Political Exercise by Lawrence D. Brown

Author:Lawrence D. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

PARKS AND RECREATION

New York’s concrete jungle is studded with parks and green spaces, large and small, that offer opportunities for walking, biking, sports, and after-school programs. Everyone loves parks (which occupy about 14 percent of the city’s land area), and “lower crime, improving park conditions, and a growing city” have encouraged ever-heavier use of them.37 In the early 1980s Central Park welcomed about 12 million visitors but suffered roughly one thousand crimes per year. In 2017 visits had risen to 42 million and crimes had fallen to fewer than one hundred per year.38

The universal affection for parks, however, turns them into big green Rorschach tests that invite conflict over their character and contents. Where should they be located? Should policy emphasize the construction of new parks or the repair of older ones? What should be the relative priority and placement of, say, walkways, playgrounds, lawns, pools, pavilions, gardens, rest rooms, and benches (the latter a mixed blessing for active living aficionados given that, according to one survey, 61 percent of U.S. park-goers call themselves “sedentary”).39 And how much does size matter? Although very small parks need work “desperately,” concentrating on them, said Tupper Thomas, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, is “not a good idea.” To make an impact on a community, the focus should be on “midsized parks. Having a beautiful park nearby, a place where you can meet up with friends or go for a run, is essential.”40

The city’s more prominent parks, moreover, are battlegrounds on which proponents of pedestrians and cyclists ally in the fight to limit cars. Although Transportation Alternatives has long argued for a complete ban on cars in the parks, its executive director praised as a “great leap forward” the announcement by Mayor de Blasio in 2015 that major portions of Central Park and Prospect Park would henceforth be off limits to cars on weekdays as well as weekends, thus creating “safe zones for kids to play in, for bikers, for joggers,” and for others who want to “enjoy the park in peace.”41 Peace cannot be perpetual, however: parks are also sites of skirmishes between cyclists and pedestrians over how car-free space should be apportioned between them.

The complexities inherent in making policy for parks are aggravated by governance arrangements little less diffuse than are the expectations parks evoke. To make policy—and raise money—the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) works with various nonprofit conservancies, advocacy groups, private donors, partnerships, funds, trusts, “Friends of,” and alliances; with local public officials (notably borough presidents and members of the city council, who can allot discretionary funds to parks in their jurisdictions); with community groups; and with consultants, architectural and design firms, and researchers.

Public agencies other than DPR also get into the act. Parks are important to the greenness that the Department of Environmental Protection seeks to promote, may figure in the design and maintenance of housing under the control of the New York City Housing Authority, are loci of instruction and recreation for school children the

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