Nonprofits Managing Parks

One of the great nonprofit stories in the country is that of the Central Park Conservancy in New York City, which has been profiled many times, and again in this new story from City Journal.

It is a story with particular relevance to your blogger as I'm the founder and senior policy director of the American River Parkway Preservation Society, which has long promoted the Central Park Conservancy as a model that could be brought to the Parkway.

An excerpt from the City Journal article.

“It’s a beautiful day in New York’s Central Park, and Isabella Rossellini is whispering in my ear. “Beneath the leafy canopy, you are surrounded by miracles of nature,” she says of the scene that confronts me: the hilly, arboreal midsection of the park known as the Ramble. “Countless creatures call the Ramble home.” Rossellini’s is just one of about 30 famous voices that I can summon to describe the park by punching two digits on my phone. This cellular companionship is provided by the Central Park Conservancy, the innovative organization that, since 1980, has spearheaded the park’s spectacular rejuvenation.

“I remember a very different Central Park when I was a college student in Manhattan in the 1970s. I even recall passing through the Ramble. Countless creatures called it home then, too—most of whom you wouldn’t want to run into, day or night. The park’s lawns were dust bowls; its trees’ limbs were broken, their roots exposed; graffiti and inoperative lights marred the once-manicured landscape designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. “It was so awful,” recalls Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, an urban planner from Texas who became the park’s administrator in 1979. “Central Park was under a unionized, civil-service workforce. They were demoralized. It would take three men to prune a tree because of the job titles.”

“The change began when Rogers formed an alliance with Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis. Davis started cutting deadwood in his department, a traditional dumping ground for patronage jobs. He also decentralized his department’s operations—first down to the borough level, then to the park level. And Rogers championed the idea that private money and workers would play a key role in the park’s restoration. The Central Park Conservancy was born in 1980—what current park administrator Douglas Blonsky calls a “revolutionary public/private partnership that would bring private monies and expertise, in partnership with the City of New York, to manage and restore Central Park.”

“In this partnership, the Conservancy manages Central Park under a contract with the city. It also raises money for the park. Over its 30-year existence, the Conservancy has overseen $500 million of investment, nearly 80 percent of it from private sources. But the Conservancy owes its success less to its knack for holding soirées for wealthy donors than to its ability to tap into New Yorkers’ love for Central Park. Today, nearly 300 volunteers donate some 30,000 hours of labor each year. A generation ago, public employees ran the park; today, more than three-quarters of the workforce is private, either volunteers or Conservancy employees.”