How to Fix New York City's Parks

Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux

In an ideal world, the city would robustly maintain its own seventeen hundred parks without private donations. But that’s unlikely to happen—particularly not as the park budget stretches to accommodate newer parkland on difficult marine and brownfield sites, and has to react to natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. A tithe, however, is not the only way that private money could make its way to smaller, poorer neighborhood parks.

Why shouldn’t we all have the chance to be John Paulsons, at a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars a pop, giving to the parks and playgrounds in our own backyards via a network of Neighborhood Parks Conservancies? We would leverage our inherent narcissism to do some good for our daily lives, and the lives of others. The pitch: give to the park you visit every day, rather than the one you go to a couple of times a year.

Last Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the appointment of the planner Mitchell Silver as his new parks commissioner. The announcement was held not at one of the marquee parks of the Bloomberg era—the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Williamsburg waterfront—but at the inland and significantly less photogenic Seward Park, on the Lower East Side.

One of the first topics that the Mayor raised at the event was equity, a theme echoed in the congratulations of parks activists and advocates like Tupper Thomas, the former head of the Prospect Park Alliance and now the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. Her statement read, “The opportunity before Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Silver is complex, but golden: creating a more equitable park system for all New Yorkers.”

Park equity is a relative newcomer to the roster of issues that New York City leaders must have a position on. The issue gained relevance last year, after State Senator Daniel L. Squadron introduced legislation, still before the state senate, that would take twenty per cent from the budgets of the “well-financed conservancies” and redistribute it to poorer parks, matching these “contributing parks” to “member parks.” De Blasio endorsed the bill then but stopped short of reiterating his support on Friday, instead referring to the idea as “creative.”

At the time, the leaders of those well-off conservancies, such as the former parks commissioner Adrian Benepe and advocacy groups including New Yorkers for Parks, reacted with dismay to this idea, saying that those funds are needed by the wealthier parks. They also said that the proposed plan would discourage donations like the hedge fund manager John Paulson’s hundred-million-dollar gift to the Central Park Conservancy—which manages the park just down the block from his house.

The Reuters columnist Felix Salmon argued that all private funding for public parks is inequitable, shaping park-building priorities to suit development interests. He suggested that, for transparency’s sake, the public should pay for public parks. Which would mean that the city would have to return to pre-fiscal-crisis-level funding for the Parks Department, or at least, as New Yorkers for Parks has suggested, be given a discretionary capital fund to help the parks most in need.

In an ideal world, the city would robustly maintain its own seventeen hundred parks without private donations. But that’s unlikely to happen—particularly not as the park budget stretches to accommodate newer parkland on difficult marine and brownfield sites, and has to react to natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. Squadron’s tithe, however, is not the only way that private money could make its way to smaller, poorer neighborhood parks.

Why shouldn’t we all have the chance to be John Paulsons, at a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, or ten thousand dollars a pop, giving to the parks and playgrounds in our own backyards via a network of Neighborhood Parks Conservancies? We would leverage our inherent narcissism to do some good for our daily lives, and the lives of others. The pitch: give to the park you visit every day, rather than the one you go to a couple of times a year.

The city’s center of gravity has been shifting away from Manhattan for some time, creating alternative cultural, institutional, and recreational hubs in the outer boroughs. If you have children, you are likely to operate within a much smaller circumference on weekends. But even if you don’t, destinations like Smorgasburg, the ballfields at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Rockaway Beach, and Barretto Point Park provide plenty of leisure options without touching Manhattan. In summertime, why go all the way to Central Park from Brooklyn when you have Governors Island? We stay in cities not just for the big cultural institutions but for smaller shared spaces; why buy your own climbing structure when there’s one right down the block, with more kids, too? Wouldn’t you give something to clean up that park, to plant a lawn for picnicking on that bare field, for benches on which to eat lunch?

The neighborhood conservancies would help to pay for maintenance and to set up weekend volunteer projects. They would also assist neighborhoods in thinking strategically about their park and open-space needs. Every playground in a ten-block radius doesn’t need the same mail-order climbing structure for the same age kids. Every park doesn’t need to be for kids at all. Dog owners have already organized to push for canine corners in many areas. The newspaper readers, the sunshine sitters, the weekend athletes should all receive consideration, too. When they are looked at as parts of an open-space catchment zone, rather than as individual entities, different sets of needs will out.

Of course, one could argue that this system could quickly become as inequitable as the old one, in the manner of richer and poorer public-school parent-teacher associations. If the parents have the means to give, there will be art and music; if not, the kids are often out of luck. The solution to this problem, as with the P.T.A.s, is to create alliances—not between conservancies but between adjacent neighborhoods across the Mayor’s “two cities” divide. It would make sense, for example, to combine Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Red Hook under a single conservancy, with the donated money to be spent equally, and volunteer labor to be spread equally, among all the parks in those areas. The economics here would not be trickle-down but levelling-up, creating cleaner, safer, more appealing spaces for people living in a variety of housing.

As Mayor Bloomberg did his victory lap last year, parks and open space were identified as among his major accomplishments. He was an early supporter of the High Line and, watching that success, his administration worked hard to make both sides of the East River waterfront and Governors Island happen. The administration could do worse than to take each category of Bloombergian, Manhattan-centric mega-projects and transform them into a smaller-scale, outer-borough initiatives. But even if De Blasio commits more public funds to the Parks Department, as he should, there will still be unmet needs. Let’s invest, both publicly and privately, in making our neighborhoods better for everyone. We may not all have a view of Prospect Park, but we can all have a tree, a bench, a patch of green to be proud of.

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