It has been two years since Mayor Guiliani attempted to auction off more than 100 community gardens to developers. Those gardens narrowly escaped the bulldozers when the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project worked out a deal with the city to buy the land. But about 500 similar gardens (no one seems to know the exact number) remain in limbo.
Gardeners from all over the city held a rally at City Hall to protest the lack of permanent protection for most of the city's community gardens.
The gardens were originally vacant lots that had been claimed by the city for non-payment of taxes. Beginning more than 20 years ago, the city encouraged residents to clean up and plant the lots, eventually leasing them to the gardeners under the GreenThumb program, but with the understanding that it could eventually reclaim them. Over the years, however, the gardens have come to serve an important public function in their communities, which tend to be low-income, minority areas lacking parks and open space. In many cases, the gardens have been catalysts for reducing crime and turning around a block or neighborhood, as people came together to clear out trash, haul in dirt, plant flowers, and create a place for children to play and neighbors to gather.
The gardens are protected under a temporary restraining order while a lawsuit filed by State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer makes its way through the courts. The lawsuit contends that state law requires the city to conduct an environmental review when it proposes to sell off the gardens. It also claims some of the gardens have been functioning as public open space for so long that they are essentially public parkland, which cannot be sold without the approval of the state legislature. A hearing on the city's motion to dismiss the case is scheduled for May 23rd in State Supreme Court. At the hearing, the state will also argue its motion to compel the city to provide information on the gardens that it previously requested.
Meanwhile, the city has been going through the process of getting gardens ready for sale and development. If the restraining order is lifted, the city is ready to proceed with developing 50 sites, including 20 in Brooklyn and the Bronx under a home ownership program that offers a streamlined process for developers building one- to four-family homes.
City officials say that the gardeners always knew that the land could be reclaimed by the city at any time, and that the lots are needed to address the city's acute housing shortage. Garden advocates agree that more housing is essential, but claim there are hundreds of truly vacant lots in good locations that should be developed first, and that the housing being built on gardens is rarely affordable to most people who live in those communities. At the rally, speaker after speaker stressed that affordable housing and gardens are not mutually exclusive. "What we say to the Mayor, to Speaker Vallone, and to all of those who would like to be mayor: We want parks and gardens and housing, too," said Leslie Lowe, director the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance.
Last year, City Council members Kenneth Fisher and Adolfo Carrion introduced legislation that would establish a review process to protect community gardens and give gardens a way to seek permanent protection. But Council Speaker (and mayoral candidate) Peter Vallone has not yet scheduled hearings on the bill. On the state level, there has also been little action on a number of bills that would give the gardens more permanent protection or require a review process. None of the mayoral candidates have taken a position on the issue.
As for the gardens that were purchased in 1999, the usual work and politics of building a community-run green space continues. The New York Restoration Project, the organization founded by Bette Midler to clean up and maintain public spaces in New York City, will retain official ownership of its 41 gardens. Joseph Pupello, the organization's president, says the group has been getting familiar with its sites and their gardeners, as well as addressing basic liability issues, like sidewalk and fence repairs. While leaving the running of the spaces to the gardeners, it is working with them to increase the number of hours the gardens are open to the public and to build membership.
The Trust for Public Land, which helps preserve land but does not own or manage it, is working with gardeners to set up three non-profit land trusts, in the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn/Queens, to ultimately assume the ownership of the 63 gardens. It is something that has not been done before on as large a scale in other cities, according to the trust's spokesperson, Susan Clark. In addition to handling liability and insurance issues, the trust is also assisting individual gardens in democratic decision-making, conflict resolution, and increasing membership and public access. Those involved are finding it a complex and time-consuming process as gardens with their own rules and decision-making style come together to create the more formal structure of the borough-wide trusts -- "a little bit of democracy in the making," as one gardener describes it.
Anne Sounds Off
In spite of opposition by environmental groups, the city's final environmental impact statement has given the green light for ball fields to be built in Bloomingdale Park on Staten Island. Construction could begin as early as May 17 or 18.
It is understandable why politicians and residents in south Staten Island are clamoring for ball fields on a 38-acre section of the 138-acre natural area. A highway edges one side of the park; typical Staten Island-style new houses, closely built together, crowd another. Ball fields and playing spaces are in short supply because of the area's rapid growth, and the developers of housing are not required to include these amenities for the families they attract.
Many people do not understand the benefits of protecting natural areas, especially wetlands: that they soak up rainwater to prevent flooding of houses and businesses downstream, harbor native plants, and provide habitat for animals and migrating birds. Most people also do not know that clearing se ctions of native vegetation provides a foothold for weedy species, allowing them to invade the parts of the forest that are left alone. They don't realize that some local and migrating bird species nest only in the interior forest habitat of large 100-plus acre forests -- few of which are left in the metropolitan area.
Bloomingdale Park was originally purchased with state environmental protection funds to protect the watershed of Lemon Creek, and ultimately the water quality in Raritan Bay, as well as to prevent flooding downstream. Moreover, it is completely forested, with hilly terrain, poorly draining soils, and many wet places as well as numerous areas with wetland "indicator" trees, whether or not the state has officially designated the areas as wetlands. Walking around the woods (and looking at the topographical maps), it is hard to imagine where a total of ten soccer and baseball fields and basketball and tennis courts would fit, and how they would stay dry once built. Putting ball fields into this forest will involve significantly altering the terrain and cutting thousands of trees (even if many of the oldest are left, as promised). The dirt road that divides the two sections of the park will be paved, and parking spaces put in. And as anyone who has ever seen this sort of construction project knows, no matter how many promises are made by the politicians, there will undoubtedly be a great deal of unintended damage as bulldozers punch their way into the ball field sites and drag out soil and felled trees.
A study done by a consultant to the parks department found that ball fields in Bloomingdale Woods would cost two to three times as much to build as similar fields on other nearby sites. The parks department initially opposed the plan, until Mayor Giuliani silenced it and transferred the project to the Department of Design and Construction. And with parks department budgets inadequate to keep up the city's existing parks, will these high-maintenance fields end up useless and decommissioned?
Unquestionably, Staten Island's children need more sports fields (as do the children in all of New York City!). But there are several flat, well-drained sites nearby that could be made into ball fields, just as quickly and for a lot less money -- if the political will was there. Why is the city rushing ahead to build on one of its few remaining natural areas?
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.
Increasingly frustrated after a decade of Parks Department budget cuts, greening groups have begun organizing to increase their political clout. In February, the 80 groups that make up the Brooklyn Park Advocates held a rally at Borough Hall, and introduced their petition drive, which has collected 10,000 signatures so far. The coalition has been meeting with City Council members and is broadening its base to others who have a stake in the parks, from business leaders to sports leagues. Similar efforts are starting in the other boroughs as well. Citywide, the Parks Council, a nonprofit parks advocacy group, is launching its Campaign for Parks and Recreation 2001 to increase the visibility of park issues during the forthcoming election. The council has already begun informational sessions with the candidates running for city office in September, and will launch a public education campaign next month.
The goal of all these efforts is to double the city's budget allocation for parks to $300,000,000 about 1 percent of the total city budget. This would allow the city to restore basic park services, said Richard Greene, the coordinator of Brooklyn Park Advocates. "We're not talking about anything esoteric or extravagant," he said, "We're talking about essential." He noted that there are four park rangers to patrol all 406 parks and playgrounds in Brooklyn. The coalition is calling for the return of the "parkies," the neighborhood-based employees who watched over their parks and ran recreation programs. In the 1970s, there were 2,000 people in the recreation division of the Parks department, most of them working in the community parks and playgrounds. Today there are just 100 recreation employees, who staff the city's 35 recreation centers. Also needed are more park rangers, say the park advocates, as well as more staff to coordinate volunteer and education efforts, and increased horticultural and forestry services.
Since 1986, the parks operating budget, which pays for maintenance and recreational programs, has declined almost 40 percent, while fulltime staff has dropped nearly 60 percent. The city has relied on privately funded groups, neighborhood volunteers, and WEP workers to fill the gap. Nevertheless, park advocates say, neighborhood park facilities and even expensive new capital renovations are not adequately maintained. For next year's budget, Mayor Guiliani again has proposed to cut the Parks department's allocation. (He has, however agreed to assign 350 new workers to help clean up city parks because the latest Mayor's Management Report showed a decline in maintenance of small parks and playgrounds due to the loss of 2,000 WEP workers.) In the usual budget game, the City Council restores most of the cuts, which merely leaves park funding at the level to which it was cut in the early 90s. Park advocates are working to get an actual increase over existing funding. For the longer term, advocates are targeting the September elections, in a non-partisan effort to educate candidates about the importance of public parks to the communities they seek to represent, and about the need for better public funding.
Anne Sounds Off
Six years ago, Bay Ridge residents rescued a neglected 4-acre section of city parkland, cleaning it up and planting gardens of roses, lilies, and native plants. Joan Regan, one of the volunteers, says she and her neighbors do all of the work in the garden, including mowing the lawns with a home lawnmower purchased through their fundraising efforts. The Parks department has been as helpful as it could be, Regan says, given its acute shortage of funds. But volunteers can only do so much. Sidewalk and fence repairs, security, basic maintenance -- these are all things the Parks department should be doing.
There are thousands of volunteers like Regan all over the city taking care of parks and playgrounds the city won't take care of itself. Nonprofit organizations like the Partnership for Parkshelp them out with information and small grants. But for all the volunteers' hard work, they can't replace the services that a first-rate parks department should provide. Leaving the care of parks to volunteers -- and depending on private fundraising -- has also worsened the inequalities between poor and rich neighborhoods. Central Park, which is funded and run by the private Central Parks Conservancy, has set a magnificent example of what a park can be. Private funding allows Central Park to hire 81 gardeners, while the rest of the system makes do with only 28. So neighborhoods with fewer resources have ended up with the most poorly maintained parks.
Virtually every segment of the community has a stake in the parks: educators, the police, businesses, sports groups, families, senior citizens. Yet somehow, we have lowered our expectations for the park system, and by our political inaction have tacitly accepted the premise that parks can be maintained by the private sector. The growing movement to organize advocacy for the parks is good news. If all those volunteers -- as well as other community members who use and benefit from the parks -- direct some of their incredible energy toward creating a new culture of public support for our parks, amazing things could happen. 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.Â
A passerby would never guess that the empty space on three sides of a highrise on Third Avenue is an officially designated public plaza. Part of it is a block-long staircase. The rest consists of two small vacant slabs, one sunken and one raised. Everything about them screams "keep out," from the lack of seating to a forlorn row of discarded furniture and appliances.
Nearby, at the entrance to a residential building called the Future, is another official public plaza. This one is strikingly different. There are granite benches, planters filled with trees and shrubs and flowers, a drinking fountain, trash receptacles, even a sign that welcomes the public to the space.
These two places, across the street from each other in the East Thirties, illustrate the problems and potential of a special type of open space in the city. There are 503 such privately-owned "public spaces" in 320 buildings in New York, all but a few in Manhattan, and they are coming under increasing scrutiny. They owe their existence to zoning laws, passed in 1961 and amended numerous times since, that allowed developers to build taller structures in exchange for creating and maintaining plazas, atriums, passageways, and other spaces, all supposedly open to the public. Together, they amount to 82 acres, one-tenth the size of Central Park. In exchange, developers were permitted to add on an extra 16 million square feet of floor space.
Until recently, there has been no comprehensive inventory of these public spaces, and no way of telling how many were successful -- or indeed, how many were even open to the public. "It is slowly entering the zeitgeist as something that really has to be looked at," said Jerold Kayden, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, who conducted an in-depth study of the city's so-called bonus plazas together with the Department of City Planning and the Municipal Art Society. The study, Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience, looked at each and every one of the spaces (the list available online, listed by neighborhood). It concluded that 41 percent of these spaces were of marginal value, particularly those created before zoning law amendments in the mid-1970s. Moreover, it found that almost half of the buildings were not in compliance with legal requirements meant to make the spaces accessible and attractive to the public.
Critics of the current zoning resolution say that the plaza bonus, along with loopholes in the law like the one that allows the transfer of air rights from existing buildings, has encouraged the proliferation of apartment towers that have ruined the charm and continuity of many low-rise neighborhoods.
Last year, City Planning Commissioner Joseph Rose proposed a complete overhaul of the zoning code, a plan known as the Unified Bulk Program. Among many other things (such as setting the height of a building in keeping with the character of the neighborhood that surrounds it), the reforms would eliminate the plaza bonus for residential, but not commercial, districts.
Whether the zoning reform will succeed is, like so much of the city, up in the air. Many are predicting its demise because of lukewarm support from elected officials, and outright opposition from the real estate industry, although it is still moving ahead through the approval process; the City Planning Commission held a hearing last week. If the zoning reforms are approved, however, the city will be left without a mechanism for creating new open space in residential neighborhoods.
The idea of creating small urban spaces in exchange for building rights was viewed as an innovation when it was first incorporated into the New York City zoning law passed in 1961. Since then, cities all over the world have seen the benefit of this trade-off.
Urban designers see these small spaces as providing something different than the larger parks, whose missions include recreation and an experience of nature. They are, first and foremost, places for people to gather and relax. William H. Whyte, in his book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, observed, "The best-used places are sociable places, with a higher proportion of couples than you find in less used places, more people in groups, more people meeting people, or exchanging goodbyes."
The most valuable public spaces create an atmosphere that invites people in, providing them, as Whyte wrote, with "people to watch, sun to bask in, trees to sit under, water to splash and listen to." Successful spaces often have food, drinking fountains, bathrooms, proximity to shops, as well as outdoor sculpture. Some of the best spaces are indoor atriums, usable year-round.
These bits and pieces of open space provide much-needed oases from the densely built Manhattan streetscape. They are places for office workers to eat their lunch and get a breath of air; for senior citizens to sit and socialize; for shoppers to take a break; and even for busy pedestrians to stop and talk on their cell phones. They make a city more livable.
But how successful have the New York City public spaces been? The record is mixed, according to Privately Owned Public Space, which was the result of three and half years of researching dusty city files and visiting every single space. The project generated a database that will be kept up to date, and will eventually be available on the city planning department's web site.
Most New Yorkers would be surprised at some of the spaces included. How many people know that the landscaped semicircular driveways leading to East Side residential towers are bonus plazas? Extra-wide sidewalks and arcades at the edges of buildings also qualify. Certain gated plazas are supposed to be open to the public. The book has already begun to make people aware of the open space they are entitled to use.
The plaza incentive has been responsible for some of our best-used public spaces, like the Citigroup (formerly Citicorp) Building atrium and 590 Madison Avenue at 59th Street (still thought of as the IBM building). It has also produced some wonderful plazas, mini-parks really, in increasingly built-up residential neighborhoods.
The study found, however, that most of the privately owned public spaces were deficient in some way, especially those created from 1961 to 1975, before zoning amendments set higher standards. Some are forbidding open-air stretches of concrete, with no seating or other inviting amenities. These early plazas went hand in hand with the much-criticized "tower in the park" style of building. While it increased light and air, as it was intended to do, this style, exemplified by the succession of vast plazas along Sixth Avenue from 47th to 50th streets, ended up eliminating the "streetwall" and its storefronts that urban observers like William H. Whyte believed essential to a lively downtown.
But the study turned up numerous problems even with more recent plazas. Owners have removed chairs, plants and other amenities, locked gates to keep out the public, or turned plazas into parking areas or construction sites. A typical situation is "cafe creep," where restaurants appropriate public tables and chairs, making people who are not customers feel unwelcome. Very often, there are no signs informing the public that this is public space, though such signs are legally required.
Many of the problems are the result of poor compliance with the law by building owners and lack of enforcement by the city. Already, now that information is available about places open to the public and the amenities legally specified for each, efforts at enforcement have increased.
At present there are almost 50 enforcement actions in various stages, including three lawsuits filed by the city. The lawsuits target three typical types of violations. At 40 Broad Street, a downtown office building, benches, planters, and trees were removed. One Worldwide Plaza, at 825 Eighth Avenue, is charged with letting restaurants take over public chairs and tables. A residential building, Parc East Tower at 240 East 27th Street, has locked a passageway leading through the middle of the block to a mini-park and waterfall.
There has been a marked increase in the number of calls reporting violations. "We think of it as an empowerment document," says Ellen Ryan of the Municipal Art Society, who directed the research project. Members of the public with complaints about specific spaces can contact the Department of Buildings, or the Department of City Planning.
The Municipal Art Society recently organized volunteers to visit 200 of the public spaces, to update the study. The society called it the "Holly Watch" in honor of William H. Whyte, who was known as Holly, and plans to do it every year
The Unified Bulk Program proposed by Planning Commissioner Joseph Rose would eliminate the "as of right" plaza incentives in residential areas, so that developers would no longer automatically get to build extra floors in exchange for providing public space. The bonus plaza provision would be retained for residential buildings in commercial areas, by special permit, and for commercial and community buildings.
In a speech on zoning reform, Rose said, ". . . the concept of providing incentives to real estate developers to provide public open space on private properties produces largely unsatisfactory results. This is especially true in residential neighborhoods, despite repeated attempts at reform."
Many civic organizations and community boards are in favor of the reforms proposed by the Unified Bulk Program, including scrapping the residential plaza bonus. But some people argue that this is a drastic solution. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, landscape architect Thomas Balsley wrote, "if the problem is poorly designed or maintained open space, surely the solution isn't to have no open space at all." Balsley, who designed a number of public plazas, says that with better design and enforcement, poorly functioning spaces "can be pulled from the ashes and turned into spectacular public amenities."
Dave Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, an advocate for open space, says "there should be public space tucked around" to make a city more livable and more aesthetically interesting. He says, "We're about to say than an experiment that has provided Manhattan with more public space since perhaps Central Park is a failure because some owners and the buildings department failed to meet their obligations." The spaces can always be improved, he says. "But if you don't have the space, you can't go back and do it right."
List and assessment of the privately owned public spaces, neighborhood by neighborhood (in pdf format): http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/pdf/poptab.pdf