Just an inch of rain fell last month. The stock market tanked. Tax revenues are down and the budget is reeling. Power outages threaten. People can't bear to throw out their formerly recyclable glass and plastic.
At least there are still the parks.
For New Yorkers enduring the summer in the city -- by choice or not -- the parks are truly essential. They are both refuge and entertainment. Of course, the parks have had their share of bad news, too, with six percent less funding next year for maintenance and programs, and warnings of an additional reduction of 7.5 percent. This further shrinks a budget that was never restored from the last fiscal downturn. More funding cuts could deprive us of safe, clean and green parks just when we need them the most.
But for now, the parks still offer dozens of ways to escape the city's oppressive heat, noise, and smells without venturing on the Long Island Expressway. They also provide some of the best summer fun in town -- mostly for free. Here is just a sample of some of the things you can do in the dog days and nights of August.
Go fishing in the Harlem Meer, the lake at the northeast end of Central Park. Bamboo poles are available at the nearby Dana Discovery Center. (Fishing is also permitted at several other water bodies in the park.) Or take a history, design or ecology tour of the park run by the Central Park Conservancy.
Bring your little ones to a Forest Fairytales storytelling hour at High Rock Park in Staten Island on four days in August (718-667-7475). The City Parks Foundation also sponsors the Summer Fun recreation program for children at a number of parks and playgrounds (212-360-8290 for locations), as well as free tennis classes for kids.
You can almost imagine yourself in the country when you walk through the newly restored ravine in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The ravine is open from 1 to 5 p.m. on weekends, with guided tours at 3 p.m. And at the park's new Audubon Center you can learn to bird watch on weekend mornings, or glide through the park's waterways in a canopied electric boat.
Learn about the outdoors -- even at night -- at one of the city's ten nature centers, run by the Urban Park Rangers. You don't have to leave the five boroughs to go hiking, birding, canoeing, or stargazing.
For serious cooling, there are the city's 14 beaches and 53 outdoor pools -- all free (for now, at least). Some pools have early morning and evening lap hours for adults.
Too hot to cook dinner? Can't bear returning to your stifling apartment after a day at work? Bring a blanket, invite some friends, and have a picnic in the park.
Stay for the entertainment. Something is going on at a park almost every night of the week. Movies are screened on Mondays in Bryant Park in Manhattan. Wednesdays at Union Square until August 21, there are readings from children's books from 5 to 6, and dance performances from 6 to 7. Learn ballroom dancing outdoors on Thursdays from 6 to 6:45 at the plaza of the Dana Nature Discovery Center in Central Park, and then dance to live music from 7 to 8:30. Or go to RockNRollerblade, a roller disco party with free skate rentals, a disc jockey, and roller dance performances, from 6:30 to 9:30 at a different park each Thursday in August. Jazzmobile's summer concert series brings jazz performers to Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem from 6 to 9 p.m. on Fridays. Bring a blanket and picnic and listen to music Sundays at 4 to 6 at the Harlem Meer Performance Festival in Central Park. And on several nights of the week at Forest Park in Queens, there is theater, dance, or music.
For more information on park events and facilities, check the web sites of: the Parks department, Central Park Conservancy, Bryant Park, the Staten Island Greenbelt Conservancy, and Prospect Park Alliance.
There are also events at the Hudson River Park and the various locations of Gateway National Recreation Area.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
New York City has the largest municipal park system in the country -- some 28,000 acres, including parks and playgrounds, as well as tennis courts, ballfields, beaches, pools, recreation centers, and natural areas. A city agency, the Department of Parks and Recreation, runs this green realm. The department even has jurisdiction over the stadiums and the botanical gardens, although it doesn't operate them. It would seem that the state has little to do with parks in the city.
But every borough has at least one state park or preserve, and the state has been adding to its city holdings in recent years. City funding for parks has shrunk over the last few decades; New York City spends just half a percent of its budget on parks, less per capita than most major cities in the country. At the same time, the state has taken on an increasingly important role in protecting natural areas and creating new parkland in the city. So how much money the state spends on open space and parks -- and where it chooses to spend it -- has a significant impact on the green space and recreation available to city residents.
Money for state purchases of open space, both for the city and upstate, has come mostly from two sources. The 1996 Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act included about $150 million for open space and parks. That money has all been spent. The other source is the Environmental Protection Fund, a dedicated trust set up in 1993 that receives revenue from the state real estate transfer tax and is supposed to be spent only on environmental projects, including land acquisition and parks. The state has been appropriating about $125 million from the fund every year.
The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance analyzed how Bond Act and Environmental Protection Fund money was spent from 1996 to 2000 for all environmental programs, including open space. New York City received 23 percent of the funds available, even though the city has 40 percent of the state's population and contributes 44 percent of the revenue statewide from the real estate transfer tax.
ON-THE-GROUND RESULTS
Although the city receives a disproportionately small share of the state's open space money, state funding has been crucial in protecting some of the few remaining natural areas in the city as well as in acquiring land and creating parks along the waterfront. In some cases, the acquisitions have been added to the state's park system, operated by the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, or become nature preserves under the aegis of the Department of Environmental Conservation. The ambitious new Hudson River and Brooklyn Bridge parks are being built by a trust or development corporation run jointly by the state and city. The city has also benefited from a smaller matching grants program in which nonprofits or municipalities apply for grants for land acquisition, park improvement and renovation, wetlands restoration and other park-related projects.
The lion's share of state money for New York City parks has gone to the two large waterfront parks now being developed. The state has committed half of the $300 million cost of building the Hudson River Park, with annual appropriations of around $15 million to $20 million. Governor Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently signed a memorandum of understanding in which the state pledged $85 million and the city $65 million toward the creation of the Brooklyn Bridge Park. To avoid burdening the state and city with future maintenance costs, both parks include commercial developments -- 30 percent in the Hudson River Park, no more than 20 percent in the Brooklyn Bridge Park -- that are expected to cover their upkeep.
The state has also made smaller but significant land purchases. In late 1999, the state began the process of buying scenic Mount Loretto on Staten Island from the Archdiocese of New York for $25 million. One of the last remaining natural areas in the city, with woods, meadows, wetlands, and shore, it is now a state nature preserve. In August 2000, the state announced the purchase of two city blocks at the former Eastern District Terminal along the waterfront in Williamsburg. The land is to become a state park in a community that has had very little access to the water or open space. The purchase agreement (which, like Mt. Loretto and other acquisitions, was brokered by the Trust for Public Land), involves a partnership with New York University. The school is to develop and maintain athletic fields and a waterfront esplanade. The fields will be available to the community when not in use by the university. This July, the state acquired a tiny but key piece of land within Soundview Park along the Bronx River, where efforts are under way to create a greenway corridor.
SHORTCHANGING THE INNER CITY
State funding over the last decade will soon make a dramatic improvement in the lives of city residents who live near the new waterfront projects. But it has had far less impact on low-income minority neighborhoods -- the areas with the lowest ratios of open space per resident.
The state Open Space Plan, which guides the state's land purchases, has been criticized for neglecting the needs of urban areas. In the plan's most recent revision, urban open space advocates have made headway in increasing the priority of under-served areas, but the recommendations have yet to be realized.
There are several reasons for insufficient funding of New York City's open space needs. According to Dave Lutz, director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, a New York city non-profit, there is a consensus in Albany, in cluding among New York City lawmakers, for protecting natural areas in the Adirondacks and the wilder areas of the state. But there is no such agreement about the importance of making green space available to city residents. "The upstate people need to begin to understand the needs of the people who live in New York City," said Lutz.
Another reason, according to John Stouffer, legislative director of the Atlantic chapter of the Sierra Club, is that the pot of money for all of the state's needs is too small. "In New York we are misers when it comes to spending on open space protection and parks," he said. Stouffer noted that New York state ranks dead last of all 50 states in total environmental spending, as a percentage of the state budget and per capita, according to U.S. Census data analyzed by the Institute for Southern Studies. New Jersey, a state roughly one-seventh the size of New York with less than half its population, provided $115 million this year for open space programs, including urban parks. New York plans to spend about $40 million.
Many environmental groups credit Governor Pataki with putting a priority on open space acquisition, and hundreds of thousands of acres have been protected during his years in office. Yet he has been very conservative fiscally, and has not always matched his rhetoric with funding.
Last year, the governor refused to approve the annual appropriation from the Environmental Protection Fund (even though there was plenty of money in the fund) because of a disagreement with the legislature about how to spend that money. In this year's budget (2002-2003), the governor and legislature agreed to appropriate $125 million per year for two years (which is less than the $135 million appropriated in 2000 and the $150 million originally proposed for last year). But Governor Pataki also orchestrated an agreement to "lend" $235 million that had accumulated in the environmental fund to the general fund to help balance the state's budget. That leaves the environmental fund with just over $100 million in cash to cover this year's $250 million in appropriations. Lawmakers acted on the assumption that the money would come in by the time the state needed it and promised to repay the "loan" if the fund ran short. However, there are no guarantees or deadline for repayment.
It is not at all clear how New York City will meet the needs of its under-served neighborhoods for open space and recreation, or even the cost of maintaining its existing parks equitably in all parts of the city. The state and the city are facing enormous revenue shortfalls. Creative legislative solutions on the state level are unlikely given the dysfunctional system in Albany.
A number of people involved in park and environmental issues have expressed the view that -- given he low priority of parks in the city budget and the limit on money available from the state -- funding will have to come from some sort of new city tax. The new tax would be dedicated solely to the purchase and upkeep of parks.
All over the country, voters have been approving such proposals, including sales and property tax surcharges. According to Christopher Wells, director of the conservation finance program for the Trust for Public Land's Mid-Atlantic region, 90 percent of such ballot proposals have passed. A number of New York State counties and several municipalities have dedicated property tax surcharges to parks or raised money specifically for parks through bond issues. Here again, however, Albany has a role. If New York City were to propose a tax dedicated to the support of parks, the state would have to approve it.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
They are the Hamptons for New Yorkers without a summer house. On sweltering days, hundreds of thousands of people find cool, watery relief at the city's public beaches and pools, from Orchard Beach in the Bronx to Brooklyn's Sunset Pool.
But with 14 miles of beaches and 53 outdoor pools, many of which have been renovated in recent years, there are not enough aquatic facilities in the city to meet the demand. New York City has the lowest number of public pools per capita of the 25 major U.S. cities surveyed in Inside City Parks, a study published in 2000 by urban parks consultant Peter Harnik. New York City has .7 pools (including its playground mini-pools) per 100,000 residents, compared with Chicago's 3.3 and Boston's 5.7. Many New York City neighborhoods lack a swimming spot, and people don't tend to visit pools outside their neighborhood - although pools are generally located in the poorer neighborhoods where they are most needed. During peak times, people often wait more than an hour to gain admittance, and even though the parks department limits the number of bathers at any one time, the water can be as packed as the sidewalks of midtown. A shortage of lifeguards sometimes forces the parks department to close sections of the larger pools, resulting in more crowded water -- and lots of complaints.
The city's first public pools were floating baths -- decks around a pool with a slatted bottom -- placed in the Harlem and Hudson Rivers between 1870 and 1910. These and indoor public bathhouses were built as an antidote to the unsanitary conditions in the tenements. In 1910, the Health Department closed down the floating baths because the rivers were too polluted. Five were retrofitted to hold fresh water and operated until 1935, when Robert Moses began building pools on land with funding from the federal Works Progress Administration. Moses opened 11 enormous and beautifully ornamented pools in the summer of 1936, setting the standard for public pools in the city. Ten of these are still in use today, including Astoria Pool, where Olympic trials were conducted in 1936 and 1964. Most of the existing city pools were built from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Today New York City has 33 large outdoor pools (10 Olympic-sized), some paired with wading pools, as well as 20 mini pools in neighborhood playgrounds. During the nine-week summer season, the city's public outdoor pools are used intensively. Last year, they logged 1.1 million visits, slightly fewer than previous years because it was a cool summer.
Swimming pools are expensive to build, maintain, and operate. Budgetary restraints have worked against increasing the number of pools in New York City.
Cities with more extensive aquatic facilities spend far more money per capita on parks and recreation than New York City, according to the information compiled in Inside City Parks. Chicago, with a dedicated source of park revenue, spends $108 per resident on parks compared to the $41 spent in New York City. It has more than 100 indoor and outdoor pools as well as 24 miles of lakefront beaches for a population of 2.7 million, less than half that of New York. Cincinnati, a city of just 350,000 people, has 47 pools. Cincinnati's recreation commission spends $83 per resident; it has a separate Park Board that spends $41 per resident.
WHERE HAVE ALL THE LIFEGUARDS GONE?
There is a shortage of lifeguards all over the country, which has been attributed to various factors, including fewer qualified swimmers and the preference of high school and college students for summer jobs in the fields where they hope to work. In spite of an aggressive recruiting campaign, including visiting every public school and recruiting lifeguards from overseas, the parks department has not yet met its goal of hiring 1200 lifeguards. Over the past five years the department has been able to hire only 950 lifeguards, on average, each year, according to Liam Kavanagh, deputy commissioner for operations. In New York City, a decline in swimming programs in public schools -- both swim instruction and competitive swim teams -- has reduced the number of teens with the superior aquatic and lifesaving skills needed to pass the rigorous lifeguard test.
In recent years, the parks department has offered free swim instruction in the public pools. "We are trying to develop the next generation of swimmers," Kavanagh said. Last year, upwards of 6,000 children participated in the summer "Learn to Swim" program, and 2,000 children took classes during the school year at the recreation center indoor pools. Three years ago, the department also began organizing competitive swim teams for kids ages 6 to 18. There are 12 swim teams in the five boroughs. Kavanagh said that the department would be meeting soon with the Board of Education to try to partner with the public schools in training swimmers who could eventually become lifeguards.
Providing extensive swim instruction and working with the schools has proved successful in Chicago, which has not had a problem staffing its pools, according to Chicago Parks District spokesperson Angelynne Amores. Last year, the district started a paid sports internship program in the high schools, in which students learn to lifeguard as well as to work in other sports. More than 50 graduates of the program became lifeguards. The Park District also finds lifeguards by working closely with the police and fire departments and marine units, says Amores, offering spots to "seasoned lifeguards" -- older, experienced lifeguards whose regular jobs have flexible hours.
POOLS FOR THE FUTURE
New York City would benefit tremendously if swimming facilities were available in all of its neighborhoods. Even for those who can afford a membership in a "Y" or a private health club, swimming is not an easy sport to pursue in this city. Lap lanes are crowded, and parents wait for hours to sign their children up for limited swim classes. But for recreation and exercise -- especially in the summer -- swimming is many peoples' sport of choice.
It is unlikely that there will be a major new initiative to build swimming pools any time soon. One project in the works is an Olympic-sized indoor pool in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. In Greenpoint, the community seems to have reached a consensus on how to renovate McCarren Park pool, which has been closed for 18 years in part because of lack of agreement about how to restore it. This plan could well be postponed because of the city's financial problems, but Commissioner Kavanagh said, "It remains one of our top priorities." If the city is chosen to host the 2012 Olympics -- a long shot, at best -- the plan calls for tearing down Astoria Pool and building three new pools in a more accessible part of the park. After the Olympics, the new pool is envisioned as a "premier aquatic center" for the city within a traditional landscaped park space.
Another idea that sounds far-fetched but may turn out to be a cost-effective way to increase swimming options for New Yorkers is an effort to revive the concept of floating pools. Ann Buttenwieser, an urban planner and author of a history of New York City's waterfront, has been pursuing this goal for more than 20 years, with support from the Municipal Art Society and the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. The Neptune Foundation, which Buttenwieser established to build floating pools, now has architectural and engineering plans for a prototype pool on a barge, has raised the $2 million needed to build it, and is negotiating to locate it off the Hoboken, New Jersey, waterfront.
According to the project's architect, Jonathan Kirschenfeld, the floating pool would be 81 by 50 feet and have all amenities -- locker room, showers, bathrooms, a terrace where parents can sit and watch their kids (and enjoy the waterfront views) -- as well as self-contained electrical, waste treatment and water systems. It could move from community to community, or arrive seasonally and depart when it is not in use. Kent Bartwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, says, "Our belief is that once one or two got going, other communities would want to do it."
And those who don't want to wait for floating pools -- and have the skills and stamina -- can brave the rivers and harbor, which are much cleaner than they used to be, except after a rainstorm when there are sewage overflows. The Manhattan Island Foundation sponsors marathon swims every summer. There are seven races this year, from a half-mile "Cove to Cove Swim" off Battery Park City to a 28.5-mile marathon around the island of Manhattan.
POOL AND BEACH INFORMATION
The outdoor pools open for the summer on June 29, with public swimming hours from 11-7 daily. (Beaches opened Memorial Day.) Many pools offer lap swim, hours for seniors, and swimming classes in the early morning or evening. Admission is free. There are also 10 indoor pools in city recreation centers, which are open year-round. For information, call the Aquatics Hotline at 718-699-4219.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.