Why Parks Matter, Part 1

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.  

"Why Parks Matter, Part 2" takes this on.  More to come...

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