NYC has 2,300 parks; poor neighborhoods lose out
Governors IsNEW YORK land, a 172-acre oasis in the middle of New York Harbor, has become one of New York’s City’s most popular summer playgrounds, with hammocks, biking and spectacular water views.
But the island’s managers want it to be a greater resource for those who need it the most, especially during the pandemic — poor and nonwhite New Yorkers who often lack parks in their neighborhoods.
So the island, which reopened recently, has for the first time adopted a ticketing system aimed at prioritizing those parkgoers while sharply reducing the number of overall visitors to ensure social distancing.
“Our goal this year is really to make sure New Yorkers in need are able to access the island,” said Clare Newman, president and chief executive of the Trust for Governors Island, which manages the park.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has hit the poor and people of color the hardest, has laid bare another glaring inequity: park access.
In a city with some of the most famous green spaces in the world, many low-income New Yorkers live in virtual park deserts and are largely shut out of a sprawling network of more than 2,300 parks that has become more important than ever for physical and mental well-being.
Many Black and Latino families squeezed into cramped apartments in the south Bronx, one of the poorest sections of the city, have to fight for every bit of green space, while less than 5 miles away, residents of the affluent Upper West Side of Manhattan have both the lawns and ballfields in the 840-acre Central Park and the playgrounds, dog runs and waterfront views in the 310acre Riverside Park.
At the height of the pandemic, more than 1.1 million New Yorkers did not have access to any park within a 10-minute walk of where they lived, according to an analysis by the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group that helps create public parks across the country. Many of those without access were in densely packed and low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods outside Manhattan.
Nearly all these New Yorkers lost the only outdoor space they had when the city shut down playgrounds and small recreation areas to prevent the virus from spreading. Since then, playgrounds have reopened officially, but many parents said they have stayed away because of crowding.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed flaws in the park system that I don’t think we understood,” said Adrian Benepe, a senior vice president for the Trust for Public Land and a former city parks commissioner. “Not all parks are created equal. Small parks do not have room for lots of people to exercise and socially distance.”
Many large parks are heavily used by nonwhite New Yorkers. But across the city, parks in poor and nonwhite neighborhoods are smaller and have to serve far more people than in wealthy neighborhoods. The average park size is 6.4 acres in poor neighborhoods, compared with 14 acres in wealthy neighborhoods, according to an analysis by the Trust for Public Land.
Similarly, the average park size is 7.9 acres in predominantly Black neighborhoods, compared with 29.8 acres in predominantly white neighborhoods.
For Michel Cerisier, a Haitian immigrant, the closest thing his family has to a park during the pandemic is a patch of sidewalk in front of their house in a predominantly Black area of the Flatlands neighborhood in Brooklyn.
His daughter, Brianna, 6, usually plays in Prospect Park 3 miles away, but he worried that taking two buses to get there would expose them to the virus. “I don’t go to the park at all,” said Cerisier, 56, who works as a taxi driver. “It’s tough for the kids. Really tough.”
City officials said they had significantly expanded access to parks in recent years, refurbishing small parks and remaking larger parks into community anchors in the south Bronx; Brownsville, Brooklyn; and other low-income neighborhoods. They have added parks to public housing complexes and pressed more schoolyards into service as neighborhood parks.
During the pandemic, the city also opened 67 miles of streets for walking and biking. “To protect health and safety, we had to temporarily shut down playgrounds and other park amenities, but we also opened up miles of streets across the city for pedestrians to enjoy, with a focus on neighborhoods that did not have access to open space,” said Jane Meyer, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio.
A stretch along 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, now serves the overflow crowd from a busy park. “This open street has been such a wonderful respite for the neighborhood,” said Martha Lopez Gilpin, 60, an actress who walks there every day.
Still, some park advocates said many park-starved neighborhoods were left out of the city’s openstreets program. Adam Ganser, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, said that although he supported the open streets, “they were not equitably distributed based on need.”
City officials said more recently, open streets have been placed in neighborhoods with high rates of the virus and few parks.
Even though New York City’s network of parks is one of the country’s largest, it was created piecemeal as real estate developers built up neighborhoods, said Benepe, the former parks commissioner.
Small parks often lack the amenities found in larger parks, such as athletic fields, jogging and biking paths and natural areas such as woodlands.
And many small neighborhood parks have been neglected for decades, while Central Park and other well-known parks have conservancies that help pay for their operations and upkeep.
Some park leaders have increased their efforts to make large parks more accessible to poor and minority visitors.
Prospect Park, a 585-acre oasis, is building two new entrances to connect directly with lower-income communities along its eastern edge, including Flatbush and Crown Heights.
“As neighborhoods change and there’s more gentrification, I think it’s imperative that we make sure the park continues to feel open and accessible to all,” said Sue Donoghue, park administrator and president of the Prospect Park Alliance, the park’s conservancy.
Governors Island has a long working history as a training ground for soldiers, a hospital site for yellow fever and a Coast Guard base. Since opening as a park in 2005, it has offered attractions including the city’s longest slide, at 57 feet, down a hillside. It has also hosted Jazz Age lawn parties and even luxury overnight glamping in Frette robes.
Last year, the park had about 800,000 visitors, up from 8,000 when it opened.
The new ticket system will limit ferries to 5,000 people per day on weekends, or approximately half the typical ridership.
“The pinch point is the ferry,” Newman said. “Once you get to the island, it’s a huge amount of open space.”
Ferry tickets, which cost $3, are being made free to public housing residents and some community organizations.
“The pandemic has, for us, really raised an urgency to redouble our efforts to make sure we reach disadvantaged New Yorkers,” Newman said, “and New Yorkers with less access to green space.”