Whoa! Not so fast on horse park deal

Over the last 50 years, we who love our parks have had to fight hard to keep New York City’s green spaces sacred. After years of work, we hoped that we had finally convinced government that parkland is not just vacant city-owned property, but a precious necessity.

With the mayor’s and the City Council’s proposed deal to relocate carriage horses — a private industry — within a renovated public building inside Central Park, we realize we must always be vigilant.

New York City’s parks are precious shared resources that give all New Yorkers and many visitors the respite we all need. As Frederick Law Olmsted famously said, parks provide us with “a sense of enlarged freedom.” As Enrique Peñalosa, mayor of Bogota, Colombia, has put it, “parks allow us the pursuit of happiness” so necessary to our democratic society.

The carriage-horse deal struck by the mayor, City Council and Teamsters union and being considered for passage by the Council, would, over time, reduce the number of carriage horses from 164 to 75; the horses would ultimately be housed in a rehabilitated stable in Central Park.

That might sound like an elegant way to get the horses off city streets. But from our perspective, it risks compromising a beautiful communal space at the heart of Manhattan that means a great deal to the people of the city.

Central Park is the most important open space in New York City and the grandmother of all city parks in the United States. It offers tranquility to the millions of New Yorkers and tourists who visit every year. It is a landmark — and so is the historic stable building where the mayor seeks to relocate the horses.

We should not take lightly the idea of permanently installing a private business, with public dollars, in a public building.

The question we must all ask: Is this the highest and best use of that part of the park and that historic facility?

The city has not released a figure for how much renovating and restoring the stable will cost taxpayers, but it will undoubtedly be expensive. Because the park is landmarked, the building cannot be demolished. It would need a major redesign and renovation. Some estimates place the cost at a minimum of $25 million.

Throughout our park system, I can think of many better uses for $25 million in capital spending. Using the city’s own figures, we know that money could replace play equipment in 50 to 100 highneed parks. Or fully restore St. Mary’s Park in the South Bronx.

For $15.3 million in 2013, the Upper West Side got a fully refurbished Parks Department recreation center with an indoor, year-round swimming pool, cardioexercise facilities, a computer room and more.

Finally, New Yorkers need to be able to consider how the stable may change a park user’s experience, and how it will impact the infrastructure of the park itself. Will the traffic of horses going into and out of the stable affect recreational activities on the surrounding roads? How will the park handle the increased traffic from horse trailers and waste removal?

The answers matter. We hope the City Council will postpone the legislation until more information is available.

We need to know not whether this is a convenient way for the mayor, animal rights activists and carriage-horse proponents to resolve a long-running dispute, but whether this is the best thing for New Yorkers who treasure the beauty, tranquility and historical resonance of Central Park.

Postpone a decision on the mayor’s reform plan until we can get some tough questions answered