Aligning City Forest Management by Engaging Community Partners in New York City

New York City contains 10,000 acres of forested natural areas, 8.5 million residents, and dozens of organizations dedicated to improving the condition of natural areas. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) manages the majority 7,300-acres of natural area forests through hands-on work and contracts overseen by the Division of Forestry, Horticulture and Natural Resources. Additional capacity to manage and steward NYC Parks’ forest resources is created through nurturing community organizations by the non-profit Natural Areas Conservancy (NAC). Here I discuss how NAC’s Conservancy Engagement Program is aligning forest management under NYC’s forest management plan to care for the forest

Engaging New York City Volunteer Stewards Through Shifting Forest Management Goals

The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) manages 7,300-acres of natural area forests by hands-on work of professional staff and volunteer stewards. Through NYC Parks’ Stewardship program, trained staff engage over 8,000 volunteers annually, many of them working in natural area forests removing invasive plants, planting, and formalizing trails throughout the city. Here we discuss the evolution of Parks’ community stewardship through a highly publicized tree planting campaign, the campaign’s conclusion and its newest approach to forest management

Monitoring Forest Restoration Activities in NYC Parks

The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) owns 30,000 acres of property in New York City, 12,000 acres of this is natural areas, including 7,300 acres of forest. These forests have been monitored and managed since the Natural Resources Group was founded in 1984. The forests experience a variety of threats: some threats are a legacy of past land use and development, while others are continuous. Monitoring forest management practices has been occurring for decades and has taken many forms, including site-specific monitoring of restoration outcomes and system-wide monitoring to understand overall health and ecological trajectory. This case study contextualizes the various forms of monitoring and describes a recent and ongoing shift in monitoring protocols

New York State and New York City Must Take Drastic Measures to Increase All New Yorkers’ Access to Quality Greenspaces

(Excerpt) Consistently, elected and appointed city government officials around the United States, despite recognizing how important parks are to cities, have expressed that they would cut park funding before other essential services when a city’s budget is limited. For example, New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation (“Parks Department” or “Department”) has seen extreme budget limits. The Parks Department’s limited budget means that most communities do not receive the financial support needed to maintain their local parks. Historically, this has impacted lower-income areas more severely because these areas generally receive less public and private funding for parks, leading to less access to greenspaces. This lack of access to greenspaces—especially in low-income areas—is an important issue because there are many environmental, psychological, social, economic, and physical benefits associated with a community’s access to greenspaces. Furthermore, even when funding is received by a community, it is piecemeal and not enough to address the community’s pressing need for greenspaces and parks. Both the overall lack of funding and the piecemeal approach to limited funding create large discrepancies in access to greenspaces based on a community’s socioeconomic status

Supporting Our Parks: A Guide to Alternative Revenue Strategies

"Supporting Our Parks: A Guide to Alternative Revenue Strategies", a study carried out by New Yorkers for Parks during 2008 and 2009, presents a flexible strategy for addressing the chronic maintenance and operations budgeting shortfall in the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) system. This study offers "reforms in action": a menu of strategies that exist in various parks across the country and can be mixed and matched to develop a broader portfolio of revenue sources than is currently available to DPR. These strategies are suited to the system level, to categories of parks, and can also be creatively and meaningfully applied to individual parks

Charter of the City of New York (Partial Draft)

This document is a partial draft of the Charter of the City of New York. All of the chapters are dated with the exception of Chapter 2. Listed below are the chapters included in this document. If the chapters are dated, the date is listed next to the corresponding chapter. Chapter 2 Council President Chapter 5 Comptroller; 6/17 Chapter 8 City Planning; 6/19/89 - 11:00 A.M. Chapter 13 Procurement; 6/19/89 Chapter 15 Property of the City; 6/20/89 Chapter 21 Department of Parks & Recreation; 6/14/89 - 8 PM Chapter 27 Board of Standards & Appeals; 6/20/89 Chapter 29 Department of Ports & Trade; 6/20/89 Chapter 47 Access to Information; 6/18 Chapter 49 Officers & Employees; 6/17 Chapter 59 Department of General Services; 6/20/89 Chapter 61 Department of Housing & Preservation; 6/14/89 7PM Chapter 69 Community Districts & Coterminality of Services; 6/17/89 Chapter 70 City Government in the Community; 6/17 Chapter 71 Department of Transportation; 6/14/89 Chapter __ Financial Information Services Agency; 6/1

Introducing a Longitudinal Study of Community Gardeners and Gardens in New York City

For almost a decade, the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation GreenThumb program has collected data about hundreds of New York City community gardens citywide to understand how these gardens function. Building on a data set that includes surveys and interviews conducted periodically with garden representatives since 2003, GreenThumb and USDA Forest Service researchers have conducted a new round of community garden interviews examining membership, programming, partnerships, and motivations for gardening. This comprehensive study of the largest community gardening program in the United States aims to understand the evolving role of community gardens in New York City. The study asks: From 2003-2011, is gardeners’ motivation for creating and participating in community gardens persistent or changing? How do the use and social functions of community gardens evolve or remain the same? What sort of programs and community events are held in gardens? How has garden membership changed over time? Is membership increasing, decreasing, or staying the same? Who participates in gardening in neighborhoods with changing demographics? During the summer of 2011, structured interviews were conducted by phone with representatives from a sample of 102 community gardens for which survey data existed from 2003, 2007, and 2009. These research findings will help assess the ways in which New York City community gardens have evolved and can continue to grow in the future

Concluding Remarks

Shira Goodman is the Executive Director of CeaseFirePA, a statewide organization to take a stand against gun violence. She has extensive experience in the nonprofit world and joined the organization following ten years as a public policy advocate working for better courts in Pennsylvania and a career in labor law. She is involved in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and American Bar Associations, and serves on the board of the Legal Intelligencer and several community nonprofits. Thomas Farley is Commissioner of Health for the City of Philadelphia. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Farley was Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. As Health Commissioner, Dr. Farley advocated for innovative public health policies, including making the city’s parks and beaches smoke-free, prohibiting price discounting of cigarettes, raising the legal sales age of tobacco to 21, capping the portion size of sugary drinks sold in restaurants at 16 ounces, and restricting the burning of air-polluting dirty fuels to heat buildings. He is coauthor of Prescription for a Healthy Nation (Beacon Press) with RAND Senior Scientist Deborah Cohen, and author of Saving Gotham: A billionaire mayor, activist doctors, and the fight for 8 million lives (W.W. Norton)

Arte y Regeneración Urbana en Nueva York. El Proyecto Público de Doris C. Freedman

[EN] Given its positive economic, social and urban impact, even with low-cost or low-tech materialization, the urban creativity encouraged by the arts is of great interest today. This narrative reviews one of the most prolific careers in this regard addressing the pioneering work by Doris C. Freedman. The late 1960s and the 1970s, in the context of two financial crises, saw a groundbreaking effort to formalize innovative artistic programs that recycled the obsolete city and integrated local communities in the processes. Doris C. Freedman was the first director of NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Public Arts Council, and leader of the organization City Walls. These institutions promoted an unprecedented improvement of the public urban life through the cultural action. Such experiences led Freedman to the conception of her last project, the relevant and, still, ongoing Public Art Fund of New York City. This article focuses on her early professional years, when she began and consolidated herself in the task of legitimizing art as an urban instrument for shaping the city. This research provides a contextualized critical analysis on Freedman’s less-known experimental projects before the foundation of the Public Art Fund, enabling an extraordinary source of inspiration for a current creative city-making.[ES] Debido a su positiva repercusión económica, social y urbana, incluso con una materialización de bajo coste y escaso desarrollo tecnológico, la creatividad urbana fomentada por las artes es de gran interés en la actualidad. Este texto revisa una de las trayectorias más prolíficas en este sentido, abordando el trabajo pionero de Doris C. Freedman. A finales de la década de 1960 y en la de 1970, en el contexto de dos crisis financieras, se produjo un notable esfuerzo por formalizar programas artísticos innovadores que reciclaran la ciudad obsoleta e integraran a las comunidades locales en sus procesos. Doris C. Freedman fue la primera directora del NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, Public Arts Council, y una de las líderes de la organización City Walls. Estas instituciones promovieron una mejora sin precedentes de la vida pública urbana a través de la acción cultural. Tales experiencias llevaron a Freedman a la concepción de su último proyecto, el relevante y todavía vigente Public Art Fund en la Ciudad de Nueva York. Este artículo se centra en sus primeros años profesionales, en los que se inició y consolidó en la tarea de legitimar el arte como instrumento urbano para conformar la ciudad. La investigación proporciona un análisis crítico contextualizado sobre los proyectos experimentales menos conocidos de Freedman antes de la fundación del Public Art Fund, facilitando una singular fuente de referencias para una regeneración creativa de la ciudad actual. Carrascal Pérez, MF. (2021). Art and Urban Regeneration in New York City. Doris C. Freedman’s Public Project. VLC arquitectura. Research Journal. 8(1):97-118. https://doi.org/10.4995/vlc.2021.12709OJS9711881Ault, Julie. Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. First ed. New York: The Drawing Center, 1996.Ballon, Hilary. The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon Schuster, Inc, 1982.Bogart, Michele H. Sculpture in Gotham. Art and Urban renewal in New York City. London: Reaktion Books, 2018.Brown, Lance Jay, ed. Grant Recognition Program. The National Endowment for the Arts. New York: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 1980.Carrascal Pérez, María F. "City and Art: Cross-dialogue on Space. New York in the 1970s." PhD diss., idUS, Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla, 2015. https://idus.us.es/handle/11441/39112Carrascal Pérez, María F. "The Share Use of the Cityscape. The extraordinary case of SoHo." Revista Telón de Fondo, no. 24 (2016): 227-255. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (UBA) Argentina. http://www.reia.es/REIA1112_04_WEB.pdfChapin, Louis. Platforms for Design. New York City: Arts and Business Council, Public Arts Council and Municipal Art Society, 1975. Public Art Fund Archive. Fales Library NYU, Downtown Collection, Subseries II.B: Public Arts Council Projects, Box 9, Folder 1-4.Columbia University Libraries, Digital Collections. Real Estate Record and Guide. Vol. 201-205 (1967-1970). Accessed July 3, 2015. http://rerecord.cul.columbia.eduDane Bernbach, Doyl. Street Art/N.Y. A Photo Essay. New York City: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1968. Public Art Fund Archive. Fales Library NYU, Downtown Collection, Box 7, Folder 7, Mixed materials 31142050717092.Davidson, Cynthia C., ed. Anyplace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.Everything Happening in Lower Manhattan, "Louise Nevelson Plaza." Accessed October 20, 2012. http://www.downtownny.com/louisenevelsonFlint, Anthony. Wrestling with Moses. How Jane Jacobs took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City. New York: Random House, 2009.Foster, Hal, Rosalind E. Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames Hudson, 2005.Freedman, Doris C., and Kyle Morris (with the participation of Joan K. Davidson). City Walls a New Kind of Public Art. New York City: unpublished text. Public Art Fund Archive. Fales Library NYU, Downtown Collection, Box 2, Folder 20, Mixed materials 31142050717001), 2.Freedman, Doris C. Introduction to Neighborhood Street Festivals. New York City. New York: New York City Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration's Department of Cultural Affairs, 1969.Freudenberg, Nicholas, Marianne Fahs, Sandro Galea, and Andrew Greenberg. "Changes in living conditions, The Impact of New York City's 1975 Fiscal Crisis on the Tuberculosis, HIV, and Homicide Syndemic." American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 3 (March, 2006): 424-434. http://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ar cles/PMC1470515/ https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.063511Gilmartin, Gregory F. Shaping the City. New York and the Municipal Art Society. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1995.Goldberger, Paul. "Doris Chanin Freedman, 53, Dies; Cultural Leader Headed Art Fund." The New York Times, November 27, 1981. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/27/obituaries/doris-chanin-freedman-53-dies-cultural-leader-headed-art-fund.html.Indergaard, Michael. "Beyond the bubbles: Creative New York in boom, bust and the long run." Cities 33 (August 2013). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.07.001Kayden, Jerold S. Privately Owned Public Space. The New York City Experience. New York: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2000.Krauss, Rosalyn. "Sculpture in the Expanded Field." October 8 (Spring 1979): 31-44. https://doi.org/10.2307/778224Lynch, Kevin. Echar a Perder. Un análisis del deterioro. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2005, 104. First ed. Wasting Away. An Exploration of Waste: What it is, How It Happens, Why We Fear It, How to Do it Well. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 199.Maderuelo, Javier. "El arte de hacer ciudad." In Arte Publico Naturaleza y Ciudad, edited by Javier Maderuelo, 15-52. Madrid: Fundación Cesar Manrique, 2001.Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space. Crime prevention through urban design. New York: Macmillan, 1972.NYC Gov, Percent for Art. "About Percent for Art." Accessed July 3, 2020. http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dclapercentforart/about/about.pagePeracca, Ronald M. Jr. "Louis Nevelson Plaza (A Park in Lower Manhattan)." New York City: unpublished. Public Art Fund Archive. Fales Library NYU, Downtown Collection, Subseries VI.A: Exhibitions and Projects (1977-2009), Box 37, Folder 28.Reiss, Julie H. From Margin to Center. The spaces of Installation Art. New York: MIT Press, 2001.Rosen, Nancy. "Public Art: City Amblings." In Ten Years of Public Art 1972-1982. New York, Philadelphia: Public Art Fund, Falcon Press, 1982.Sandler, Irving. Untitled. New York City: Public Art Fund, 1966. Public Art Fund Archive. Fales Library NYU, Downtown Collection, Box 8, Folder: 10, Mixed materials 31142050716979.Secchi, Bernardo. "Le condizioni sono cambiate." Casabella 48 (January 1984): 8-13.Senie, Harriet. Introduction to Projects and Proposals, New York City's Percent for Art Program. New York: New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, 1988.Stern, Robert A. M., Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman. "Death by Development." In New York 1960. Architecture and urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial, 88. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997.Stevens, Carol. "4 Graphic Design Firms, 3 Foundations, 2 Transportation Authorities and A Corporate Benefactor." Print magazine. New York: Print (January/February 1977).Ursic, Matjaz. "'City as a work of art' - Influence of public art in the city." Theatrefit. Accessed July 3, 2015. http://www.theatrefit.org/perch/resources/art-in-the-city-bunker-2014-ursic.pdfWaterside Plaza. "Unique History, The Only Residential Towers East of the FDR." Accessed Jun 2, 2015. http://www.watersideplaza.com/about/?p=viewPage.jsp&id=101&did=108Watersideplazafilms, "The Building of Waterside Plaza." Accessed July 4, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUnncNVbaR

Preserving Nature in New York City: NYC Parks’ Forever Wild Program

Urban biodiversity has increasingly been recognized as providing multiple local, regional, and even global benefits. In New York City (NYC), conservation and planning professionals in the Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) pursued biodiversity protection through the creation of a “Forever Wild” program in 2001, which designated and aimed to protect 8,700 acres of the largest, most ecologically valuable natural areas across City parkland. In 2018-2020, NYC Parks’ Natural Resources Group (NRG) expanded the program’s extent, resulting in 2,500 acres added to the Forever Wild program, for a total of over 12,300 acres. These additions reflect new acquisitions to the Parks system as well as an acknowledgment of the ecological importance of smaller patches of habitat. By prioritizing the conservation of habitat at the scale of the Parks system, the Forever Wild program enabled tackling some of the scale mismatches that often challenge urban ecosystem management. Over the past two decades, this program has highlighted the value of habitat conservation within NYC Parks, enabled the reduction of natural resource impacts from construction projects in or near Forever Wild areas, and included hundreds of acres of ecological restoration. At the same time, the program has faced constraints and challenges due to competing priorities for limited public land in NYC. Because the program does not confer any regulatory or statutory power, its effectiveness has waxed and waned under different administrations, each with their own priorities. To meet this challenge, NRG has aimed to make information about Forever Wild areas, the program, and its intent widely available within the agency and to the public. NRG has worked to coordinate with other parts of the agency to anticipate and better manage conflicts while protecting biodiversity. Still, upholding the program’s conservation goals in the face of continued threats remains an ongoing challenge. More recently, the need for outdoor recreation during the COVID pandemic has given new visibility to natural areas in NYC. NYC Parks will continue to rely on the Forever Wild program to care for these areas while also facilitating their appropriate use