FOLLOW THE PURPLE ORBS, I told myself. I could see them in the distance. On the warm November night that I visited Central Park, leaves rested picturesquely on the grass near the 72nd Street entrance. A couple running in Alo leisurewear tumbled past. A dog walker towed an Iditarod of mutts. Somewhere near the orbs, someone gently played the melody of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” on a saxophone. I imagined the bearded spirit of Frederick Law Olmsted, godfather of landscape architecture and designer of the park, beaming down on this idyll from the heavens, eyes closed, swaying to the music. His glorious creation was secure, thanks to the aristocrats and arrivistes streaming into the annual gala of the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that funds and manages its 843-acre premises. This year’s event boasted a “Fortune’s Fête” theme and appeared in clammy corporate partnership with diamond jewelry and luxury watch brand Harry Winston, Inc. Charitable donations were surely forthcoming.
Central Park is public, the conservancy not so much. The organization denied my request for a complimentary press pass. The gala “would not be appropriate for the subject matter of your story,” a representative told me by phone. A later email from a publicist offered a more diplomatic reasoning: Tickets were sold out. Even if I could afford the $2,000-per-plate minimum, I was out of luck. Still, I couldn’t stay away. A sturdy white tent draped the whole of Rumsey Playfield. Any dorky gonzo daydream I harbored of talking my way into the party was dashed by the appearance of a guard dog perched faithfully at the door, alongside a goateed bouncer. Three semi-trailer trucks blasted generator electricity into what the conservancy’s website called a “mystical evening of cocktails, dinner, and dancing.”
The revelers taking selfies and changing loafers for Louboutin red-bottoms as they filed into the tent represented a vision of New York society rooted in the Sex and the City maximalism of the pre–Great Recession 2000s, as well as the coalition of old and new money that has traditionally larded the conservancy’s more-than-$400 million endowment. An especially giant purple orb radiated from the center of the tent. Sculptural playing-card centerpieces cascaded above “crystal ball” desserts that cracked open to reveal little chocolate cakes. Tarot readers doled out fortunes to a flotilla of veteran financiers, real estate moguls, socialites, and influencers, who, in turn, showered good fortune on the conservancy: $1.2 million over the course of the evening.
ALTHOUGH THEY SELDOM REACH the opulent heights of Central Park’s fête—or for that matter its springtime “Hat Luncheon,” where this past May luminaries such as Martha Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, and Michael Bloomberg donated three and a half times the amount collected at the fall event—parkland galas are mainstays of the social calendar for New York’s donor class. Days after the luncheon, park patrons attended the High Line’s posh Spring Benefit, sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Google, real estate developer Tishman Speyer, and the Bjarke Ingels Group–designed luxury condo One High Line. The Battery Conservancy’s June gala, which featured a “farm-to-table feast” on park grounds, was an occasion to “honor American Express with the Battery Corporate Leadership Award” for its altruism. Today, conservancies are a standard model for parks governance, with cities across the country surrendering daily operations of green spaces to private corporations in order to work around depleting public budgets and the unwieldy machine of municipal democracy.
The Central Park Conservancy’s successors have taken even more forceful approaches to management, ones that limit public activity through strategic partnerships with corporate capital, endless programming, and practices of social surveillance.
The conservancy movement originally shored up the authority and influence of elites over parks planning at a moment when public trust in government had withered. The time and place was 1970s New York, when the economic blow of deindustrialization combined with a fiscal crisis that nearly bankrupted the city. The federal government steadily reduced aid intended to help stem layoffs, and President Ford, in 1975, famously vowed to veto a proposed bailout. Under pressure from federal officials and local business leaders, New York entered a period of eye-watering austerity. The Department of Parks and Recreation (now known as NYC Parks) was halved. “It was almost as if somebody in Washington said, ‘let’s see how we can destroy the New York City Parks Department,’” Commissioner Gordon Davis said at the time. In Central Park, a market of drug dealers assembled on the terraces; graffiti enveloped dilapidated buildings; muggers lurked on the eroded pathways of the Ramble. “Even Parks Department workers were reluctant to go into these places,” writes Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, founder of that park’s conservancy, in her memoir, “and tourists were told at hotel desks to avoid Central Park altogether.”
Into this state of emergency the park conservancy was born. What else, after all, could pacify these trembling tourists and hoteliers? From its infancy, it was fashioned as a private nonprofit that could raise money independently to make repairs, run programs, conduct maintenance, and execute capital projects through an agreement with city government. The conservancy grew up alongside close cousins, like the business improvement district, that were designed to stoke speculative investment in urban space through partnership with the private sector. Parks remained city-owned, but more and more, moneyed interests called the shots.
It wasn’t just free-market ideologues who favored this neoliberal approach to city services; as historian Benjamin Holtzman has shown, many “concerned residents, nonprofits, cultural institutions, and officials who had lost faith in the ability of local government to maintain parks” helped lay the path to privatization. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros was among the first to suggest that the city create a new administrative body to manage Central Park. Ultimately, Mayor Ed Koch and Parks Commissioner Davis tapped Rogers, a savvy civic operator with a background in landscape architecture, to serve as Central Park administrator, working directly for the city to oversee personnel and set policies. By 1980, she had also formed the Central Park Conservancy and become its first president, raising funds for restoration and managing a whole parallel staff of nonunion employees. Not everyone was pleased with this new arrangement. Resistance, in Rogers’s telling, came mainly from public officials who jealously guarded their own authority and patronage opportunities, not to mention pesky taxpaying citizens who for some reason believed that “the care of parks was a city responsibility.” Nevertheless, with the city’s blessing, Rogers prevailed. In a way, she came to embody New York’s tenuous new marriage of public and private governance.
Over the coming decades, a conservancy board composed largely of corporate executives coaxed a downpour of dollars from the deep-pocketed likes of Brooke Astor, Paul Newman, Yoko Ono, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Meanwhile, Rogers’s growing staff competed with old-guard union bureaucrats at the Parks Department to buff out Central Park’s graffiti, regreen its Great Lawn, and rehab its belvederes and bridges. These improvements, in turn, made it possible for Carrie Bradshaw to fall into the lake at the Loeb Boathouse, emerging with no ailment more serious than soggy resortwear. And it was conservancy maneuverings that allowed Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in 2005, to install their iconic saffron Gates (which in 2025 visitors got to experience again, this time by staring at an augmented reality app on their phones). As Manhattan revived into a glittering Mecca of global finance and culture, the conservancy’s dollars transformed the park into the visible centerpiece of the city’s makeover. “No longer was the concept of private-sector support of parks resisted by city officials,” Rogers writes.
Defenders of conservancies allege that they save taxpayers money and allow cities to allocate limited funds to the parks in greatest need. In reality, they reinforce disparities across the city by directing massive sums to high-income zip codes.
In one sense, inviting private capital into parks was nothing new. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, wealthy philanthropists like Edwin Litchfield, John D. Rockefeller, Mary Harriman Rumsey, and Kate Wollman delivered vital contributions to urban landscapes. Such support was always a touch imperious, springing from an elite desire to shape urban space and its use. But the character of conservancy philanthropy differs in important respects from earlier notions of noblesse oblige. The nineteenth century’s robber barons pillaged society but gave back in the form of extraordinary institutions, public parks among them. Their gifts were not selfless; certainly, they harbored visions of “exercise, instruction, and psychic restoration” for the lower classes, rooted in the need for a healthy workforce, as Galen Cranz documents in her landmark 1982 study The Politics of Park Design. But parks of that era, at least, resided wholly under public governance, their uses noncommercial, negotiable, and occasionally responsive to democratic pressure from below. For today’s plutocracy, the conservancy represents a more refined political project, one explicitly aimed at retrenching from the perceived excesses of the New Deal order. The strings attached to their charity have multiplied, ensnaring parks in a complex web of influence through the vehicle of the nonprofit. Donors often sit on the governing boards of these groups and intervene directly in park projects and programs in service of ego and profit.
Indeed, an ideology of privatization now dominates park management. In a 2015 report, the Trust for Public Land, a parks conservation group, characterizes this shift in frank terms. “There was a time when urban parks were firmly considered the pride, joy, and responsibility of taxpayers,” its authors write. “Once a park was in the public domain, all agreed that its weight was to be carried on the shoulders of city government. No longer.” Since 1980, the conservancy has run Central Park, and today it raises almost all of its nearly $74 million annual operating budget. In other signature green spaces like Madison Square Park and Prospect Park, conservancy management and fundraising facilitated decades of enhancements to revalorize local property. By the 2000s, as many as fifty parks across the city depended on private philanthropy and administration. The appeal was obvious: These groups were bound by none of the red tape that tied the hands of the Parks Department. They could hire and fire, start programs quickly, and accomplish projects that seemed possible only with private support. The city would still kick in money for capital improvements, but operating costs were increasingly left to alternative financing schemes. At the same time, the conservancies’ mandates were far broader than maintenance alone. As affluent, white professionals repopulated New York City, these groups eagerly courted opportunities for corporate and commercial partnerships to serve a growing demographic. Soon, even parks that were but a green glint in the city’s eye—like the High Line on Manhattan’s West Side, Brooklyn Bridge Park on the waterfront, and the QueensWay in that borough’s central district—assembled nonprofit funding machines of their own.
FROM THEIR NINETEENTH-CENTURY inception, urban parks embodied an idealized preserve of nature, a spiked and varied topography, a green reprieve for factory and office workers alike amid the industrializing city. Subsequent planners embroidered parks with social programs, cut-and-paste playgrounds, and stimulating entertainments. Eventually, postindustrial parks made decaying infrastructure into destinations for the “creative class,” with walking paths hemmed in by wildflowers. New Yorkers, who have the lowest car ownership rates in the country and therefore the least means of vehicular escape to greener pastures, may value parks uniquely. We are, of course, not above the damp commercial offerings of a Smorgasburg food festival or a Union Square Holiday Market. But our deeper need isn’t for more paid activities, which this city generates compulsively; it’s for the dwindling resource of collective and noncommodified space: all-day barbecues, morning qigong sessions, hectic protests against police brutality, what have you. Our need, in short, is for a common, or perhaps more pointedly, for what urban geographer David Harvey calls a “social practice of commoning.” At the heart of this practice, Harvey writes in Rebel Cities (2012), lies the principle that the relation between a social group and a part of the physical environment be “off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations.” In other words, parks should not simply be “public,” a term that has been studiously adopted by the state, nonprofits, and developers to describe spaces believed to be productive expenditures in the neoliberal city. They should be democratically controlled and used for social benefit.
With conservancies at the helm, democracy in parks has eroded. What has sprouted up in its place is a method by which private groups espouse values of public engagement while prioritizing opportunities to market the city, promote select business and real estate partners, and inscribe strict norms of behavior. Think, for instance, of how Friends of the High Line practically designed the gated and elevated path to discourage protests even as it made ample room for concession vendors and corporate events since day one. Spaces of this sort promote “a concept of the public that speaks of access, expression, inclusion, and creativity but which nonetheless is centered upon surveillance, order, and the bolstering of corporate capitalism,” sociologist David Madden writes in a 2010 case study of Bryant Park, calling this phenomenon “publicity without democracy.”
There are, of course, some experiences that you just cannot realize without the paternalism of private enterprise.
Compared with the city’s next-gen green spaces, Central Park can at first appear relatively democratic in its programming, its uses largely open and Olmstedian. The park’s East Meadow is the first place that I can remember attending a protest, in fall 2002, against the impending invasion of Iraq. The conservancy still allows permitted demonstrations, as well as qigong and picnics. (Barbecues are forbidden save for three designated days annually.) Most conservancy-sponsored activities now focus squarely on educating visitors about the history and landscapes of the park. Marquee programs like Shakespeare in the Park, supported in part by the conservancy, remain free to the public, and the group recently helped fund an attractive wood-paneled renovation of its Delacorte Theater home. Perhaps you find the Capital One City Parks Foundation SummerStage concerts—with their corporate sponsorship, lukewarm contemporary acts (Common? Rilo Kiley?), and reported $500,000 of concessions revenues—self-aggrandizing and stupidly consumerist; at least, however, the foundation delivers the proceeds to other spaces across the boroughs. It’s even easier to pick on boosterish enterprises like the “Central Park on Screen” guided tour, where cinephiles are encouraged to experience their own “main character moment” while visiting the settings of movies like The Avengers (2012), Home Alone 2 (1992), and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) for photo ops. But credit where it’s due: You won’t catch the Central Park Conservancy going live on Instagram to shill high-end yoga apparel, as the Bryant Park Corporation does.
Yet for all its sylvan civic populism, the governing logic of Central Park is more plutocratic than grassroots. In 2012, hedge fund manager John Paulson made the conservancy a tax-deductible $100 million–gift, the largest ever bestowed upon an American park. This pourboire ensured that the grounds would serve as a well-appointed patio for the lavish park-side residences of the 1 percent, including his own neo-Georgian mansion on East 86th Street. At one time, during the de Blasio mayoral administration, it was rumored that the conservancy’s CEO, Betsy Smith, wished to pry Central Park away from the city altogether and place it under the control of billionaire-friendly Governor Andrew Cuomo, a former Parks Department official told me. The rumor, true or not, provides a sense of the conservancy’s perceived attitude toward local democracy. And the organization’s stunning executive salaries underline an approach to parks management that centers the desires of high earners. In 2023, Smith was compensated $1.2 million. (Compare that with the $243,000 paid the same year to recently resigned city Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue.) For all its riches, however, it took the conservancy more than forty years of existence to get around to rehabilitating the derelict Lasker Rink recreational facilities that border 110th Street and the historically Black neighborhood of Harlem. The new Davis Center at Harlem Meer, whose elegant redesign includes a pool, a skate rink, green spaces, and, of course, specialty concessionaires, “comes as an act of civic reparation,” wrote New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman prior to its 2025 opening. It also comes as an act of multimillion-dollar naming deals: $40 million from board member and financier Andrew Davis allowed him to name the facility for himself, and $25 million from chairman and investment banker Thomas Kempner attached his moniker to the center’s boardwalk. Now guarding the 110th Street corridor is the city’s so-called Community Link, a program that gathers the police department and other agencies to address “quality-of-life” issues from retail theft to substance use to illegal scaffolding. The plan sounds suspiciously like a rebrand of criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” model of policing, which promoted crackdowns on small crimes as a means to maintain social order—and ultimately led to the aggressive use of arrests in New York’s Black and brown neighborhoods.
Harlem Meer Boathouse. Benoit Tardif
Many of the Central Park Conservancy’s successors have taken even more forceful approaches to management, ones that limit public activity through strategic partnerships with corporate capital, endless programming, and practices of social surveillance. Madison Square Park, situated in the shadow of the iconic Flatiron Building, was the site of an experimental campaign, in the late 1970s, to collect corporate donations from within the local business improvement district. The plan? Attract a higher echelon of visitors, whose presence would eject “unwanted elements” and spark a revolution of property values in the process. “It can be duplicated throughout the city,” said Richard Clurman, a former parks commissioner, at the time. “You pick a park, one in bad condition, and you treat it as a company would treat its corporate plaza, complete with private sector funds.” Alas, the charitable gifts proved too stingy. Not until 1997, after the space had suffered decades of neglect, did wealthy citizens and local business leaders launch a precursor of the Madison Square Park Conservancy. Its restoration of the six-acre park’s south side helped to revitalize the neighborhood and welcome office workers back in for lunch hour. Restaurateur Danny Meyer, of the Union Square Hospitality Group, opened an insanely popular hot-dog stand. Soon, the conservancy struck a sweetheart deal with Meyer (conveniently, a member of its board) to create a permanent kitchen, the first location of the Shake Shack chain, that would allow him to pay a pittance of its annual revenue to the city. The burger kiosk would belch rank cooking oil into the hungry faces of an incoming professional-managerial class for years to come. And so began the courtship of laptop workers and Empire State Building–gawking tourists with attractions like corporate-sponsored outdoor coworking spaces and gourmet pastry pop-ups. These days, the unwanted elements have mostly vanished, and the park’s transformation into a corporate plaza, surrounded by global HQs and luxury condos, is nigh complete.
Not so long ago, it would have appeared obvious that public revenue is meant to spread wealth across the city, not just hoard it in favored districts. But for profit-seeking landlords and tax revenue–seeking officials, these deals have been outlandishly successful.
The social imagineering of urban space took an extreme turn in Bryant Park, as both Holtzman and Madden have observed. There, a nonprofit group—in this case not a conservancy but a division of a newly formed business improvement district—staged what amounted to a corporate takeover of the nine-acre backyard of the New York Public Library’s marble lion–flanked main branch. In the 1980s, the park was beset by “undesirables,” as Clurman put it, like drug dealers and vagrants, so the city handed it over wholesale to the Bryant Park Corporation, which agreed to run the space without public money. Its founder and executive director, Daniel Biederman, worked closely with Andrew Heiskell, chairman of the NYPL. “Our plan was to ‘privatize’ the park,” Heiskell later recalled, “to take it away from Parks Department ownership and management.” Through the business improvement district, the corporation would not only collect tributes from the Rockefeller and Henry Luce Foundations but also tax local businesses directly to pay for operations. Over time, an $18 million overhaul would convert the park into a hub of commerce and entertainment, including book stalls, restaurants, cafés, flower stands, movie nights, and live music.
All this hoopla entails intensified security. In addition to New York City police officers, rent-a-cops patrol the park with 24/7 vigilance. From the start, Biederman took inspiration from Kelling and Wilson’s recently published “broken windows” theory. (Biederman and Kelling even touted Bryant Park as a practical application of the strategy at the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank.) Renovations removed iron fences and high hedges to foster greater visibility, and the corporation packed its schedule of events, with the explicit intent of creating the type of “eyes on the street” surveillance extolled by urban theorist Jane Jacobs. To the charge that Bryant Park now excludes the homeless and other “undesirable” users, Biederman has demurred that it in fact welcomes them but now simply contains a greater proportion of other visitors. Indeed, as Madden notes, the homeless have “become objects of tokenistic toleration by the park authorities and other park-goers,” their presence useful insofar as it supplies “free-floating justification for any action that maintains park revenues.” These security measures have successfully retrenched the common of Bryant Park. “We created social order there,” Biederman reflected after three decades at the corporation’s helm. Today, he is an enormously influential and well-paid privatization crusader. In 2024, he was compensated $517,000 for his executive role at the Bryant Park Corporation, in addition to $417,000 for heading the nearby 34th Street Partnership. Through his consulting firm, Biederman Redevelopment Ventures, he “has produced a substantial return on investment in placemaking for public and private sector clients,” including in flashy signature spaces like Salesforce Park in San Francisco and Fair Park in Dallas.
Today’s ruling elite has devised more genteel means of dispossession, ones that appear as acts of nature—or even nurture—rather than deliberate eviction.
When it came time to hoist a prissy landscaped path onto an abandoned spur of New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line, the playbook was already established. In 1999, preservationists Joshua David and Robert Hammond, learning that the track was slated for demolition, launched Friends of the High Line. The nonprofit dedicated itself to fashioning a new kind of park that would draw inspiration from elevated gardens abroad like the Promenade Plantée in Paris. Financing flowed in from philanthropists, Hollywood talent, and condo builders, and the city handed control of the project to the nonprofit years before ground was broken. Despite the high-profile patronage of area power couple Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, whose businesses buttress the path, most funding came from public coffers. Designing and building the first two sections of the High Line cost $152 million, with $112 million paid by the city and another $20 million by the federal government. Friends of the High Line kicked in $44 million, which contributed to construction of those and later park sections. The group is responsible for nearly all the High Line’s operating expenses, which amounted to a staggering $20 million in 2024. Explicit in the deal was that the 1.45-mile park would spur economic growth. The High Line arose as an amenity to the West Chelsea rezoning proposal, which aimed to “provide opportunities for new residential and commercial development” in the formerly derelict district. No more would the shaggy freight line be allowed to play host to sex workers turning tricks in its arched shadows.
A network of bug-eyed surveillance cameras now watches the High Line, as does a small army of NYC Parks Enforcement Patrol officers. Open hours are more limited than in the city’s other public parks. And a list of special rules regulates High Line behavior: Not only are smoking, vaping, and amplified sound forbidden, as in other city spaces, but so are cycling, skateboarding, dogs (except service animals), and throwing objects (like balls and frisbees). Gatherings of more than twenty people are banned without approval, but the park makes little space for groups to linger in the first place. Narrow and crowded, its structure prods visitors to tour the path, snap their selfies, and leave. At the same time, by “enjoying” the High Line, users grant the nonprofit permission to use their likeness for promotional purposes. Whereas New York’s ordinary parks are designed for nonproductive public leisure, with the new breed of public-private playgrounds, business is business.
How has this arrangement come to seem like common sense? For many, the fiscal calamity of the 1970s exposed the limits of public governance. But the severity of that crisis was deliberately engineered. Both locally and nationally, an emerging regime hell-bent on cutting government spending, reducing tax burdens on the rich, and curtailing democratic participation pushed residents toward privatized solutions. “As neoliberal politics diminishes the financing of public goods,” Harvey writes, “so it diminishes the available common, forcing social groups to find other ways to support that common.” In New York, it has unsurprisingly been well-heeled residents with established networks who have aided parks in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Many of them seem to believe that they are performing a genuine public service. But even as the city has returned to fiscal stability, inequality has skyrocketed, making it almost impossible to imagine a world where government could, or even should, once again fully fund public goods.
THERE ARE, OF COURSE, some experiences that you just cannot realize without the paternalism of private enterprise. At times, the conservancies seem like overactive parents programming every waking moment of their children’s lives with extracurriculars: this morning yoga, this afternoon a carousel ride, this evening an outdoor family film. The Bryant Park Corporation’s desired clientele was always bourgeois, and the plaza is thus loaded with crappy attractions. A space-hogging restaurant and grill, yielding the corporation millions in annual rental income, is good for power lunches and tourist food pics and nothing else. Pending a heated legal battle, it will soon be evicted and replaced by yet another sterile Jean-Georges venture. Corporate-sponsored tents crowd the grounds during the Super Bowl and other events. Each year, the Bank of America Winter Village draws about four million visitors during the extended holiday season with its skating rink, bumper cars, “cozy igloos,” iceless curling, and food stalls serving an olfactory assault of pickles, corn dogs, and raclette sandwiches on sticks. In December 2024, several booths burst into flames, sending billowing smoke plumes into the Midtown sky. In this chintzy way, the park has been reenvisioned as a side yard for tourist overflow from its neighboring Times Square.
It will take both political contestation and greater social imagination to appropriate our urban environments for non-commodified use.
At the southern tip of Manhattan, the Battery Conservancy formed in 1994 to lead the restoration of the area’s dilapidated twenty-five-acre park. By the mid-2010s, its $133 million transformation was well under way, after years of disruptions that included the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. What has taken shape at the Battery is an expensive space that includes a range of busy and ecologically buzzy features: ample lawns, an urban farm, and one of those posh-looking playgrounds with sleek steel climbing structures, interactive water features, and something that the conservancy’s website calls “verdant bioswales.” The federally owned Castle Clinton, a former military fort that from the late 1800s until the midcentury housed a popular aquarium, now serves as a ticket booth for visitors to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The conservancy, of course, also packs the park with discouraging opportunities for consumer citizenship. Visitors may be intrigued by the translucent SeaGlass Carousel, where they can pay five dollars to ride inside one of thirty pastel fiberglass fish, an experience that sounds more whimsical and charming than it actually is. (The city and the conservancy went Dutch on its $16 million price tag.) From there, they might trip across the lawn to eat Belgian confections at the obligatory Wafels & Dinges kiosk. (Similar stands grace the grounds of Central Park, Bryant Park, and Herald Square’s paved parklet).
Friends of the High Line is responsible for a similarly dispiriting roster of enhancements. Situated amid the galleries that first marked the neighborhood as a target for gentrification, the park has always featured contemporary public artwork splotched along the path. In 2019, the High Line added the Plinth, a new art space on the Thirtieth Street overpass for long-term monumental works. Today, it hosts a CowParade-level morsel of tourist bait: Iván Argote’s Dinosaur (2024), a sixteen-foot-tall aluminum statue of a New York City pigeon. Recently, Friends of the High Line sponsored a Pigeon Impersonation Pageant where apparently attention-starved adults in costumes made from feathers and papier-mâché gyrated down a runway on the trail, offering insight into the kinds of public gatherings—if not protests—that the nonprofit does encourage. Crammed into the vest-pocket lawns and splinter-sized terraces of the park are a swirl of fitness-oriented “activations”—tai chi, senior stretch, Zumba, “creative movement,” and guided mindful meditation—all brought to you by health-insurance giant Guardian, the High Line’s “lead wellness sponsor.”
These activities reproduce a set of behaviors to which elites increasingly expect all public conduct to conform, inside and outside of parks: busyness, consumerism, proactive recreation. (“In the current state of things you can’t have ‘passive spaces,’” Biederman said in 2021. “Too many people are circulating who are violent or emotionally disturbed.”) As a philosophy, it’s psychically oppressive. It also stands in opposition to the virtue that Olmsted assigned primacy in urban parks, a “feeling of relief, experienced by those entering them, on escaping from the cramped, confined, and controlling circumstances of the streets of the town; in other words, a sense of enlarged freedom.” It’s a small irony that the Central Park Conservancy has enshrined these words in its communications materials, given that it pioneered a model of management that has circumscribed and commodified park use.
AS WITH MOST EVERYTHING in New York City Life, what at first appear to be public-spirited enterprises are compulsory gifts to real estate. “Attempts to create new kinds of urban commons can all too easily be capitalized upon,” cautions Harvey. “In fact they may be designed precisely with that in mind.” His prime example is urban parks, which, he writes, “almost always increase nearby residential property prices in surrounding areas (provided, of course, that the public space of the park is regulated and patrolled to keep the riff-raff and the drug dealers out).” Privatization was sold as a smart investment for landlords around Bryant Park, and it was. Inflated rents and property values have persisted there even amid the postpandemic commercial real estate slump, with Amazon recently leasing nine floors of office space on the park’s southeast corner and buying 522 Fifth Avenue just a couple of blocks away for a cool $456 million.
When it came time to hoist a prissy landscaped path onto an abandoned spur of New York Central Railroad’s West Side Line, the playbook was already established.
Friends of the High Line raised money in part through a novel quid pro quo: One provision of the rezoning plan allowed developers to expand their buildings in exchange for a fee that would directly fund park improvements. In 2012, the owners of nearby Chelsea Market sought to increase the footprint of its retail and office space by a third, triggering a $20 million contribution to the High Line fund. Much of the local community rejected the proposal, but Friends of the High Line, with money on the line, put its weight behind the expansion. In the end, the city brokered peace by requiring that a third of the fees be devoted to funding educational programs and building new affordable housing on undeveloped land in the nearby Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. (Today, both projects are slated to be demolished, rebuilt, and privatized under the city’s PACT program by Related Companies, the same developer behind nearby megaproject Hudson Yards.) Collisions like these are a small emblem of the wholesale neighborhood renovation that the High Line jump-started. For tycoon-mayor Michael Bloomberg, the project “was the linchpin of developing other sites on the Far West Side,” writes sociologist Kevin Loughran in his 2022 book Parks for Profit. “Once the zoning codes were lifted in the part of Chelsea west of the High Line, the lightly populated former manufacturing district would become a virtual free-for-all.” This postindustrial frontier quickly attracted $2 billion in investment. By 2016, real estate prices had increased by 51 percent along the first section and 48 percent along the second section of the park, versus around 31 percent in comparable areas of the city. Ultimately, the High Line would serve as a rusticated runway for the ice-spike city-state of Hudson Yards, the largest private real estate development in the country’s history. Related Companies and its partners committed $28 million to extend the path into the project’s grounds.
Another boondoggle mapped onto the conservancy template is Brooklyn Bridge Park, an eighty-five-acre spectacle of infrastructure reuse constructed along the rotting wharves of the New York Harbor. Neighborhood activists had long called for a waterfront park. But they balked at the city’s plan to fund it. When Mayor Bloomberg took office, he convinced the state to turn the area over to the city, putting the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, a quasi-governmental nonprofit, in charge of construction and management. That entity in turn struck a deal to cede development rights for a portion of the land to private builders, who would create a kind of instant gentrification kit: luxury condos, a boutique hotel, a post-Fordist food hall, yacht berths. The Empire Stores—essentially a shopping mall situated in an “adaptively reused” coffee warehouse—include the TimeOut Market, a West Elm, a Kith Kids, and an institution called the Museum of Food and Drink. In lieu of taxes, developers make payments directly to the nonprofit, and the revenue makes up more than double the bloated $15 million annual cost to operate and maintain the park’s rolling hills, thatches of forest, and various courts and playfields, which, to be fair, serve a diverse swath of residents from across the borough. In a 2024 retrospective, New York Magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson, bedazzled by the park, threw up his hands and called the developer deal a win: “It’s clear that the neoliberal mayor was right and progressive opponents were wrong,” Davidson wrote. “Sometimes the rich really do pick up the tab for everyone else’s good time.” To read one of the country’s leading critics regurgitating this crumb of received wisdom is incredibly depressing.
Everyday New Yorkers reject conservancy rules when they use parks in radical and unsanctioned ways, often at great personal risk. But the conservancies have maintained power, dictating how they spend money that should rightly be held in common.
Not so long ago, it would have appeared obvious that public revenue is meant to spread wealth across the city, not just hoard it in favored districts. But for profit-seeking landlords and tax revenue–seeking officials, these deals have been outlandishly successful. For working people, the results have been more mixed. Like so much nonprofit activity these days, parks programming is chock full of community input processes and symbolic sops to the neighborhood like ¡ARRIBA!, the High Line’s popular Latin dance night, developed in partnership with residents of the endangered public housing projects that hunker beneath gleaming condos. Meanwhile, Chelsea has become increasingly wealthy as the High Line has expanded its footprint, with a growing share of residents occupying the highest tax bracket—those who earn more than $250,000 in household income—and a declining share of middle earners. Displacement, of course, is not a new feature of park planning. In order to build Central Park, the city removed 1,600 people, including the residents of Seneca Village, the first majority settlement of free Black Americans in Manhattan. Today’s ruling elite has devised more genteel means of dispossession, ones that appear as acts of nature—or even nurture—rather than deliberate eviction.
“A much-needed rat’s-eye view of the built environment.”
Defenders of conservancies allege that they save taxpayers money and allow cities to allocate limited funds to the parks in greatest need. In reality, they reinforce disparities across the city by directing massive sums to high-income zip codes. As Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates cautioned back in 2010, New York has created a two-tier parks system: “One for the rich, the other for the poor.” Elites consolidate neighborhood power to transform flagship spaces into sanitized tourist attractions and goose local property values. Poorer communities of color, meanwhile, suffer the desiccation of “park deserts.” At times, the peculiar incentives of conservancy funding mean that visitors may encounter a two-tier system even within the same park. For several years in the early 2010s, Mayor Bloomberg’s corporation rented out a huge swath of Randall’s Island from its conservancy for $750,000 to hold a $9 million company party with rides, bars, and a carousel, making that section of the park unavailable to New York residents for more than three weeks of the summer during the elaborate setup and breakdown. The pay-to-play arrangement sparked ire among activists like Croft and residents of low-income neighborhoods who use the park. “You almost feel segregated,” one such user said at the time. “It’s a slap in the face.” Residents have also long lamented that the Prospect Park Alliance, keepers since 1980 of Olmsted’s 526-acre emerald oasis in Brooklyn, devotes disproportionate resources to preening its wealthy west side while leaving the poorer east side degraded. Only in the last ten years or so, as white residents have begun to inhabit historically Black neighborhoods like Prospect Lefferts Gardens has the nonprofit begun to give those areas serious attention—such are the mutually reinforcing processes of beautification and gentrification. A $74 million public-private partnership overhauled the Lakeside skate rink and its surrounding grounds in 2013. Now, a proposed renovation of the Vale of Cashmere would restore the park’s northeast end and add a playground, arbor, and pavilion using significant public funds; the plan, however, which would disrupt a historic meeting and cruising spot for the local queer community, has attracted outrage from both preservationists and activists. Despite these capital investments, routine care of the east side still suffers.
Spaces without an ultrawealthy donor base—in other words, the huge majority of the city’s 1,700 parks, playgrounds, and recreational facilities—must make do with a shrinking municipal budget. In one sense, this is a blessing: It frees outer-borough environments like Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx and Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens to be parks, liberated of the corporate gimmicks required of their upwardly mobile counterparts. But they often lack the most basic upkeep. Pelham Bay Park, for example, is three times the size of Central Park but maintains only a tiny fraction of its staff. In 2020, when New Yorkers poured into parks during the Covid-19 pandemic, hillocks of garbage towered out of trash cans and lawns were worn bald, the result of an $84 million budget cut that downsized clean-up crews. The slash was consistent with a long-standing trend. Since 1980, the city’s budget has grown by 127 percent, with some individual agencies like the Department of Correction benefiting from increases of as much as 165 percent, according to a 2023 report from nonprofit New Yorkers for Parks. During that time, the allocation for the Parks Department grew by just 72 percent. In recent years, Mayor Eric Adams has culled parks funding to around half a percent of the total city budget, the lowest share in a decade and a contributing factor to brush fires in poorer parks with dwindling staff. Some have worried that private philanthropy, rather than freeing up money to fund city-run amenities, can actually serve as pretext to cut parks funding further. As Friends of Morningside Park president Brad W. Taylor told The New York Times, “That’s just a recipe for disaster.”
A DECADE AGO, a movement was afoot to tithe the big park conservancies and their kin. While on the mayoral campaign trail, Bill de Blasio endorsed a proposal by State Senator Daniel Squadron that nonprofits, including the Central Park Conservancy, Battery Park Conservancy, Bryant Park Corporation, Friends of the High Line, Madison Square Park Conservancy, and Prospect Park Alliance, peel off 20 percent of their donations to parks in poor neighborhoods. This incredibly moderate plan, which did not challenge the existence of private parks governance, was met with indignation from people like former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, who frothed that it “flies in the face of American history and democracy” to tell nonprofits how to spend their treasure. In the end, the Parks Department brokered a compromise: The big-ticket conservancies would contribute resources like horticulture help and playground redesign to struggling spaces in the South Bronx, East Harlem, and central Brooklyn. In the intervening years, little organized opposition has challenged the conservancy spoils system, despite critiques from academics and nonprofit groups. New Yorkers for Parks has made a modest but unsuccessful appeal that the city increase parks funding to 1 percent of the overall budget. As we witnessed during the George Floyd uprisings and throughout the pandemic in spaces like Washington Square Park, everyday New Yorkers reject conservancy rules when they use parks in radical and unsanctioned ways, often at great personal risk. But the conservancies have maintained power, dictating how they spend money that should rightly be held in common.
Not so fast, the keepers of the Central Park Conservancy will object, deploying their white-shoe PR team to send long press releases to freelance critics who only wanted to eat a crystal ball cake at a fancy gala. Behold the new Davis Center at Harlem Meer, with its “emphasis on accessibility,” at the long-suffering north end of the park. Have you seen the majestic restoration of the decrepit Lasker Rink?* Imagine if Olmsted had designed a world-class swimming pool that you can skate on in the wintertime! Amble across the brand-new bridge and boardwalk that pass over the Meer. Visit the airy, granite-hewn pavilion full of happy families in the heart of Harlem, which as you know is a Black and Latino neighborhood. Consider the beneficence of philanthropic gifts like those of Davis and Kempner, not to mention the $10 million from venture capitalist Russell L. Carson. Wouldn’t you say that the $160 million price tag, $100 million of which derived from such generous donations, was worth it? Could this wonder be fabricated without the doting attention of a public-private partnership?
The answer appears to be that it could, if only public officials were willing to take up the fight. After all, it was the Parks Department’s idea to restore Lasker Rink in the first place, and taxpayers’ $60 million that kicked off the project. Only a few years prior, when the city hatched a climate plan to adapt East River Park for future flooding, it scraped together $1.45 billion with help from the federal government—but not from private groups or donors. Across the river, when officials wanted to build the Hunter’s Point South Park, a swooping waterfront landscape in Long Island City, the Parks Department, working with a public-benefit corporation and the park’s conservancy, scared up $165 million in public funds to do so. Likewise, the QueensWay, the borough’s own High Line–style railway restoration project, while it also has a nonprofit group, has raised its $154 million exclusively from municipal and federal grants, with no intention of seeking wealthy supporters. Reviewing these sums, it’s hard not to conclude that the dearth of funding is largely a manufactured crisis. A primary problem appears to be tax rates improperly calibrated to recapture social wealth—that is, the profits created through the productivity of working New Yorkers. The city contains among the highest concentrations of millionaires and billionaires in the country, and to raise taxes on this rarefied bracket would tap a vast reserve of funds not just for capital investments to build and restore parks but for routine operating budgets that keep them green and free for common use. What we have instead is a system in which elites make ever more extravagant gifts, a means to burnish their reputations and maintain amenities in their own neighborhoods while conveniently writing off charitable donations. (Kempner’s tax-deductible largesse, for just one example, could have more than made up for the $20 million cut to the parks budget in 2024.) Such gifts, while they may appear benevolent, ultimately deprive the city of needed revenue.
For today’s plutocracy, the conservancy represents a more refined political project, one explicitly aimed at retrenching from the perceived excesses of the New Deal order.
If park conservancies have long outlived their social justification, they at least provoke us to think carefully about alternatives. How might the city democratize its public realm, ensuring that common spaces are truly common for working people? One rebuke to today’s marketized vision of resource distribution can be found in the mixed history of the New Deal. We need not celebrate every element of Robert Moses’s iron rule over the Parks Department to appreciate the massive expansion in public works that the era occasioned. Under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, influxes of federal funding supplemented generous municipal budgets, and the city rapidly created everything from zoos to playgrounds to recreation centers to murals to concert series, hundreds upon hundreds, not just in wealthy areas but in working-class neighborhoods. It has become popular in policy circles to articulate a New Deal for all kinds of basic human needs, a response to staggering conditions of inequality. Where urban space is concerned, what’s worth emulating about the era is that park construction and operation were centralized, with resources distributed across the five boroughs. In our present system, Harvey warns, “decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater inequality through neoliberalization.” Park conservancies and corporations reproduce that problem by concentrating resources hyperlocally among the rich. An organized demand from working New Yorkers to return to greater public governance of parks would need to be accompanied by democratic processes to spread adequate funding throughout the system. These measures, on their own, would not magically transform urban spaces into utopian commons for working people, but they would be a necessary start. The recent victory of State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary bodes well for this project. Mamdani has not yet laid out a proposal for parks, but he is a democratic socialist with ambitious plans to tax the billionaire class and expand support for public goods. Should he be elected mayor, he could take up an agenda to fully fund the city’s green spaces and remove them from private control. In any event, it will take both political contestation and greater social imagination to appropriate our urban environments for noncommodified use.
For weeks following the Central Park Conservancy’s gala last November, I occupied the perverse position of reconstructing this unpublic evening from outside, through grid posts and party reports and phone calls to gala goers, but not by talking to conservancy officials, who were, a PR flack assured me, “strapped for time.” But maybe I hadn’t missed anything, not really. Maybe the most significant feature of Fortune’s Fête was the PVC chrysalis of the white party tent, encasing the donor class in a private realm away from the public on whose behalf they act, the premise being that government is stretched too thin rather than that our rulers are pillaging it. “In an ideal world,” one gala goer, a marketing professional, told me on a phone call, “it would definitely not come down to needing to be funded by the conservancy.” But that world is not so distant. On the other side of the tent walls, the gathering of philanthrocrats with thousands to spend on a dinner plate, and perhaps even $40 million to spend on a building, formed an urgent reminder of a peerage practically begging for higher taxation. After I circled the playfield for a while, a generator-truck worker told me that the paths were closed for the night. I accepted my fate, leaving the hallowed glow of the orbs, crossing the horse shit–strewn path of East Drive, and walking a rooty trail back toward 72nd Street. A pair of teenagers vaped illicitly under a lamp that the conservancy, many years ago, must have repaired, gently proving a New York axiom: Wherever the common is constrained, the public will revolt.