In Park Plan, a New Life for Spaces Long Closed (Published 2007)

Changes for the city’s 29,000-acre park system are even more ambitious than initially detailed by the mayor in his 25-year plan for a greener New York, and include reopening the High Bridge and the McCarren Park swimming pool, officials said yesterday.

The High Bridge, the city’s oldest standing bridge, will get a $65 million face-lift over about two years beginning in 2008, said the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe.

The pedestrian bridge, which was completed in 1848 to connect Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, was shuttered during the 1960s; officials had deemed it a safety hazard because people had been dropping rocks and other objects from it onto passing boats.

The McCarren Park pool, built in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1936 and closed in 1984, is one of 11 giant swimming pools built in the city as part of the Works Progress Administration. The pool, which could accommodate 6,800 bathers, will be reduced in size by about one third and reopened as an Olympic size pool. The work is budgeted at $50 million, and officials expect it to begin this summer and take a couple of years.

Details of the city’s plan to reopen the bridge and the pool were not discussed when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined his PlaNYC initiative on Sunday, but were confirmed yesterday by the Department of Parks and Recreation.

Other elements of the $1.2 billion parks plan include planting one million new trees; working to ensure that every New Yorker will live within a 10-minute walk of a park by 2030; building lighting fixtures at 36 athletic fields to allow for nighttime play; and refurbishing portions of several large parks that have fallen into disrepair.

“It has been the perfect alignment of planets: a healthy economy and an administration that understands the importance of parks,” Mr. Benepe said.

While parks advocates generally praised the plan, they warned that the new money will mean little if more attention — and funding — is not given to maintaining the city’s parks and sports fields.

“We can meet the goal of having everyone live near a park because 75 percent of people already live within 10 minutes of parkland, but what do you get when you get to that park — and is it a park or a playground?” said Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, who was consulted by the city during the planning process. “To make it a wise investment, it must be backed up by maintenance.”

Mr. Benepe said the initiative included funds for new gardeners and workers to prune trees, an allocation that has been almost unheard of in recent years. The result is that trees in the city will be pruned every seven years, instead of the current 10 years, he said.

“I think there was a recognition that you couldn’t build new parks without maintenance money,” Mr. Benepe said. “It’s a great precedent that is being established here, and I hope it continues in future administrations.”

At least one advocate, however, was somewhat skeptical of the plan, saying it was little more than a drop in the bucket toward transforming the city’s park system, where some parks are rarely used because they have become dominated by homeless encampments, drug users and weeds 10 feet high.

“These are good individual projects, but when taken as a whole, they will have very little measurable impact on the system,” said Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Parks Advocates.

To meet its goal of having each person live within a half-mile walk to a park, the mayor’s initiative calls for opening public school playgrounds after school hours, during summers and on weekends; creating at least one new public plaza in each of the city’s 59 community board districts; and expanding the Greenstreets program, which turns street medians into miniparks. The city said it would build 400 new Greenstreets spaces by 2017, bringing the total to about 3,000.

The plan also calls for planting 250,000 new street trees, in addition to the city’s current 600,000 trees, during the next decade, with a goal of a total of one million new saplings on public and private property by 2030.

The $118 million price tag for the program includes the cost of planting each tree — from $1,100 to $1,700 apiece — and hiring 15 new forestry workers.

The most ambitious part of the initiative may be in providing play space in areas with many children but few parks.

The parks standard set by the Trust for Public Land, a private, nonprofit conservation group, is 2.5 acres of parkland per 1,000 people — a ratio that 90 percent of city neighborhoods do not meet, according to the national organization.

City officials acknowledge that New York regularly fails to meet its even lower standard of providing at least 1.5 acres of park space for every 1,000 people and one playground for every 1,250 children.

According to the city, 97 of 188 neighborhoods — most in low-income areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn and southeast Queens — have more than 1,250 children per playground.

In East Flatbush, Brooklyn, there are 56,000 people for just 4.8 acres of parks and other open space — about 0.09 acres per 1,000 people. The neighborhood’s 12,000 children share three playgrounds, the city said.

Because of the cost of land in the city, which generally prohibits building large new parks or playgrounds, the initiative relies on working with what already exists but has become unusable through age and lack of maintenance, officials said.

So instead of building new playgrounds, the plan calls for opening playgrounds that are now closed during after-school hours.

The city has focused on 290 playgrounds in neighborhoods that lack other suitable play space for some 360,000 children.

Due to disrepair, however, the city said only about 69 of those playgrounds could be opened immediately. The others need to have unsafe play surfaces and equipment replaced.