Parks as a Means to Happiness

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and for the last few minutes of the show today, we're turning our attention to New York City parks in general, and a very distinctive park in Washington Heights and Upper Manhattan, in particular, Fort Tryon Park. Some of you know, it is the home of the Cloisters, which is a little satellite location of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that looks like a European monastery and has a lot of medieval art.

And with the view of the Palisades, that a movement against development on the Jersey side of the Hudson succeeded in protecting a few years ago, it's one of those places you go and think, wait, am I really in New York City right now? Well, the Fort Tryon Park Conservancy has a new managing director and chief development officer whose name you may know, Adrian Benepe. You might recognize that name because he served as the parks commissioner for over 10 years in the early 2000s under Mayor Bloomberg. And a quick fun fact, that's the longest anyone has held the position since Robert Moses. He was also head of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden before taking this job, so he's got a foot in a bunch of boroughs. He's joining us to discuss his plans for Fort Tryon Park and unpack some parks news more broadly.

You know, Benepe also spearheaded the movement to make sure every New Yorker lives no more than a 10-minute walk from a park. How close is the city to that standard today? I will ask. Adrian, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Adrian Benepe (1:40)

Happy to be back with you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer (1:42)

On your new job, I see you have a personal history with Fort Tryon Park dating back to the 90s. You want to tell us how you got involved with it at first and what you're doing now?

Adrian Benepe (1:52)

I got roped in by Dr. Ruth Westheimer. She gave me a call one day out of the blue and said, I would like you to come to Fort Tryon Park. I could resist that invitation.

Brian Lehrer (2:03)

She lived just a few blocks away.

Adrian Benepe (2:04)

For 50 years or more, she lived a few blocks away. She was pointing out that the park was not what it could be, even though we had beautifully restored the Heather Garden as a centerpiece. She was right. I said to her, there's these things called conservancies, and if you'll agree to be a charter member, I think we can get one started. She said, done.

That was the beginning. Twenty-eight years ago, we had some great people join us. Tom Kissinger, the nephew of Henry Kissinger, who grew up in the neighborhood. Joseph Pearson, a descendant of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who of course built the park and the Cloisters.

Now, his daughter, Nancy Kissinger, is on the board, which is capably chaired by the great Jeff Baumel who grew up in the neighborhood. So it's been going on 28 years and they've been raised millions and millions of dollars in the public and private sector to make a better park and we have some ambitious plans for the future.

Brian Lehrer (2:54)

And before this role, as I said in the intro, you were president and CEO of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for about five years. What did you learn in that role that you want to bring to this new position?

Adrian Benepe (3:05)

Well, an interesting coincidence, both of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Fort Tryon Park were designed not by Frederick Law Olmsted but by his sons, the Olmsted brothers who inherited his firm.

Two of their greatest landscape projects separated by 17 years, Fort Tryon Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. because his older half-brother had died by then, when John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired the preeminent landscape architecture firm of the country to design this park and spare no expense. There are at least seven separate acts of philanthropy by John D. Rockefeller Jr. over 25 years to create the park, the museum, and to save the view of the Palisades.

Brian Lehrer (3:49)

I said in the intro that I was going to ask you, how's the movement that you helped to launch a couple of decades ago now, to have every New Yorker be able to live within 10 minutes walk of a park? How much has that succeeded or not?

Adrian Benepe (4:07)

As far as I know, Brian, we're at 100 percent. This was a goal of this Trust for Public Land, I worked for for eight years after I was at New York City Parks, but it's also a centerpiece of Mayor Bloomberg's Plan YC, the whole Sustainable Development Plan. We achieved that largely through the transformation of schoolyards into public playgrounds, project invented by the Trust for Public Land, and by adding massive new parks, like Hudson River Park, and Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the High Line, and things like that. But we had a golden age of park creation and expansion in the Bloomberg years, and I'm optimistic that there's going to be some new parks on the horizon for our current mayor who seems to be a fan of parks with a brilliant new parks commissioner, Tricia Shimomura.