September 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 46

P R I V AT E M O N E Y, P U B L I C P A R K S

pride and joy, its 455 acres of woods
and urban beaches along Lake Erie,
is so cluttered with trash as to make
stretches nearly unusable. The state
has explored turning these parks
back over to the city.
Setha Low, an anthropology professor at the City University of New
York, directs the Public Space Research Group, which studies the
health of the public commons across
the United States. Again and again,
she sees a confounding pattern. City
dwellers love their parks and view
green space as no less essential to the
fabric of their lives than garbage pickup and good schools. Wealthy city
residents, such as in Denver, Atlanta,
Boston and New York, pay a hefty
premium to live near a greensward.
Yet year after year, funding for
all but the most prized parks tumbles downward. Parks in poor and
working-class neighborhoods, where studies
show residents are most
passionate about their
green space, have been
particularly hard-hit.
" No organized constituency speaks for
parks, " Low notes. " So
like schools and libraries, parks suffer from
chronic underfunding. "
In some cities, officials talk of parks as a
commodity fit for the
auction block. In Corpus Christi, a consultant
recommended selling off
30 " underused " parks, as
if its green inheritance
was another page in a
real-estate portfolio. In
Orange County, California, leaders turned over
By the 1970s, Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan had become a haven for illegal activity, but thanks to
the massive old El Toro
the Bryant Park Corporation, a private not-for-profit firm organized by Dan Biederman (see page 12), and
Marine Base to Lennar,
four years of intense restoration and improvement efforts, it is once again an inviting space enjoyed by
a housing developer, in
both locals and tourists alike.

There is perhaps a temptation to
assume that Paulson's gift represents
the high-water point in Gilded Age
underwriting of America's urban
parks. But that's likely not the case.
In city after city, the long march away
from public funding of urban parklands - and the turn toward corporate benefactors and money-making
schemes - has turned into a gallop.
Early 20th-century progressives
spoke eloquently of parks as the
lungs of a city, and leaders took great
pride in building up their park departments in hopes that working classes
and the poor might gambol across
glorious swathes of green. That moment is fading into history.
Nonprofit park conservancies more
and more supplant traditional park
and recreation departments. These
conservancies control public funds,
often supplemented with copious pri-

44

Parks & Recreation

vate dollars. And their leaders, many
quite wealthy, move with alacrity,
making decisions and transforming
parks in a manner of a year or two.
Harsh economic storm winds have
speeded this transition. A long recession and a stumbling recovery have
left park officials from Seattle to Baltimore to San Diego scraping for pennies. In Milwaukee, the park budget
declined for years, an audit identified
$200 million worth of deferred maintenance and officials installed a beer
garden in a park to raise revenue. In
Atlanta, park officials have closed
recreation centers and cut millions
from their budget - and already far
fewer Atlanta residents live within
walking distance of a park than in
most big cities.
The state of Ohio, having made
cut after cut in park staff, confronts
the realization that Cleveland's

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September 2013 - Parks & Recreation

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