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Chapter One
Near Death
It was obvious when Gordon Davis and I settled on the name “Conservancy” what a long way we had to go toward realizing the new organization’s mission goals to make Central Park clean, safe, and beautiful once more. To get a sense of the park’s dire condition when the Conservancy was formed in 1980, it is necessary to turn the clock back to 1965, when John Vliet Lindsay was elected New York City’s 103rd mayor. With the good intention of energizing his administration with new talent, Lindsay appointed as parks commissioner Thomas Hoving, who was then curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum. One might have thought that Hoving would approach the job with the perspective of a historical preservationist. Instead, he chose the path of radical showmanship.
Hoving’s Happenings
Although a scion of the establishment, Hoving was eager to dethrone the old guard. Aligning himself with the vibrant hippie era of psychedelic drugs, mass rock concerts, student riots, and Vietnam War protests, he shook things up from the day he took office. Acting as impresario, he led Central Park into its Events Era. With a well-developed instinct for publicity, he announced that his administration would make “an all-out attack on a kind of repetitive, conservative design associated with the Parks Department since the Depression days of the W.P.A. that critics have alternately called naive or Neanderthal.” Proclaiming that “we’re boiling up a creative pot,” he announced that “Moses men” (employees whose employment dated to the prior regime of Parks Commissioner Robert Moses) who were not protected by their civil service status would be dismissed. In their place he assembled a staff whose ages ranged from twenty-four to thirty-four, his own age. While previously the only women employees in the Parks Department’s headquarters in the Arsenal were secretaries, now Mary Perot Nichols, an editor at The Village Voice, was hired by Hoving to manage press relations.
Hoving also hired Henry Stern, a thirty-year-old lawyer who would himself become parks commissioner one day, as executive director and counsel, with the mandate “to bring back the opportunity for imagination, taste, and creative design that existed in the nineteenth century.” With this laudable goal in mind, he persuaded George Delacorte’s Make New York Beautiful foundation to underwrite a contract with Milton Glaser’s Push Pin Studios for new park signage. He invited Pratt, Columbia, and other schools of architecture and landscape architecture to engage students in studio projects involving innovations in park design. Hoving also met with community leaders in East Harlem to say that from now on there would be town-hall meetings to hear what kind of parks people wanted.
Famous as an ironfisted political czar who brooked no opposition, the recently dethroned Moses now had a brash foe who was his equal in terms of arrogance. More used to being insulting than insulted, Moses was unable to respond with a withering retort when Hoving told him to his face, “Your design is absolutely appalling and you never gave a damn for the community.” Again sounding the trumpet of the angels, Hoving proclaimed, “We’ve got to get back to the concept that a park is a work of art.” To further this perspective, he appointed an architectural historian, Henry Hope Reed (1916–2013), as curator of Central Park, an unsalaried advisory position.
Helped by citizen protest, Hoving quashed the proposed encroachment on the park by A&P heir Huntington Hartford, who sought to donate a café, a large two-story structure that was to be sited by the Pond near the Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street entrance. When Hartford complained, “Moses suggested the location, and he is a very great man . . . He knew a hell of a lot better than anyone else,” Hoving replied, “We just have to be resolute about some things. One, two, three—bang!”
Lindsay and Hoving’s most significant contribution to Central Park was to introduce a ban on motorized vehicles. Announced as an experiment on March 1, 1966, this initiative set off a protracted fight with the traffic commissioner, Henry A. Barnes. In April Barnes agreed to compromise by permitting traffic closings for the sole purpose of bike races. In spite of this concession, which was enthusiastically supported in newspaper editorials, the Automobile Club of New York and the Taxi and Limousine Commission continued to wave the banner of protest. Opposing them were environmentalists arguing for the protection of vegetation from heavy doses of carbon monoxide. At last a deal was struck. For those who remember having to dodge traffic on the park drives back in those days, their closing during the weekend represented a victory for the Lindsay administration and a big boon to the park’s users. Following the ongoing positive public opinion that continued to build over the years, the park has been progressively closed to automobiles for longer durations.
Hoving’s “happenings,” as they were called, became a staple of his administration. Thanks to Nichols’s press releases and Hoving’s flair for colorful statements, these events were frequent news topics of the moment. During the same period the Times was supporting the traffic closings, it carried the headline “Old Central Park Will Rock ’n’ Roll: Go-Go Concerts and Dancing to Discotheque Combos Planned for Summer; Hoving Thinks Attractions Will Draw Teen-Agers and Make Park Areas Safer.”
Always ready to direct a jab at Moses, Hoving said, “We’re going to open it up and have a little bit of—how shall we call it—Central Park à Go Go . . . No longer are we going to restrict ourselves to square dancing and ballroom dancing.” He began meeting with professional pop-concert booking agents and soon announced that Central Park would host “the largest outdoor music festival in the world.”
During the summer of 1966 and in subsequent years, Wollman Rink operated as the venue for rock ’n’ roll, jazz, folk, pop, and ethnic music concerts sponsored by Rheingold Breweries. Overlooking the objections of his recently appointed Central Park curator, Henry Hope Reed, Hoving played on the public’s justifiable fear that the park had become unsafe at night: “It’s my responsibility to make it so exciting that people will come there in droves, and that also is protection.” He did not foresee the extent to which his “attractions to draw teen-agers” would stimulate the consumption of alcohol and the sale of drugs in the park, nor the effect this would have on the park’s landscape and future safety.
Happenings could be artistic as well as musical. On May 16, 1966, the Times reported a Hoving happening featuring a 105-yard-long canvas set up below the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a “cartoon performance.” As he doodled a caricature of himself over the slogan “Three Cheers for Fred L. Olmsted,” Hoving cried, “It’s marvelous. It lets people come in and smash away.” At such high-profile occasions it did not seem to matter that vandals were smashing away in more destructive ways elsewhere in the park. Without Moses’s control over the park police, rules were no longer enforced and muggings and more serious crimes were on the rise. Hoving’s cartoon performance anticipated the avant-garde’s appreciation of graffiti as a form of public art. It is not surprising, therefore, that at the same time that subway cars were becoming moving graffiti murals, all the hard surfaces in the park—walls, buildings, surfaces of rock outcrops, granite bases of statues, and carved stonework—were being systematically defaced.
When it came to further encroachments, Hoving dismissed park curator Reed’s objections, but in ignoring them and the growing citizen movement to preserve the park’s landscape, he learned that big dreams for big building projects in Central Park could go down in defeat. At the time—after fourteen months in office—Hoving resigned as parks commissioner in order to become the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a campaign to thwart his proposal to build a $6.4 million stable for mounted police horses and polo players’ thoroughbreds, complete with a three-hundred-seat arena and thousand-seat belowground amphitheater at the north end of the Great Lawn, still simmered. The task of championing its construction fell to Hoving’s successor, August Heckscher (1913–1997), a former consultant to President Kennedy on the arts.
After Heckscher took office in 1967, he made the lofty prediction that the project would “capture the ceremonial significance of equestrian sports.” Not surprisingly, defenders of the park as a populist institution joined the proponents of preserving its landscape in protest against turning the Great Lawn into a field for polo players. Heckscher continued to promote the construction of a belowground arena for the purpose of training the horses used by the mounted police, but by 1970, with dwindling city funds for capital projects, the proposal was dropped, and opponents were able to celebrate a victory in the fight to stem encroachments on Central Park’s landscape.
In other ways Heckscher followed the course set by Hoving, and the park remained the venue of choice for mass events and bizarre happenings. One of his first initiatives in office was to discuss the possibility of an archaeological “occurrence” with the Israeli government. “The idea,” he said, “is to erect a mound and fill it with several thousand shards of ancient pottery, statuary, and glass, which the Israeli government is contributing, and then let kids dig for it.” This never took place, but many other events did. Ron Delsener, the impresario of the Rheingold Central Park Music Festival, staged more than sixty programs during the summer of 1967. With overflow audiences on the slopes around Wollman Rink five nights a week, erosion left only bare dirt patterned by rainwater runnels.
Heckscher disapproved of flag burning by anti–Vietnam War protestors in Central Park, but he was in favor of other kinds of events: an Easter “yippee” celebration, a kite-flying contest, and a Ringling Brothers parade to announce the circus coming to town. This anything-goes policy extended to “be-ins,” mass rallies, concerts on the Sheep Meadow, and the assembly of a contingent of the Poor People’s March on Washington. A 1969 New Year’s Eve party for two thousand offered fireworks, rock music performed by the Mighty Mellotones, and dancing at Bethesda Fountain. There was a mass vigil on July 20, 1969, the eve of the moon landing. “I’m asking everybody to come dressed in white,” Heckscher announced, “and we’re working with the broadcasting companies to have live TV or huge screens, so great crowds can participate in this wonderful moment.”
The Price
Because of these large-scale events and unregulated sports use, the Sheep Meadow had by this time become a dust bowl. In 1966 Restaurant Associates was given a concession permit to turn Bethesda Terrace into an al fresco café, which continued operation until 1974, when rampant drug dealing on the fast-eroding surrounding slopes caused it to close. The Terrace came to resemble a bazaar, populated by illegal vendors hawking merchandise. Its balustrade finials were knocked off, and the intricately carved stairway side panels were vandalized and slathered with graffiti. Since the park appeared so unkempt everywhere that no one seemed to think it wrong, and such rules as “do not pick the flowers” no longer were enforced, each spring when those daffodils still left in the untrampled ground came into bloom and the cherry and crabapple trees were in flower, one saw people leaving the park with large bouquets and broken-off branches. An estimated fifty thousand square feet of graffiti covered walls, statue bases, and bedrock outcrops. Unvegetated slopes eroded, exposing the roots of dying trees. The Boathouse on the Harlem Meer that Moses had built in the mid-1940s became a restaurant in 1973, but shaky finances forced it to close the following year, leaving the building prey to vandals. It soon became a charred ruin, and the adjacent Meer, which Moses had encased in concrete and rimmed with iron fencing, was a silted, algae-coated bed of mud.
Lacking Robert Moses’s indomitable ability when he was parks commissioner to face down the heads of other city agencies, Heckscher was forced to allow a permit to be granted to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection in 1970 to dig a shaft and construct a valve chamber for Water Tunnel No. 3 on 1.2 acres of Cedar Hill. Hemlocks were planted to partially screen the wooden fence protecting the work site, but this did not alter the fact that the north side of the hill—a favorite sledding slope—remained off-limits to the public during the construction project, which lasted more than twenty years. In the early 1980s the park was further penetrated belowground at Sixty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue with the boring of a fifteen-hundred-foot subway tunnel.
Budget cuts exacerbated the park’s woes at this time, and the Lindsay administration began to use funds from the city’s capital budget to cover the operating costs of the parks. Now rusting oil drums passed for garbage receptacles. The workforce diminished through attrition as employees retired, and their positions were left vacant. The plethora of events and the lack of a policy for rules enforcement demoralized the remaining workers. Broken benches, bridges, and lights; compacted soil incapable of supporting anything other than the hardiest weeds—all were results of the park’s lapsed management system. The Sheep Meadow was a barren dirt plain, and as far as routine park maintenance was concerned, the Great Lawn’s softball outfields had also gone from grass to weeds to bare compacted soil.
With increasing cuts in the parks budget as the heavy spending of the Lindsay years was curtailed, prestige drained from the office of commissioner, and the job was handed over to a series of career civil service employees. The administration was staffed through patronage appointments dictated by City Hall, and playground attendants and trained gardeners disappeared. The Central Park police precinct abandoned its policy of enforcing park rules and regulations, there were no more foot patrols, and the only remaining visitor protection was in the form of two-man squad cars patrolling the drives. Interviewed in 1975, Richard M. Clurman (1924–1996), the former chief of correspondents of the Time-Life News Service, who had served as commissioner during the last year of the Lindsay administration, summed up the situation: “You’ve got to start managing people and equipment much more. Park workers have no goals. They have no targets. There is simply no management of routine work.”
Quixotic Quest
Central to New York City both geographically and in name, the deteriorated park by this time had become a symbol of severe municipal decline that many people assumed was irremediable. During the mayoralty of Lindsay’s successor, Abraham Beame, the city entered a protracted state of fiscal crisis. In response, New York State formed the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC) in order to prevent municipal government from defaulting on its bond obligations. To fall in line with MAC’s mandated strictures, it was necessary for city agencies to cut their workforces. This involved the unprecedented act of firing employees, many of whom were unionized civil service personnel. In this situation, federal funds were eagerly sought as a stopgap. Within the Parks Department, this meant that monies that had been allocated through the 1973 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) to provide jobs and skills for the long-term unemployed and low-income high school dropouts were used to hire back workers whose jobs had been terminated. Under these conditions, the vision that Central Park could be rescued and restored seemed hopelessly quixotic. What kind of Pollyanna was I to assume otherwise? And what were the chances that this starry-eyed mission could succeed?
