Vanessa Paggioli, 21, peered through her sunglasses at the TV cameras that gathered this morning on the newly renovated schoolyard of John J. Pershing Junior High School, a few blocks from her home in Brooklyn. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was on his way to announce a new program that will allow public access to nearly 300 previously restricted city school playgrounds.
“After school, kids can come and play,” Ms. Paggioli said approvingly, her green Bryn Mawr T-shirt matched by a vivid patch of freshly planted turf. “Instead of an empty concrete space there will be a place to go.”
This is the type of reaction that Mr. Bloomberg was hoping for. The $111 million plan, part of the mayor’s PlaNYC initiative, aims to add over 200 acres to the city’s parks by 2010 by opening 290 schoolyards to public use after school hours and during the weekend.
The Pershing playground, sporting several freshly painted blacktops and a renovated volleyball court, was one of 69 spaces that opened today to the public. The remaining spaces are expected to open by 2010.
“On any given school day, schoolyards around the city are a beehive of activity for students. But once school ends, the gate close shut and the yards sit empty,” the mayor said at the news conference. “They represent the greatest opportunity we have for transforming an existing underused resource cost-effectively into something we can all enjoy.”
With school out of session, local residents will have free reign of the playground-cum-parks from 8 a.m. until dusk. During the school year, the spaces will stay open on weekday evenings and all day during the weekend. The city is pledging to renovate many of the affected schoolyards, including the addition of new athletic fields, play equipment, landscaping and other improvements.
But will an influx of outsiders pose a wear-and-tear problem for local schoolchildren?
“The more use, the better,” said Rose Harvey, president of the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group that is a partner with the city on the initiative. “All use is encouraged by all communities, all children, all families. These are built to assume a huge volume of use. If they wear down, that’s fine. That’s what they’re all about.” (Ms. Harvey added that her group would provide money for maintenance.)
School principals will oversee use of the grounds during the day and ensure that preference is given to after-school activities that involve community children, organizers said. The city’s Department of Education will oversee maintenance and repairs.
The original PlaNYC report promised that “by 2030, every New Yorker across the city will live within a 10-minute walk of a park.” The mayor slightly modified this pledge in his statement today, noting that the schoolyard plan will advance the “goal of having every New Yorker live within a 10-minute walk of a park or playground.”
Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates, an advocacy group, raised questions about the mayor’s announcement, saying the city had not not provided a specific timetable as to when the public can expect the other yards will be open. He said in a statement:
For years the custodian union and school principals have held many of these school yards hostage. They have prevented the public from enjoying these desperately needed public open spaces. The $50,000 dollars the mayor has allocated to the DOE for each site would be much better spent on the Parks Department maintenance, which already oversees 269 schools yards in concert with the Department of Education.
Such disagreements aside, the young people at this morning’s news conference seemed to appreciate the news.
Kevin Fich, a seventh grader at Public School 246 in the Bronx who worked on the program, told reporters that parks “are not just just a place that kids can go to walk around. They’re a place that kids go to create memories.”
Mr. Bloomberg, apparently impressed by the young man’s eloquence, leaned over. “Are you running for mayor? Or perhaps higher office?”
Mr. Fich seemed to like the idea. “Uh, someday,” he said with a smile.
But he couldn’t match Mr. Bloomberg’s grin. “Let the record show,” the mayor said, “that he is, and I’m not.”
