Why Parks Matter

Parks, Public Spaces and Neighborhoods

     Should I even have to make this declarative statement?  Don’t we all know the reasons?  Health and well-being data abound, economic benefits are not a secret.  There is no shortage of information for this argument.  

Infrequently made is the argument that parks are the great social equalizers.  No one is turned away.  There is no charge to get in.  This cannot be said for the cultural institutions:  museums, concert halls, theatres, opera houses.  There is an admissions charge, often steep for a family, excluding many from the benefits of a great city.  Only our libraries are equally free; you just have to be able to sign your name to a library card.  Six is about the right age.  

Riverside Park

But we have many more parks than cultural institutions in New York City.  We have 2300 – more than our fair share.  But the parks are not in the neighborhoods where the needs are greatest.  The flagship parks – Central, Riverside, Flushing Meadows-Corona, Prospect, Van Cortlandt, are easily accessible only to those living close by.  In these times subway and bus travel is hazardous at best.

“If you are looking for a neighborhood in New York City with no parks,” says Adrian Benepe, former NYC Parks Commissioner and now Senior Vice President at the Trust for Public Land, “look for a neighborhood with the word ‘park’ in its name:  Ozone, Rego, Borough.”  These neighborhoods, built solely by developers, added the word ‘park’ to lure buyers into thinking they would be moving into a park-like setting.  At the height of the pandemic, when the playgrounds were closed, 1.1 million New Yorkers did not have access to a park within a 10-minute walk from where they live, according to the Trust for Public Land.

To remedy the economic consequences there is a frantic scramble to transform commercial outdoor space.  On-street parking has given way to outdoor dining or restaurant pick-up in a bid to help restaurants and coffee shops survive.  The Center for New York City Affairs projects that 2020 could end with 500,000 to 600,000 fewer jobs than the beginning of the year with half of that jobs deficit stemming from face-to-face industries – restaurants, local retail, neighborhood services and entertainment.  Many of these changes have been made with no civic engagement and while they are amenities in affluent neighborhoods it doesn’t play the same way in less-affluent neighborhoods.  

The coronavirus and its disproportionate effect in low-income communities and on people of color has forced planners to change the way we look at public space.  It has opened our eyes of the glaring inequities of access to parks.

Governors Island 

A case in point: Governors Island.  It reopened with a new ticketing system making it easier for visitors from underserved areas.  Management already knew that most visitors came from Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope and the Upper West Side and was catering to that demographic until pushed into thinking more broadly when the pandemic hit.  Now ferry tickets will be free to public housing residents and the ferry stop to the island from Brooklyn Bridge Park has been moved to Red Hook, the location one of the city’s largest public housing projects.

Parts of Queens are woefully underserved.  In Rego Park a schoolyard behind PS139, one block wide and about as long, is mostly paved.  The few places to sit are on the edges of raised planting beds. This schoolyard is only a block or so away from a heartbreaking missed opportunity, the proposed QueensWay. 

An elevated linear park on the old rail line, QueensWay would transform a long-abandoned rail line running from Rego Park south to Ozone Park. The project, around for nearly a decade. pitted parks proponents against commuters who wanted to reconstitute the rail system, discontinued in 1962.  The debate awaited resolution in an MTA study, completed in 2018 but held back a year for release.  The study revealed the cost of rail service would be between $8 and $10 billion, sticker shock for the transportation supporters.  

Outdoor Classroom in the Proposed QueensWay

In addition to the expense, QueensWay remains politically sensitive.  It is dead at the moment, but not yet buried.  Parks proponents could not get city money to build it, nor private money (unlike the High Line) and it was sidelined due to bureaucratic inertia and lack of vision.  Nonethless, the combination of the cost to rebuild the rail system, the coronavirus lockdown, the inequities of park distribution and the looming threat of school closures should be enough to raise the call to revive QueensWay.

Supporters received a boost when the Queens Chamber of Commerce, long a proponent of improved rail service, came out in support of the park project.  Now it is up to the Mayor to provide preliminary funding.  Notoriously unfriendly to parks, he has not initiated any new parks in his administration; it will take public pressure or the next administration to push this forward. 

This is only a snippet of what city residents will face as schools try to figure out whether and/or how they plan to open.  Hybrid arrangements of half-time in school, half-time at home are being discussed everywhere.  Although there were frantic emergency measures to expand locations for health care at the height of the pandemic in New York City, the same sense of urgency is not evident regarding education.  The bureaucracies have yet to look at the potential of moving classrooms out of doors.

Parks and Schools

     While the Board of Education struggles with parceling out limited indoor space among 1 million students, the use of outdoor space for classrooms is beginning to garner attention.  It started with the press, graduated to candidates for office, and is rumored to be a rumor in the Mayor’s office. 

Ginia Bellafante in the New York Times (July 9th) and Adrian Benepe of the Trust for Public Land were among the first to see the possibilities of outdoor space for education.  Ms. Bellafante reminded readers of the tuberculosis outbreaks in the early 20th century, when school attendance was out of the question.  Open-air classrooms were run year-round on school rooftops and abandoned ferries.  Within two years of the first opening, 65 open-air classrooms were mobilized.  

Early Outdoor Class - circa 1915

We know the risk of contracting the virus diminishes out of doors.  But this fact hasn’t entered into the calculations of the city’s bureaucracy.  Mark Levine, City Council member who has chaired both the Health and Parks Committees, makes the case that “there is an emerging public health consensus that minimal transmission occurs out-of-doors, making the idea of outdoor classrooms a logical step.” 

Currently, New York City has the nations’ largest school system with more than 1 million students.  Children are not the only ones at risk.  There are more than 75,000 teachers plus an army of support personnel and security staff.  Empty office spaces and vacant buildings without windows that open are not the answer.

At hand we have the network of city parks, ideal for mobilization as outdoor classrooms.  The Parks Department response is expected.  “Everyone asks the Parks Department to do more with less funding, the liabilities at stake are not considered, nor are the laws defining use.” 

Covid Tents in Central Park

But we do have precedent in times of crisis.  After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco tent cities went up in Golden Gate Park.  In the 1936 heatwave Mayor LaGuardia advised New Yorkers to sleep outdoors in the parks.  Central Park provided space for a tented field hospital during the worst of the pandemic, using standards developed and perfected in World War II, for Covid tents.  Why not do the same for schools?  Linear parks like Riverside and Ft. Tryon transect an economic range of neighborhoods.  Riverside Park, engaged in a capital campaign to rethink the North Park, stretches six miles along the Hudson.  It would not be too difficult to identify sites for outdoor classrooms.

As with parks, public schools are also free but not necessarily equal.  Schools in affluent neighborhoods have a relatively low density and are close to major parks.  Those in the poorer parts of the city are not.  We will probably see wealthy school districts (and private schools) able to raise new money to rent additional space and achieve social distancing, while poorer school districts will have to “make do” with what they already have.

And what about the neighborhoods with no parks of any consequence?  The case for outdoor classrooms has been led in large part by Adrian Benepe of the Trust for Public Land, whose mental inventory is the repository of most of the available spaces in the city.   

In the 1940’s and 50’s Robert Moses created 275 jointly operated playgrounds.  Between 8am and 4pm the playgrounds were operated by the schools and after 4pm by the Parks Department.  There are now close to 600.  New York City and the Trust for Public Land, between 2007 and 2013, converted more than 250 schoolyards for student and community use.  NYCHA has 700 playgrounds, and many have other open spaces and enclosed lawns.  

1940s Jointly Operated Playground 

The Parks Department has 35 Recreation Centers with gyms and bathrooms.  There are 600 community gardens, some large enough to accommodate classrooms.  The Natural Areas Conservancy manages 10,000 acres of natural areas within the New York City parks system, ideal sites for science classes.

Every new schoolyard has learning gardens.  Many schools have sports fields.  There are scores of community centers, gyms, and outdoor recreation centers sitting vacant.  There are west side cruise ship piers, and piers used for art fairs, if the sides can still be raised.  The City University has campuses.  So do Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.  St. Catherine’s Park, adjacent to the old Julia Richman High School building (now home to four high schools and a middle school) has a two-acre asphalt field. 

St. Catherine's Park

Maybe it’s time to look at Transportation Alternatives troubled but innovative Open Streets Program and apply its best ideas to schools.  Adam Ganser, Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks, said “It might be possible to close some streets adjacent to small schools during school hours” and hold classes outside instead of sending kids home.  This could also work at the high school level.  The almost block-long Julia Richman building on 67th Street has only the New York Blood Center across the street.

Other than the months in which the playgrounds were closed, 99% of New York City residents lived within a 10-minute walk of a park, according to the Trust for Public Land.  But what is the density within that 10-minute walk?  Single family houses, two-family houses, apartment towers?  How many people are actually using that park?

Thus we arrive at New York’s baseline message:  Everyone should be no more than a ten-minute walk to a park.  I respectfully suggest amending that to a five-minute walk.  Heresy to the ten-minute proponents, but ten minutes is a bit of a stretch to a person pushing a stroller, or a wheelchair, or managing your own wheelchair, or trying to hurry a curious toddler, or maneuvering a walker, or using a cane, or having trouble breathing.

Paley Park

Or maybe it’s time to buy blocks of buildings to create new parks.  We have done better and worse in the past.  Paley Park was built on a sliver of land at 3 East 53rd Street, the site of the Stork Club.  It opened in 1967, occupying 1/10th of an acre, and has been in constant use ever since.  So has Greenacre Park on East 51st Street.  And you only need one building site each for these.  At the other end of the spectrum, an entire neighborhood was destroyed to build Lincoln Center.  We won’t do that again, but maybe it’s time to look at many small parks instead of the mega-parks it has been so fashionable to build.

We need creative and courageous solutions in these unprecedented times.  We saw an exodus of the affluent, leaving behind under-served communities most impacted by the pandemic and without the escape valves of neighborhood parks. 

Unfortunately, you won’t see any new thinking in the present administration.  No new parks have been started under Mayor DiBlasio, only continuation of the parks started during the Bloomberg Administration.  And the Teacher’s Union is likely to stand in the way of moving classrooms outdoors, or any innovative idea.  The work will fall to the next administration.  Scott Stringer, City Comptroller, in an op-ed in the Daily News calls for an examination of outdoor education possibilities.  I expect we will see more of this in the coming weeks.  

All it takes is a few people of courage and vision.  But the charge for innovation in dealing with classrooms needs leadership immediately and right now the group is small.  Where are the levers of change here? I doubt the Mayor will entertain this.  The City Council could force it through legislation, but that is unlikely.  The strongest voices could come from parents speaking up in an organized fashion; elected officials cannot help but respond to the collective voice of the Community Boards and the Community Education Councils.

A wave of resolutions could appear before the City Council in a matter of weeks, if mobilized by the Borough Presidents. Leadership, courage, and vision matters.

I can be reached via E-Mail at:  morrisoncatherine3@gmail.com