the daffodils spreading for the next 20 years. To preservationists and parks enthusiasts, how one takes care of graffiti or daffodils makes a huge difference. But efficiency might be the by-word to those shortsighted enough to look at the parkway only as a means of transportation.
The city Department of Transportation may not want to have to keep the kind of wooden guide rails that are used along the Northern Parkway in Long Island or the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut (both scenic byways). It has its preferred way to protect stone parapets on the city's bridges -- with jersey barriers topped with chain link. The problem is compounded by the entanglement of jurisdictions. What one agency builds, another maintains. Each government agency is jointly and severally liable; even individual engineers can be held liable for projects they sign. The consequence is a hodgepodge of defensive design -- overbuilt and overpriced.
Fifty years have passed since the enactment of the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act, the nation’s interstate highway system has been fully built for a decade, and our auto companies are now in open retreat. Yet none of this seems to have loosened the grip of the highway builders over the design of New York City. Having a metropolitan planning organization was supposed to stop the city from being strong-armed by the state transportation agency. Instead it is strong-armed by four transportation agencies and authorities, each fiercely protective of its prerogatives.
The scenic byway plan couldn’t have been derailed at a worse time. Both the new New York State Transportation Bond Act and the Federal Transportation Bill contain substantial funding for the parkway. Some of the money will be used to enhance the parks and waterfront. But with no plan in place, and no declared attention to the aesthetics, much of the money may well be spent in ways that undermine the park part of the parkway.
Hilary Hinds Kitasei is a free-lance writer and founder of the Henry Hudson Parkway Task Force Â
The murder in Inwood Hill Park of Juilliard drama student Sarah Fox, who was killed in May 2004 while she was out jogging, had a chilling effect on residents’ use of the park. Tamara Ewoldt, who has lived near and run in the park for 15 years, stopped going there alone and organized a neighborhood runners’ group so people could run together.
Last July, another female jogger was assaulted in the park, escaping with injuries. Ewoldt and other residents, who want the park to be patrolled more effectively, had trouble getting information about the attack. “It’s important that local people have information about our park,” she said, “so that we can decide how we use it safely, and whether we use it at all.”
The only park for which crime statistics are available is Central Park, which has its own precinct. Compstat, the city’s highly regarded system for reporting, mapping and analyzing crime, does not identify crimes in parks. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe says that the parks, like the city as a whole, are safer than ever. But when people hear about crimes from the headlines, they feel uneasy about the places they go to play, exercise, and unwind -- the very places they feel most vulnerable.
A recently enacted law requiring the police to report felonies that occur in the parks will begin to fill the information void and may help the police and community better fight crime. “From now on when it comes to crimes in the parks, New Yorkers will no longer be left in the dark,” said Councilmember Peter Vallone, Jr., chair of the council’s public safety committee, who introduced the legislation with Councilmember Joseph Addabbo.
On signing the bill, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “This measure will continue the Administration’s commitment to open and transparent government.” The law fits with a growing trend for cities to collect, analyze, and make data publicly available, and to use it to hold managers accountable for improving city services.
Because of the technical difficulties and extra work involved, the police department initially was very reluctant to report crime in parks, as they do for the transit system and housing projects. It took two long, hard years of negotiations, led by Vallone, to reach a compromise acceptable to the police, the mayor, the council, and park advocates. The agreement phases in the reporting requirement over three years.
To begin with, the police department will provide data on all major felony crime complaints in 20 of the city’s large parks in its quarterly reports to the City Council, which can then make it available to the public. The 20 parks are being selected in cooperation with the parks department, but will likely include Inwood Hill Park. Eventually, all parks one acre or larger will be included.
The new measure has been called Parkstat, which is confusing because the parks department uses the same term to refer to its system for rating and improving park conditions.
The key to the effectiveness of the new law will be training police officers to more accurately report crimes that occur in parks. Under Compstat, the location of a crime is indicated using the nearest street address. Before, officers filling out a report had the option of reporting that the crime occurred in a park. The specific park was not named. There was no indication of whether the crime actually occurred in the park or whether the suspect was simply arrested there. Vallone said, “We have a commitment that they will improve their reporting methods.”
The parks department already uses police department crime data, running the information through the filters on its computerized mapping system to try and identify the specific parks, said Liam Kavanagh, first deputy commissioner of the parks department. They use the information internally, to coordinate their efforts with police precincts and make sure park staff is aware of criminal activity. But the information is incomplete and not available to the public. “I don’t think simply reporting on the basis of parks will in itself lead to a dramatic reduction in crime, but more information is better,” said Kavanagh. “I think it’s going to show how safe parks really are in relation to serious crime.”
Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of public information for the police department, said, “Time will tell whether it reveals any particular advantage.” He cautioned that crime rates need to be considered within the context of how many people use the park. Parks that have more visitors have more incidents of crime.
Although the police department handles serious crimes in the parks, the parks department has its own Parks Enforcement Patrol, which enforces park rules and issues summonses for offenses ranging from littering and climbing trees to defacing park property and disorderly conduct. PEP officers don’t carry guns, but their presence in the park is a deterrent to crime. According to Kavanagh, funding increases in last year’s budget allowed the department to add 60 new PEP officers, bringing the citywide total to 154 (although several dozen are assigned to recreation centers and training and are not patrolling). Even so, with more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds, and other facilities in the parks system, PEP officers are spread thin.
Park advocates hope that the crime data will shine a spotlight on parks or areas that are problematic and help focus resources where they are needed. In addition, said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks (www.ny4p.org), the citywide parks advocacy group, “The more people know the more they help the cops to deter crime.”
“The data could be used to help park managers learn what is working in one park that could be used in another,” he added. On the flip side, a sensational crime with a lot of coverage in the press can discourage people from using a park that is actually very safe, he said. “Tracking gives you perspective.”
Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.Â
In one of his last acts in office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani approved the demolition of the High Line, an abandoned elevated freight railroad running through Chelsea and the West Village. The owners of property shadowed by the hulking structure wanted it torn down. The idea of reinventing the tracks as a public open space, proposed by a grassroots group called Friends of the High Line, was a fantasy that few people gave any chance of success.
Fast forward three years. This October, the city announced the selection of a design team to make the track a public promenade, as well as the dedication of $43 million to the project, which has an estimated total cost of between $60 and $100 million. The State of New York and CSX Transportation, the railroad that owns the line, joined the city in petitioning the federal Surface Transportation Board to rail-bankthe line, which would transfer the easement to the city and allow its use as public space. If all goes as planned, construction will begin next fall. Against all odds, a crazy and impractical-seeming idea is rapidly becoming a reality.
The High Line was built in the 1930s to serve the refrigerated meat and dairy warehouses of the West Side, taking dangerous freight traffic off Tenth Avenue. Part of the line was torn down in the 1960s, and the remaining segment, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, was taken out of service in 1980. It was mostly forgotten, except by architects, preservationists and adjacent property owners.
The few people who discovered the rusting track, overtaken by weeds and wildflowers, were captivated by its solitude and mystery. Some likened it to a magic carpet ride -- a tapestry that changed with the seasons, floating two stories high through industrial precincts, just above the streets but open to the sky and river and cityscape.
In 1999, West Side residents Joshua David and Robert Hammond founded Friends of the High Lineto save the line and take advantage of a rare opportunity to create open space in an area that desperately needed it. To their surprise, they quickly gained the support of local residents, civic organizations, and businesspeople, including the owners of art galleries in West Chelsea. "The power behind the project was that it was a dream, a dream-like vision, we were making a reality," recalled David. "It seemed like something wonderful and impossible. And as soon as people got the sense that this wonderful, seemingly impossible thing was possible, it created incredible excitement."
Elected officials started coming on board, including City Councilmember Christine Quinn, who represents the area, and Council Speaker Gifford Miller. A turning point came with the election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who quickly reversed the city’s course and began the rail-banking process early in his term.
Mayor Bloomberg and Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden envision the line tying together three areas that are the focus of city revitalization efforts: the Gansevoort Historic District, West Chelsea, and the far West Side between the 30s and 42nd Street, including the site of the controversial proposed stadium complex. Mayor Bloomberg called the High Line "a beautiful new amenity that will serve as the spine of vibrant new neighborhoods on Manhattan’s Far West Side and create new economic benefits in the years to come."
A Completely Different Kind Of Park
In making their case to preserve the tracks, Friends of the High Line frequently cited the example of the Promenade Plantée, a landscaped walkway on a rail viaduct crossing the 12th Arrondissement in Paris. Reflecting the classic beauty of the city it overlooks, the promenade is a linear formal garden, a path bordered and interrupted by neatly edged beds of flowers, shrubs, and trees. The first park ever built on an elevated line, it has been a huge success, attracting many more visitors than expected and spurring the construction of apartment and commercial buildings in the surrounding area.
Although the concept of the High Line as a landscaped pedestrian walkway was inspired by its French predecessor, the design is shaping up to be something different altogether — unlike any other park and unique to New York.
"People are looking for a design that refers to the special qualities that are up there now," said David. The goal is to capture the disused track’s wildness, its grittiness, its evocation of the city’s industrial past, and especially its sense of serenity. Yet the park will need to accommodate large numbers of people, a variety of public uses, and the commercial activities that will inevitably arise in the adjacent spaces.
After narrowing down 70 proposals to four finalists, a selection committee representing five city agencies and Friends of the High named a design team led by the landscape architecture firm Field Operations and architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to create the master plan.
The team’s provocative preliminary concept looks more like a work of modern sculpture than a traditional park. It is based on parallel concrete planks that fade in and out of a landscape ranging from gravel and grasses to a more cultivated type of garden. In some sections, the volunteer vegetation and rusting metal of the existing line would remain intact. The architects envision the line as a slow, meandering path that at times dips below or curves above the tracks, with places for both quiet reflection and public activities and events.
In October, more than a hundred people came to a community input forum to view a presentation of the preliminary concept and offer their ideas, concerns, and hopes.
Most of those attending agreed that the park should be a "slow lane," a place to meander, meditate, and enjoy the views. They noted that there is already a well-used route for bicyclists and skaters just a few blocks away at the Hudson River Park. Other community concerns were safety, enough seating, connections to the river, and guarding against the encroachment of commercial activities. The design team will return to the community with an update on December 2, at the Chelsea Recreation Center.
Open Space As A Catalyst For Change
Unlike the typical development approach that throws in a park or two as a sweetener to make large new construction projects more palatable to the public, the effort to reuse the High Line starts with the premise that open space can be at the heart of neighborhood revitalization.
And in contrast to the city’s top-down plan to build a stadium and redevelop the area just to the north, which has generated tremendous neighborhood opposition, the High Line project is a model of local planning. It began at the grassroots and included the input of local residents and businesses as it evolved. According to Joshua David, there has been a remarkable and productive collaboration among Friends of the High Line and numerous city agencies, including parks, city planning, transportation, and economic development.
The Department of City Planning has put together a proposalthat weaves the High Line into a larger plan for rezoning West Chelsea. The plan aims to encourage the construction of more housing in the area, yet retain the area’s manufacturing and protect the thriving art gallery district that has emerged between 10th and 11th Avenues.
To keep light and air around the High Line, the plan would restrict the heights of adjacent buildings, while allowing their owners to sell development rights that could be used in other parts of the district. It also offers incentives for providing access to the line. The public review process for the zoning change is expected to begin in December.
Developers are starting to take interest in the area, as planners had hoped. But along with new development comes the risk of increased commercialization. The challenge going ahead is to make the High Line a true public space – not just a mall in the sky – that captures the excitement of the original vision.
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.
New York City's neighborhood parks showed a small improvement overall this year, according to the second annual Report Card on Parks released by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, although a quarter of the city's parks still have failing grades. Like last year, the city's worst performing parks are largely in the outer boroughs, while four of the ten top-scoring parks are in Manhattan.
To compile the report card, the group sent inspectors last summer to the each of the city's 195 neighborhood parks (whose size measures one to 20 acres) to rate parks in eight different categories, including playgrounds, passive recreational areas, athletic fields and courts, bathrooms, and drinking fountains. These features were graded for cleanliness, maintenance, safety and structural integrity. Attention was paid to whether repairs, lawn-mowing, painting, and other maintenance jobs were neatly and properly done.
The good news is that slightly more than half the parks received an "A" or a "B" up from 43 percent in 2003. In addition, areas where the parks department has focused capital investment in recent years - the playgrounds, pathways, and sitting areas - scored as well as they had the previous year.
But the other side of the coin is that nearly half of the city's parks were rated "C" or lower, and 25 percent received a "D" or an "F." Sixty-five percent of the parks that received an "F" in 2003 got the lowest grade again this year. The most problematic areas continue to be the bathrooms, drinking fountains, and athletic fields. Citywide, the average score for these features ranged from 52 to 66 percent.
New Yorkers for Parks found that the grades received by many parks depended on how recently maintenance crews had been there and how carefully they had done their jobs. The parks department uses roving crews that move from park to park because it lacks the resources to staff every park. In addition, most of the workers are participants in state and federally funded job-training programs, not parks staff skilled in plumbing, horticulture, or lawn care. "The maintenance is inconsistent," said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. "If you have a person for each park, a fixed position instead of roaming crews, you would see a marked improvement."
Sternberg Park in East Williamsburg, one of the ten lowest scorers for the second year in a row, illustrates the type of problems that led to poor report card scores. On a sunny day last spring, locals filled the benches to eat lunch, relax or watch their children play. But the garbage cans overflowed and trash lined the fences. The drinking fountain was choked with dirt, and the bathroom was locked. A bumpy ball field with large bare patches looked as if it had been neglected for years. A large capital investment is now slated for Sternberg Park, an expensive way for the city to compensate for the shortfall of funding for ongoing maintenance.
"While two years doesn't make a trend, if you look at the last two years of our report card, about 50 percent of the parks have received a 'C' or lower," said DiPalermo. "New York is not a 'C' city in the arts, in finance, in law. But in parks, we seem to be accepting that we are a 'C' city. And I think we fail our communities when we say a 'C' is acceptable."
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.
In the discussion about whether the city should allow protesters to rally on Central Park's Great Lawn before the Republican Convention, one issue has been left out: Where would the money come from to fix the trampled grass and plants? The New York Post was wrong when it editorialized, "Plant a new lawn. Grass seed is cheap." It requires money and skilled staff to keep a lawn green and lush. Even with ordinary use, the city's collective backyard needs frequent soil repair and reseeding. Yet New York City spends less than most major cities in the country on maintaining its parks. City funding for operating the parks has dwindled over the past two decades to less than half a percent of the city budget. That's why the lawns in many parks — those without the substantial private funding of Central Park — are little more than weeds and dirt.
This situation is unlikely to change in next year's budget, which will be finalized in negotiations between Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council this spring. With tax revenues up and increases projected for the next fiscal year, Mayor Bloomberg is proposing to increase spending in a number of areas. But just a small amount of extra money would trickle down to the parks department..
Although the numbers in the executive budget look good - $187 million in city funds to parks maintenance and operations, up from $164 million last year - the mayor is allocating about the same amount of money to parks as last year. Most of this increase reflects a shift in funding sources for the parks job training program, which is covered by state and federal funding through the Human Resources Administration. Next year, however, the city will be paying the program's supervisors through the parks department budget.
There is some real new funding, however. The mayor's budget provides money for 34 new employees to run the recently opened Chelsea Recreation Center. It is the first recreation center opened in the city in more than 30 years, offering state-of-the-art facilities and numerous activities for children and adults in an area with few parks or other places for recreation.
The budget also provides for hiring 40 new architects to work in the capital division on renovation and new construction projects.
Aside from those new items, the executive budget sticks mostly to the usual game where the mayor eliminates previously funded services only to restore them in negotiations with the City Council, although there are slightly fewer cuts from the current budget than in recent years. This tactic diverts attention from the larger issue of the need for significant increases for a department that has lost more than half of its fulltime staff over the past 15 years.
Unlike last year, when funding cuts originally proposed by the mayor would have closed the Queens and Prospect Park zoos, Mayor Bloomberg allocated $9.2 million to the Wildlife Conservation Society for the city's three zoos. He also put $6.3 million in the budget for seasonal park employees, about half the money needed to keep staffing at the current level during the months when the parks are most heavily used. However, he eliminated all funding for street tree pruning, while adding $6 million for fighting the Asian long-horned beetle to make up for cuts in federal funding.
More than 200 people, organized by the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, descended on the City Council offices in April to lobby for the restoration of tree-pruning and seasonal worker funding, and also to ask their council members to allocate an extra $20 million to the parks department for gardeners, tree pruners, enforcement officers, and other fulltime professional staff. "The city is in a better economic position," said Christian DiPalermo, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks. He noted that when the economy improved in the early 1990s, the parks operating budget was never restored. Sacrifices were necessary after 9/ll, he said, but "we don't want to be the forgotten child again."
"We've shown from our Ernst & Young study how parks investment pays its way," said DiPalermo. The study found rising real estate values and higher tax revenues in neighborhoods where parks were restored and continued to be maintained. "That's the economic side," he said. "One just needs to look at Central Park to understand what investing in parks means to the quality of our city life."
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.
For six months in 2003, Florence Lugo cleaned parks in Lower Manhattan while participating in the Parks Opportunity Program, a paid welfare-to-work program that has trained thousands of welfare recipients, mostly women, over the past three years. "The program helped motivate me to get off welfare and look forward to the future of having a permanent job," she said. But even though she received excellent evaluations, she said, so far she has been unable to find long-term work.
Lugo's experience was typical of the participants surveyed in a study of the program conducted by Community Voices Heard, an organization of low-income people. The group campaigned to change the city's Work Experience Program, which required welfare recipients to do unpaid work in exchange for welfare benefits, into the paid Parks Opportunity Program, which is the largest public transitional employment program in the country.
Most of the program participants maintain and clean the parks, although a small percentage work at playgrounds and recreation centers, in security, or doing clerical tasks. The program pays participants for four days of work and one day of job search assistance and training provided by the parks department. Workers in the first two phases of the program earned from $9.38 to $12.50 an hour for jobs that lasted up to 11-1/2 months, and were members of District Council 37, which represents park workers. In the current phase of the program, positions last six months, pay $7.50 an hour and no longer have union status.
The study, Wages Work!, questioned 101 out of a random sample of 200 people who participated in the first phase of the program in 2001. It found that receiving a paycheck changed their feelings about work. Most survey respondents said they enjoyed their work, developed confidence, and were motivated to find a full-time job. Almost 93 percent said they would have liked to continue in a permanent job in the parks. But the program was less successful in helping participants make the leap to the workforce. Only 15.5 percent had gotten permanent jobs, and only 22 percent had held at least one job since working in the parks.
The study found that the training and education offered to participants in addition to the experience gained on the job was limited -- mostly focused on job readiness and search skills like good work habits, interviewing, and appropriate dress. Many participants were not offered the opportunity for more specific training, like civil service exam preparation and commercial driver's license training. More than 90 percent of survey respondents said that job search assistance could have been improved.
Because the fulltime staff of the parks department has continued to decrease, there are few jobs available using the skills participants are learning on the job. The report recommended that the transitional program offer a variety of positions in different city agencies and non-profits, and that it provide more education, including toward a high school equivalency diploma, as well as more specialized skills training. It also concluded that the program needed to offer more outside supports, like childcare, transportation money, and helping participants keep benefits like food stamps and health insurance to bridge the gap between the program's wages and what it really costs to make ends meet.
Bob Garafola, Deputy Commissioner for Management and Budget at the Department of Parks and Recreation, said that the department now offers many more training opportunities and internships including in building maintenance, computers, and even phlebotomy -- than it did when the program first started. The department is also looking to develop new courses, like a certified nursing assistance program in connection with Lehman College. He said that job placements have tripled since last year, with 1000 participants getting jobs since July 2003.
Aside from its goal of helping people off welfare and into long-term jobs, the Parks Opportunity Program has been essential for maintaining the city's 28,000 acres of parkland. As the parks fulltime staff has declined -- from 5,400 in 1980 to around 1,900 in the next year's proposed budget -- workers in the job training program are doing the bulk of the maintenance in the parks. According to figures from the Independent Budget Office cited in the study, in fiscal year 2004 there were 2,496 participants in the current transitional program, as well as 446 Work Experience Program workers, but just 850 fulltime parks employees assigned to park maintenance. The transitional workers are paid through the Human Resources Administration, using federal and state funding.
"If the program is ended, the parks department could not function," said Christian DiPalermo, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks, the parks advocacy group. But his group sees the reliance on temporary workers paid by funding outside the parks department budget as "a way that the city has been able to not invest in parks." He said, "It's a Band-Aid for the parks department, because what's underneath the Band-Aid is the lack of full-time employees."
DiPalermo also said, "It's very difficult to manage people who come in every two weeks and stay at most six months," although he thinks the department does an admirable job. "Does that model work well in the private sector? I would tend to think not."
However, Deputy Commissioner Garafola noted that the parks department has a tradition of seasonal jobs and has a lot of experience managing short-term workers. "Everyone always wants more fulltime staff," he said. "You take the resources you get and try to make the most of it, and I think we've been pretty successful in doing that."
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.
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The plans might seem like science fiction -- making parks out of a garbage dump, abandoned railroad tracks, old gas tanks -- but they are real. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced his intention to convert the former Fresh Kills landfill into a 2,200-acre park. He negotiated an agreement with Keyspan to buy the site of the Elmhurst gas tanks and make it a neighborhood park. He endorsed the idea of greening the High Line, a 1.4-mile abandoned elevated track in Chelsea. (See story on plans for the High Line).
New York City is experiencing a renaissance in parks, and it is not just because of the mayor. Thanks to tens of thousands of park lovers, innovative parks and greenways are going up throughout the city and along the waterfront. At the same time, parks in neighborhoods that long had been ignored are being restored.
While some New Yorkers dream of making sports fields, esplanades and gardens out of underused islands and piers, former dumps and parking lots, others gleefully imagine the amazing parks and recreation facilities that would be built if the city wins its bid to play host to the 2012 Olympics.
Since 1991, the parks department has spent more than $1.6 billion in capital funding to fix up and build parks, and it is now developing plans for more spending over the next decade. The paradox of this unprecedented revival of the parks system in New York is that it is happening when the parks department has lost more than half of its full-time staff over the last 15 years; when its annual operating budget in the past decade has decreased by more than a third; when 20 percent of neighborhood park received a failing grade from the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks. So how can there be so much park restoration and innovation at the same time that there is so little public funding for upkeep and when some parks still suffer from neglect?
One answer is that New Yorkers have a sense of ownership of their public parks that simply did not exist 30 years ago. Some 60,000 New Yorkers have registered as park volunteers. Just under half of all the parks in the city now have their own support groups, made up of local people and organizations that raise money and serve as stewards and activists on behalf of the parks they have adopted.
Citizen involvement is, of course, the heart and soul of community gardens. Residents carved these patches of green from the rubble of abandoned lots and stood in front of bulldozers to save them. Some of the nearly 200 gardens spared in a 2002 settlement negotiated by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer could eventually be added to the park system.
That same spirit that fostered community gardens is present among the residents and civic groups in downtown Brooklyn, who organized, educated, planned, lobbied and sued for 15 years to get a park on the waterfront -- and in the alliance that is aiming to string together new parks and greenways to bring the Bronx River and its waterfront back to life. (See related stories on Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Bronx River.)
Citizens are not doing this alone. Non-profit, community-based conservancies have been raising money to fix up and maintain -- and sometimes even manage -- major parks in Manhattan and some of the other boroughs. And this movement has revived and even created some small parks as well. The New York Restoration Project, for example, has brought in private money to create a boat house and other facilities at Swindler Cove park in upper Manhattan. (See related story on Swindler Cove)
The Bloomberg administration wants to take this private involvement even further. It has launched an unprecedented effort to attract private money for all kinds of public services, including parks. The parks department has established special funds -- or endowments -- to which people can donate to pay for the improvement or maintenance of specific gardens or other facilities. Individual private donations, some given in memory of people, helped build a $1 million maintenance endowment for the recently restored Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, as well as for several smaller neighborhood parks.
Shortly after becoming mayor, Bloomberg suggested that the city might sell naming rights to facilities in the park. While critics complain this could commercialize the few remaining places where one can go to escape advertising, the initiative recently led to a $10 million gift from Carl Icahn for a track and field stadium on Randall's Island, part of a large planned recreational complex that will include 65 new and refurbished sports fields and a water park. The centerpiece of the complex will now be named Icahn Stadium.
At the same time that the city is exploring such controversial revenue-producing schemes, it wants to increase traditional corporate and foundation largesse. A program recently launched by the non-profit City Parks Foundation and Partnerships for Parks, using $25 million raised from corporations and foundations, focuses on improving 16 neighborhood parks in Harlem, Highbridge, Astoria and Red Hook. The city is committing some capital funding toward restoring these parks. The private funding pays for hiring community organizers and initiating activities like concerts, sports instruction and puppet shows in the parks. The overall aim is to build constituencies that will use, take care of and fight for their parks.
The parks department and park advocates have also sought help from different levels of government and an array of public agencies, opening the way to a wider range of expertise and funding. The alliance working on the Bronx River, for instance, includes almost a dozen government agencies, such as the city and state transportation and environmental agencies, the National Park Service and even the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
The city hopes that federal transportation dollars will continue to provide much of the funding to complete the 350 miles of greenways planned for the five boroughs. And the National Park Service, which manages historic forts on Governors Island, and a new city/state public corporation are collaborating on the planning of new parks on the island.
Another strategy involves the creation of independent city/state authorities. In 1998, Governor George Pataki created Hudson River Park Trust, a state-city partnership, to plan, design, construct, operate and maintain the large new part on Manhattan's West Side. The state and city have committed half of the $400 million cost of building the Hudson River Park.
In 2002, Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg formed the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation to create the new park on the downtown Brooklyn waterfront. To construct the park, the state committed $85 million to the project, and the city will provide $65 million.
Once Brooklyn Bridge Park opens to the public, however, the source of funding will shift. Commercial activities, possibly including stores, restaurants and an amphitheater, are supposed to cover maintenance costs. A similar arrangement will support all of the city's part of Governors Island, which is slated for educational and recreational use, as well as the Hudson River Park.
This strategy, though, remains unproven. No one can be certain that the commercial development will generate enough income to maintain the parks. And, although cafes, sports facilities and other amenities can attract and entertain people, too many can overwhelm the park. "It's got to be at the right scale, the right balance, from a parks-first perspective, not a revenue-generating perspective," said Robert Pirani, director of environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association and the director of the civic coalition monitoring the development of a plan for Governors Island.
The parks department continues to seek new opportunities to attract parks-related businesses. Operators of these concessions, including golf courses, skating rinks, restaurants and catering halls, pay a fee to operate in the park and often must also pay for improvements to the facilities they run. "There are a number of odd corners where you can have an appropriate form of business that provides a service and generates funding," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. These could include marinas, ferry services, restaurants, boat rentals and sailing schools -- "stuff you see in the waterfronts of Chicago and other cities," he said.
Concession revenues do not go to the parks department, however, but to the city?s general fund. New Yorkers for Parks, the advocacy group, wants the parks department to keep its concession revenues -- as long as it also gets to keep its regular city funding as well.
But not all parks advocates agree. Depending so much on concessions, they say, could encourage the parks department to use public space for recreational activities that many people cannot afford. Dave Lutz, director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, points out the parks devote a sizable amount of land to golf -- which costs a lot to play but generates concession income for the city -- when the city has a shortage of facilities for other sports.
Making a park available for special, private events also can produce revenue. This has been highly successful in Bryant Park. Although an assessment on nearby property owners originally paid for much of its restoration and maintenance, revenues from concessions and special events now cover all of the park?s annual operating costs. The downside, however, is during some events, such as Fashion Week, ordinary New Yorkers cannot use the public park.
Unquestionably, both future and existing parks will rely on support from private individuals, organizations and businesses. But can private sources really provide New Yorkers with the park system they want -- and need?
The increasing importance of the private sector will not diminish the need for adequate public funding from the city, state and federal governments. On the contrary, as the parks department expands and improves facilities, it will need increased resources to meet the public's rising expectations. Faced with this, some parks advocates say parks need a steady, consistent source of funds. And so, they want the city to establish a so-called dedicated funding stream, such as a specific tax for green space, for the park system.
Whether such a guaranteed source of funds ever becomes a reality, some mix of public and private funds will be required for parks to thrive. Joseph Pupello, president of the New York Restoration Project, likens the park system of the future to a diversified portfolio with a mix of public parks, privately run parks and "parks that live in between." He said, "We have to keep inventing new partnerships and models that enable both the private sector and the municipal department to grow."
Certainly, private support will remain a key part of the equation. "There's no going back on the idea that these open spaces demand public-private partnerships of various kinds, whether they be community involvement or private commercial interests in parks supporting them," said David Rivel, executive director of the City Parks Foundation. "The future of parks is increasingly going to be about balancing those things."
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The plans might seem like science fiction -- making parks out of a garbage dump, abandoned railroad tracks, old gas tanks -- but they are real. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced his intention to convert the former Fresh Kills landfill into a 2,200-acre park. He negotiated an agreement with Keyspan to buy the site of the Elmhurst gas tanks and make it a neighborhood park. He endorsed the idea of greening the High Line, a 1.4-mile abandoned elevated track in Chelsea. (See story on plans for the High Line).
New York City is experiencing a renaissance in parks, and it is not just because of the mayor. Thanks to tens of thousands of park lovers, innovative parks and greenways are going up throughout the city and along the waterfront. At the same time, parks in neighborhoods that long had been ignored are being restored.
While some New Yorkers dream of making sports fields, esplanades and gardens out of underused islands and piers, former dumps and parking lots, others gleefully imagine the amazing parks and recreation facilities that would be built if the city wins its bid to play host to the 2012 Olympics.
Since 1991, the parks department has spent more than $1.6 billion in capital funding to fix up and build parks, and it is now developing plans for more spending over the next decade. The paradox of this unprecedented revival of the parks system in New York is that it is happening when the parks department has lost more than half of its full-time staff over the last 15 years; when its annual operating budget in the past decade has decreased by more than a third; when 20 percent of neighborhood park received a failing grade from the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks. So how can there be so much park restoration and innovation at the same time that there is so little public funding for upkeep and when some parks still suffer from neglect?
One answer is that New Yorkers have a sense of ownership of their public parks that simply did not exist 30 years ago. Some 60,000 New Yorkers have registered as park volunteers. Just under half of all the parks in the city now have their own support groups, made up of local people and organizations that raise money and serve as stewards and activists on behalf of the parks they have adopted.
Citizen involvement is, of course, the heart and soul of community gardens. Residents carved these patches of green from the rubble of abandoned lots and stood in front of bulldozers to save them. Some of the nearly 200 gardens spared in a 2002 settlement negotiated by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer could eventually be added to the park system.
That same spirit that fostered community gardens is present among the residents and civic groups in downtown Brooklyn, who organized, educated, planned, lobbied and sued for 15 years to get a park on the waterfront -- and in the alliance that is aiming to string together new parks and greenways to bring the Bronx River and its waterfront back to life. (See related stories on Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Bronx River.)
Citizens are not doing this alone. Non-profit, community-based conservancies have been raising money to fix up and maintain -- and sometimes even manage -- major parks in Manhattan and some of the other boroughs. And this movement has revived and even created some small parks as well. The New York Restoration Project, for example, has brought in private money to create a boat house and other facilities at Swindler Cove park in upper Manhattan. (See related story on Swindler Cove)
The Bloomberg administration wants to take this private involvement even further. It has launched an unprecedented effort to attract private money for all kinds of public services, including parks. The parks department has established special funds -- or endowments -- to which people can donate to pay for the improvement or maintenance of specific gardens or other facilities. Individual private donations, some given in memory of people, helped build a $1 million maintenance endowment for the recently restored Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park, as well as for several smaller neighborhood parks.
Shortly after becoming mayor, Bloomberg suggested that the city might sell naming rights to facilities in the park. While critics complain this could commercialize the few remaining places where one can go to escape advertising, the initiative recently led to a $10 million gift from Carl Icahn for a track and field stadium on Randall's Island, part of a large planned recreational complex that will include 65 new and refurbished sports fields and a water park. The centerpiece of the complex will now be named Icahn Stadium.
At the same time that the city is exploring such controversial revenue-producing schemes, it wants to increase traditional corporate and foundation largesse. A program recently launched by the non-profit City Parks Foundation and Partnerships for Parks, using $25 million raised from corporations and foundations, focuses on improving 16 neighborhood parks in Harlem, Highbridge, Astoria and Red Hook. The city is committing some capital funding toward restoring these parks. The private funding pays for hiring community organizers and initiating activities like concerts, sports instruction and puppet shows in the parks. The overall aim is to build constituencies that will use, take care of and fight for their parks.
The parks department and park advocates have also sought help from different levels of government and an array of public agencies, opening the way to a wider range of expertise and funding. The alliance working on the Bronx River, for instance, includes almost a dozen government agencies, such as the city and state transportation and environmental agencies, the National Park Service and even the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
The city hopes that federal transportation dollars will continue to provide much of the funding to complete the 350 miles of greenways planned for the five boroughs. And the National Park Service, which manages historic forts on Governors Island, and a new city/state public corporation are collaborating on the planning of new parks on the island.
Another strategy involves the creation of independent city/state authorities. In 1998, Governor George Pataki created Hudson River Park Trust, a state-city partnership, to plan, design, construct, operate and maintain the large new part on Manhattan's West Side. The state and city have committed half of the $400 million cost of building the Hudson River Park.
In 2002, Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg formed the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation to create the new park on the downtown Brooklyn waterfront. To construct the park, the state committed $85 million to the project, and the city will provide $65 million.
Once Brooklyn Bridge Park opens to the public, however, the source of funding will shift. Commercial activities, possibly including stores, restaurants and an amphitheater, are supposed to cover maintenance costs. A similar arrangement will support all of the city's part of Governors Island, which is slated for educational and recreational use, as well as the Hudson River Park.
This strategy, though, remains unproven. No one can be certain that the commercial development will generate enough income to maintain the parks. And, although cafes, sports facilities and other amenities can attract and entertain people, too many can overwhelm the park. "It's got to be at the right scale, the right balance, from a parks-first perspective, not a revenue-generating perspective," said Robert Pirani, director of environmental programs at the Regional Plan Association and the director of the civic coalition monitoring the development of a plan for Governors Island.
The parks department continues to seek new opportunities to attract parks-related businesses. Operators of these concessions, including golf courses, skating rinks, restaurants and catering halls, pay a fee to operate in the park and often must also pay for improvements to the facilities they run. "There are a number of odd corners where you can have an appropriate form of business that provides a service and generates funding," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. These could include marinas, ferry services, restaurants, boat rentals and sailing schools -- "stuff you see in the waterfronts of Chicago and other cities," he said.
Concession revenues do not go to the parks department, however, but to the city?s general fund. New Yorkers for Parks, the advocacy group, wants the parks department to keep its concession revenues -- as long as it also gets to keep its regular city funding as well.
But not all parks advocates agree. Depending so much on concessions, they say, could encourage the parks department to use public space for recreational activities that many people cannot afford. Dave Lutz, director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, points out the parks devote a sizable amount of land to golf -- which costs a lot to play but generates concession income for the city -- when the city has a shortage of facilities for other sports.
Making a park available for special, private events also can produce revenue. This has been highly successful in Bryant Park. Although an assessment on nearby property owners originally paid for much of its restoration and maintenance, revenues from concessions and special events now cover all of the park?s annual operating costs. The downside, however, is during some events, such as Fashion Week, ordinary New Yorkers cannot use the public park.
Unquestionably, both future and existing parks will rely on support from private individuals, organizations and businesses. But can private sources really provide New Yorkers with the park system they want -- and need?
The increasing importance of the private sector will not diminish the need for adequate public funding from the city, state and federal governments. On the contrary, as the parks department expands and improves facilities, it will need increased resources to meet the public's rising expectations. Faced with this, some parks advocates say parks need a steady, consistent source of funds. And so, they want the city to establish a so-called dedicated funding stream, such as a specific tax for green space, for the park system.
Whether such a guaranteed source of funds ever becomes a reality, some mix of public and private funds will be required for parks to thrive. Joseph Pupello, president of the New York Restoration Project, likens the park system of the future to a diversified portfolio with a mix of public parks, privately run parks and "parks that live in between." He said, "We have to keep inventing new partnerships and models that enable both the private sector and the municipal department to grow."
Certainly, private support will remain a key part of the equation. "There's no going back on the idea that these open spaces demand public-private partnerships of various kinds, whether they be community involvement or private commercial interests in parks supporting them," said David Rivel, executive director of the City Parks Foundation. "The future of parks is increasingly going to be about balancing those things."
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This year is the 40th anniversary of the federal Land and Water Conservation Act, a visionary mechanism for protecting the country's natural areas and enhancing state and local parks and recreation. Although most people have never heard of this source of federal funding, they have probably enjoyed its benefits when visiting a national park or wildlife refuge or a state or local park.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund has funded state and local park and recreation projects in almost every county in the nation and protected seven million acres of wilderness and wildlife habitat. The associated Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program has provided $230 million to local governments from 1978 to 2000 for park rehabilitation and maintenance and recreation programs in the inner cities.
Although New York state and city have not gotten as large a share of these funds as some other parts of the country, these two federal programs have helped pay for many of the parks and programs that New Yorkers know and love. According to Joshua Laird, chief of planning for the New York City Parks department, during the height of funding in the 1970s, the department received about five million dollars a year through the state grants program of the land and water fund.During this period, Urban Park and Recreation Recovery grants for New York City projects ranged up to $1.5 million a year. A $794,000 urban park grant in 1979 helped establish the Urban Park Rangers (Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe's first job at the department). More recently, the city received a $300,000 grant in 2000 to renovate the St. James Park House in the Bronx and a $1 million grant in 2002 to restoration the pavilion in Columbus Park in Lower Manhattan.
As important as these funding mechanisms are for protecting and maintaining the nation's natural and recreational space, they have often been accorded a low priority in Congress and the amount appropriated has fluctuated over the years. Spending from the two funds has almost never reached the level authorized, $900 million a year for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and $725 million over five years for Urban Park and Recreation Recovery. Most recently, the ballooning federal deficit has led to large cuts in appropriations from the funds.
HOW THE FUNDS WORK
Funded with the receipts from federal offshore oil and gas leases, the Land and Water Conservation Fund was meant to be a consistent, dedicated source of money for the country's land conservation and outdoor recreation needs. Urban Park and Recreation Recovery was supposed to direct federal assistance in a similar way to recreation facilities and programs in distressed urban areas. In reality, Congress appropriates money for the funds as part of the annual budget process, and land conservation and urban recreation compete for appropriations with every other discretionary domestic program.
Land and water funding is divided into two parts. One part goes to the federal land management agencies to purchase land for conservation and recreation. The other goes to the states, which must provide matching funds. The states then distribute grants for various state and local projects. In New York State, the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation administers the grants. For Urban Park and Recreation Recovery grants, local governments apply to the National Park Service.
A BROKEN PROMISE
After minimally funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund and Urban Park and Recreation Recovery throughout most of the 1980s and 90s, in 2000 Congress enacted a landmark bipartisan agreement that promised to set aside an increasing amount of money each year for six consecutive years in a new, larger fund it called the Conservation Trust Fund. That fund was earmarked for spending on parks, recreation, and other conservation programs, including the Land and Water Conservation Fund and Urban Park and Recreation Recovery. By 2006, the land and water fund was supposed to be fully funded at its authorized level of $900 million.
But as the Bush administration turned a budget surplus of $238 billion in 2000 to the current deficit of $300 billion, the two funds lost out. In 2002, during behind-the-scenes budget negotiations, Congress reneged on its agreement and dismantled the Conservation Trust Fund. Funding for the land and water fund went from $573 million in FY2002 to $270 million in FY2004; urban parks went from $30 million to zero.
POTENTIAL FOR MORE FUNDING
The federal government supports other municipal needs, from education to transportation. Significant federal funding for parks would recognize the importance of parks to the economy and quality of urban life, as well as their role in supporting other national priorities, like education and health.
Even with a projected $500 billion deficit, Congress still finds money for a lot of projects. Land conservation and especially urban parks seem to be a low priority right now, but state governments, local advocates, and national groups are working to change that.
In March of 2003, New York State Governor George Pataki revived a task force he had set up 1998 to promote the importance of the Land and Water Conservation Fund in protecting the state's natural resources and outdoor recreation. New York State Parks Commissioner Bernadette Castro organized the support of the state's congressional representatives, all of whom signed a letter supporting higher appropriations for Land and Water Conservation Fund state grants and Urban Park and Recreation Recovery.
Conservation, recreation, and park groups, including Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation, The Trust for Public Land and the City Parks Alliance, are working to educate Americans about the importance of the federal land conservation and urban park programs and to get full funding for the larger Conservation Trust Fund.
Alan Front, Senior Vice President of the Trust for Public Land, noted that the two funds are not monolithic programs so much as a mosaic of the needs of hundreds of places. "In the picture of declining support, a huge bow wave is being created by needy, meritorious projects with a passionate constituency that desperately wants to see them done," he said. "If a constituency on the ground -- folks who are supporting individual projects -- recognize the importance of federal funding that can help protect those places, it can be a very powerful force."
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.
A dump truck heading north crashed through an elevated highway at Gansevoort Street, accompanied by a 60-foot slab of highway that came tumbling to the ground. The accident was a shocker, and it set off a chain reaction that has resulted, almost exactly 30 years later (the accident was on December 16, 1973), in communities throughout the city seeking to reclaim their waterfront from the highways that had cut them off from it.
Out of that movement has come the Hudson River Park. The waterfront transformation embodied in Hudson River Park was the largest physical change in waterfront land use since the early days of the Industrial Revolution when the machine age ran roughshod over agriculture and never looked back. Now thirty years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, what have we learned?
1) Dramatic and even positive change doesn't come without a fight. In this case, an entire generation has fought over the future of the west side of Manhattan. The construction of what was officially called the Miller Elevated Highway during 1929-1932 launched 40 years of waterfront highway expansion between the tip of Manhattan and the Upper West Side. The first stretch ran between Chambers and West 46th Street. Over the next two decades extensions were made to West 72nd street and south to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Based on the current proposals for the western edge of Ground Zero that would spend as much as $1 Billion on a short tunnel you might say that the Highway Age is alive and well.
After three decades of organizing, advocacy, and lobbying, the Hudson River Park is being pieced together over some 400 acres spread out downtown. Some would say the highway, with three lanes southbound and as many as five northbound, still won the fight. But in looking at where this traffic comes from and where it goes, the giant traffic generators such as the Passenger Ship Terminal or Chelsea Piers illustrate lesson two
2) Don't let private interests take over.
Nothing is as simple as "development" or "not." Rather, the unique environment of the waterfront suggests that all development that happens along the river should directly relate to the water itself. Cruise ships, sure. Film studios and exhibition space, why here? Sure, the park is more than 400 acres -- on paper. But considering the fact that nearly 80 percent of the area consists of submerged land, it becomes clear that there is not a lot of space to begin with. As with any public space issue, once there are fees imposed, and one must pay to play, then that becomes physical space that will always have a price tag attached to it. And these prices are not affordable to most New Yorkers.
3) The river should be seen as the center of the park, not the edge.
Fortunately, the waters have been discovered by a new generation of stewards who want to protect the river, but also want to use it. Even in the coldest weather, rowboats called Whitehall gigs and kayaks (some hand-built) are launched from Pier 40/ Houston Street or Pier 63 Maritime. In the warmer months, its not unusual to see swim caps turning up to catch a breath anywhere along the shore.
The re-awakening to the river is just the latest stage in our society's forty-year effort to clean up the environment. Finally, we are seeing how a river reborn can become a central part of a community's recreation and open space diet for daily life. At the River Project on Pier 26, the touch tanks are filled with real Hudson River critters, fish crabs and seahorses show the next generation of Tribeca denizens that most of the action in the park actually occurs beneath the surface of the water.
The feeling of openness at the water's edge can have a tremendously refreshing impact on stressed-out city dwellers. Take one look out across the river during the height of Seasonal Affective Disorder, otherwise known as SAD (or the Holiday Blues), and you'll feel better.
Governor George Pataki recently signed a law making the entire Hudson River a no-discharge zone (meaning boats cannot flush their toilets into the river) and now the challenge is how to enable a park to create as many on- and in-water opportunities as possible. After all, it's not simply a park it's a river.
Now, thirty years into this waterfront transformation it is clear that when the time is ripe, communities must come together to roll back the highway and the railroad to reclaim what is rightfully theirs, the waterfront. The improvements happening along the west side of Manhattan are striking, sure, but we shouldn't wait before we make strides that are equally dramatic in underserved areas such as Sunset Park and the South Bronx. We've made a good start with the Hudson, but we can't forget that it's just that, a start.
Carter Craft, an urban planner, is program director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.