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Showing posts with label NYC Parks Advocates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYC Parks Advocates. Show all posts
Back in January, the Parks Department sent out a letter to its employees with the stern warning that, "No matter how short or simple the answer may seem, employees must not engage in conversation about Parks to those who identify themselves as reporters." That controversial directive, which the NYCLU argued violated worker's First Amendment rights, have now been clarified.
A new directive from the Department says that Parks employees can speak to the press as long as they do so on their own behalf, on their own time and without disclosing confidential information—good thing we took our own photos of the High Line!
According to Parks spokeswoman Vickie Karp, the change came because "It was brought to our attention that the introduction to the policy could be clearer so the introduction was clarified."
Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates, however, doesn't quite buy that excuse. "They are clearly trying to cover up a host of issues," he tells us. "Obviously a lot of employees are fed up. The policy is absurd. They know fully well these are not issues of confidentiality. They are just trying to stem the avalanche of negative publicity. Obviously its not working."
The new press policy, included below courtesy of NYC Park Advocates, is effective immediately
Members of the Jamaica Bay Task Force Group (JBTF) hosted a meeting last week to decry plans calling for the destruction of 400 acres of Jamaica Bay wetlands to clear the path for a runway expansion project at John F. Kennedy Airport.
More than 150 people, including the JBTF — a cadre of citizenry, scientists, and federal, state, regional, and local agency representatives, staunchly guarding the wildlife refuge for more than 20 years — crowded into the American Legion Hall at 209 Crossbay Boulevard in the Broad Channel section of Queens during what was, at times, a heated dialogue over the Regional Plan Association’s (RPA) report, “Upgrading to World Class – The future of the New York Regions Airports” (pages 150 to 154), which proposes eliminating a sizeable acreage of “what is not simply New York City’s ecological crown jewel but a wetlands and estuarine area of national importance,” according to a press release from NYC Park Advocates.
“One of the major shortcomings of the report was that actual users, including environmentalists and civic organizations were not consulted,” said Geoffrey Croft, the president of NYC Park Advocate, of the report, developed by a conglomerate of multi-tiered stakeholders from all levels of government and funded by the Port Authority.
Croft’s blog A Walk in the Park reports that attendees delivered impassioned pleas, and one — Daniel Mundy, Jr. vice president of Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers and president of Broad Channel Civic Association — even presented a PowerPoint presentation refuting the alleged findings of a multitude of the RPA’s “inaccurate air travel projections from prior reports beginning in 1947.”
“The nature of the proposal is outrageous,” said Mundy.
According to the release by NYC Park Advocates, the destruction of the wetlands, “whose federal wildlife refuge is ‘the size of 10 Central Parks,’” would require an act of Congress.
“I am not going to let that happen,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner, of the plan. In a letter voicing their opposition, signed by 21 groups and sent last month to Port Authority Executive Director Christopher O. Ward, they pleaded that the Port Authority “consider other available alternatives for meeting the region’s airport capacity needs.”
Read the rest of the article at the Sheepshead Bite site...Click here
I guess it's good to be King Mike's daughter...you get to take over public parks...
A private foundation that helps fund two Bedford-Stuyvesant charter schools wants to renovate and close off a city park for sports team practices, the Daily News has learned.
St. Andrew's Park would be closed and used exclusively for parts of the school day by high school athletic teams from the Uncommon Schools and Achievement First, which share a building on Atlantic Ave., said Community Board 3 chair Henry Butler.
In exchange for the exclusive use of the park, Robin Hood would fund a renovation of the rundown, dangerous park, which has been the scene of two crimes in recent months.
"If they can renovate it and make it safer, I'm all for it as long as it's the community's park first not the school's park first that the community can use," said Butler, who attended the meeting.
Parks Department spokeswoman Meghan Lalor called Robin Hood's presentation "conceptual."
"While the original proposal was to renovate the athletic field, as a result of discussion at this meeting, the project was expanded to include other areas of the park as well," Lalor said.
In August, a female Parks Department employee was raped in an early morning attack in St. Andrew's. In June, a man was killed at the park after a drive-by shooter sprayed bullets into a crowd watching a basketball game.
Neighborhood mom Tyra McKinney was all for the park being closed for schoolkids' use.
"My son would be in a safe place," said McKinney, 39. "I would love that."
But Crown Heights lab worker Wendell Johnson, who plays basketball in St. Andrew's with his 13-year-old son every week, didn't like the idea of a city park being closed off to the public - even for part of the day.
"The park is supposed to be open to everybody," he said.
The park currently has three blacktop basketball courts, a play area and concrete bleacher seats.
Robin Hood officials did not return calls for comment.
New York City Park Advocates President Geoffrey Croft said the idea of a private group renovating a public park in exchange for exclusive use sets "a very dangerous precedent."
"The security issue has to be addressed but [private use] doesn't solve the problem that's happening at St. Andrew's," Croft said,
Parks advocate Geoffrey Croft is frustrated by city inaction: 'Instead of fixing the deplorable conditions, the city pretends they don’t exist.' Lombard for News
In Harlem's Highbridge Park, condom wrappers and used hypodermic needles litter a path not far from a playground at 190th St. where a mom rolled a ball to her toddler.
"It's really sad," said 26-year-old Angel De La Rosa, walking by with his beagle, Charlie. "I don't go back there."
More condoms and needles lie scattered on a short trail that leads to the High Bridge near 170th St.
The park stretches along the Harlem River Drive from W. 155th St. to Edgecombe Ave., and is the only major swath of green space in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods.
Photo caption: Instead of flowers and shrubbery, hypodermic needles, condoms and other trash are scattered in the weeds at Highbridge Park.
It does not have a large private conservancy raising money for upkeep, security and beautification - and locals say it shows.
At times, New Yorkers are forced to handle maintenance themselves.
Johnati Pol, 19, said baseball players try to repair uneven surfaces to the diamond at 174th St. by throwing dirt on the surface after it rains.
"It gets muddy, and it gets bumpy," Pol said, saying the bumps send the baseball bouncing into players' faces.
On a recent visit, part of the diamond's eroding dirt foundation was being held in place by wooden planks secured by cords.
Still farther south, a stairwell at 156th St. and Edgecombe Ave. was shuttered with rusted hurricane fencing and metal "No Trespassing" signs.
Although only a tiny fraction of Big Apple parks recycle, a new one now under construction along the Brooklyn waterfront is set to take being green to another level.
The planned 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is set to partially open this winter after two decades of planning, is being partially built with recycled materials. This includes scraps from former pier sheds that were torn down to make way for the park.
The park will also feature an irrigation system relying on recycled rainwater and an on-site recycling system for its waste.
Even project opponents furious over the park’s controversial plan to include luxury condos won’t be able to find fault with its recycling initiatives.
Lisa Willner, a spokeswoman for the state-city entity overseeing the Brooklyn Heights-DUMBO plan, said a containment tank set for Pier 1 would hold up to 104,000 gallons of water that will be used to irrigate the park. Storm water could also be stored at other parts of the park, she said.
Dog Skull and Pelvis - Pelham Bay Park - November 9, 2009. Geoffrey Croft/NYC Park Advocates
Of the city’s 1,875 parks, only Central Park has a strong recycling program and at least 18 others – including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Marine Park, McCarren Park and Manhattan Beach — have smaller ones.
City Parks Department workers collected 35,035 tons of waste in parks last year, and the Department of Sanitation supplemented service by collecting thousands more.
The Parks Department couldn’t provide a breakdown of how much tonnage gets recycled, but DOS confirmed that whatever waste it collects at parks heads to landfills and isn’t separated and recycled.
Over the past two decades, more than 10,000 abandoned vehicles have been ridded from parks. DOS collects the vehicles, and an agency spokesman said it’s unclear whether cars get recycled because private companies hired by the city decide how the cars should be disposed.
There's not enough green in the city's budget to fund New York's biggest park projects, the Post has learned.
Only two years ago, Mayor Bloomberg was hailed as a city green space champion after announcing a $386 million plan with fancy renderings to redo eight downtrodden parks through his sweeping PlaNYC initiative.
But with the city in fiscal crisis, the mayor's new spending plan cuts funding in half for five of them.
Projects to revive Manhattan's Fort Washington Park, Dreier-Offerman Park in Brooklyn, Soundview Park in the Bronx and Highland and Rockaway parks in Queens have been gutted from a combined $206 million in 2007 to $102.9 million, city documents show.
At Dreier-Offerman near Coney Island, a $40 million plan to reclaim the park from the homeless and junkies by adding new athletic fields and restoring wetlands was cut to $19 million.
Fort Washington Park in Washington Heights saw a similar $40 million project slashed to $21.5 million while a $50 million plan to restore Ridgewood Reservoir and bring new athletic fields to Highland Park fell to $19.8 million.
In fact, the Parks Department's five-year capital plan for projects through fiscal 2013 was cut by $338 million -- or 14 percent -- compared to mayor's preliminary budget in January, the city's Independent Budget Office says.
And the city is in danger of becoming even less green.
The revised $2.3 billion capital plan, part of the executive budget the City Council will vote on next month, sets aside $456.2 million for projects for the fiscal year starting July 1. But a May 19 City Council study predicts "it is unlikely that without significant staff increases, the Parks Department will be able to complete anywhere near [its] goal."
A Parks official speaking on condition of anonymity said it's more likely some seasonal workers would be laid off, adding anticipated budget gaps could also be resolved by delaying or cutting spending on other park projects.
The official also said the city has a "bad" habit of commissioning renderings for park projects "it knows it'll never be able to fully fund" just to grab a quick headline "and boost the mayor's popularity."
Parks Department spokesman Phil Abramson said it sometimes pays for the city to develop project designs before securing full funding so construction can smoothly start "when additional funds are available." He also said the administration "remains committed to its historic investments in the park system," which included a record $552 million in capital project spending last fiscal year.
The mayor through PlaNYC also pledged to convert 290 schoolyards into community parks so every New Yorker would be within a 10-minute walk of a playground by 2030. But this plan was also hit hard by cuts, the council study says.
Of the 221 yet to be built, funding has been slashed by $13.3 million, from $77.2 million to $63.9 million.
Geoffrey Croft of the watchdog group New York City Park Advocates called the department's capital program a "disaster, especially PlaNYC." He said the city continues "to make promises it knows it can't deliver on some projects while spending like drunken sailors on others."
Among the non-PlaNYC projects hit hard by the fiscal cuts are a few in Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn that were promised to residents by city officials to help push through a controversial rezoning plan in 2005 which brought high-rise housing to the waterfront.
Funding for the planned $30 million Bushwick Inlet Park on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border has been pushed back to at least 2013, leaving it in jeopardy, the council study says. Another project to build a soccer field on Commercial Street in Greenpoint has seen funding gutted from $14 million to $1 million.
In all capital funding for Williamsburg-Greenpoint projects has been cut to $112.1 million, down from $169.1 million in January, officials said.
Years of illegal dumping and unchecked weed growth at the Fresh Creek Nature Preserve in Canarsie have turned the once-beautiful stretch of waterfront park into a polluted wasteland of garbage and dead trees, residents charged.
"This is not a nature preserve," said Maria Garrett, 52, whose house sits next to an overgrown section of the preserve on E. 108th St. "It's a hospice where nature comes to die. It's a nature graveyard."
Spanning 74 acres of salt marsh along Jamaica Bay, the litter-covered shores of Fresh Creek are strewn with everything from liquor bottles to broken baby carriages.
Mussels grow out of tires left on the beach. Nearby are two burned-out cars submerged in water.
"If it was us not taking care of our property and leaving garbage everywhere, we'd get a ticket," said Garrett. "Who's giving the city a ticket?"
Garrett, her neighbors and local activists will host a two-day cleanup starting today, picking up the garbage and cutting back overgrown weeds that are killing trees.
"They want everything to go green. Well, we're going brown," said Garrett, as she made her way through 10-foot high vegetation. "Look at this stuff. They could film an episode of that show 'Survivor' right here in Brooklyn."
Garrett said the decision for the cleanup came after letters and calls to city officials went unanswered.
Further inland, the remnants of an illegal chop shop are still visible. Glass from broken windshields, floor mats, carburetors and gas caps are embedded in soil blackened by tire fires. In one spot, a tree grows out of an old washing machine.
"This park is not an asset to the community," said Geoff Croft of NYC Park Advocates. "This park is a liability.
The city maintains that the park is routinely cleaned.
"Since 2006, we have removed 44 vehicles from the park," Parks Department spokesman Phil Abramson said via e-mail. "In 2008, we removed 16 containers of debris, nearly 350 tires and, to help prevent future vehicular access, we added more berms, soil and woodchips."
Kian Mehran-Lodge, 5, with photo of his feet, which were burned in a Brooklyn playground. Alvarez/News
These city playgrounds aren't for child's play.
Black rubber mats designed to break a child's fall turn blistering hot in the summer, soaring to higher than 165 degrees, a Daily News investigation found.
Doctors at two city hospital burn units reported seeing 16 to 18 young children with playground burns a year, mostly from the mats under junglegyms and sliding boards.
"I have nightmares," said Anne Casson, whose toddler son, Will, ditched his shoes at Carl Schurz Park on the upper East Side one day last May.
"He stepped onto the black mats and was screaming hysterically," Casson said. "When I picked him up, the skin was just hanging off his feet."
The baby spent four days in New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell, where doctors administered morphine for intense pain.
The News, accompanied by NYC Park Advocates, took the temperature of mats under junglegyms at playgrounds in all five boroughs last Friday.
"It is unconscionable that the city continues to install products in playgrounds that hurt the most vulnerable park users - small children," said Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates, who took a 166.9-degree reading on the mats at Carl Schurz. "How many more have to get hurt until someone is held accountable?"
The News requested recent statistics on the number of burns at the 1,000 city playgrounds, but Parks Department spokeswoman Jama Adams said there were "no incidents reported."
The Cassons sent a letter to city officials with a graphic photo of their son's injuries.
"We're not going to remove [the mats]," Benepe told The News. "Our playgrounds are the safest in the world."
Reyhan Mehran, a marine scientist from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said her son Kian Mehran-Lodge was 14 months old in July 2004 when he was burned at Van Voorhees Park.
"We cannot understand why the city wouldn't immediately remove material that is known to severely burn children," she said.
Doctors said the highest temperatures measured on the mats could cause burns in less than a second.
At 140 degrees, it "takes about three seconds," said Dr. Palmer Bessey, of New York-Presbyterian's burn center, which treated two playground burns within the last two weeks and treats six to eight each year.
Children swarmed the artificial-turf soccer field at Asphalt Green yesterday, but a sign at the gate might have raised a red flag for their parents.
“This field can get hot on warm, sunny days,” said the posting by the city’s Parks Department.
“If you experience symptoms of heat-related illness, such as dizziness, weakness, headache, vomiting, or muscle cramps, move to a shaded area. Drink water, rest, and seek medical attention if you do not feel better.”
This sign will soon appear at all of the city’s 94 artificial turf fields — as well as at the 68 fields planned for the future — to warn the public about the risks of overheating and dehydration.
After a decade of installing artificial turf, the city’s Parks Department is finally acknowledging what’s long been known: Fake grass get hot.
One day last month, the artificial turf at Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza was 165.5 degrees, while a nearby plot of grass measured just 83 degrees. Waves of heat rose from the field.
“It’s outrageous,” said Josh Srebnick, a pediatric neuropsychologist who was playing with his five-year-old son, Jake.
One study cited by the Health Department in a recent report on the turf said, “At temperatures above 120 degrees, it only takes 3 seconds to burn a child’s skin severely enough to require surgery.”
The Parks Department has never taken surface temperatures, but this summer it will begin to conduct its own tests of “air quality” on hot days, said a spokesperson. It’s also “exploring” alternatives to rubber-infill turf “to make fields cooler.”
Watchdog group NYC Park Advocates has discovered the carpet-style alternative gets as hot as 160 degrees.
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“At temperatures of 120 degrees, it only takes 3 seconds to burn a child’s skin severely enough to require surgery.”
Days after a newspaper article exposed the presence of prostitution, chop shops, and homeless encampments in some city parks, the parks department is scrambling to clear the signs of recurring problems.
Yesterday, parks department employees removed two cars from the Fresh Creek Nature Preserve in Brooklyn, where they had been placed on cinder blocks and gutted in an alleged chop shop that was hidden by the overgrowth. Its existence was first reported by the New York Post.
The New York Sun found the department's employees had erected several 3-foot-high piles of sand to bar the chop shop's organizers from reclaiming the area and driving in new vehicles. The cars are driven from the Belt Parkway through a roadside clearing and into the park, where they're placed on cinder blocks and their parts are removed and illegally sold.
Left behind were piles of tires, scattered construction waste, broken glass, and acres of shoulder-high invasive plants that hide a variety of activities.
This is a temporary solution to a short-lived problem, the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, said of the chop shop. "We regularly go into these places and remove illegal dumping. We do massive operations," he said.
According to the president of the watchdog group New York City Park Advocates, Geoffrey Croft, the parks department has removed the stolen cars once a year for the past three years. "And every time they put up a 3-foot sand pile, as if that were a solution. It would take a couple of guys a few minutes to level that," he said.
At Calvert Vaux Park — formerly Dreier-Offerman Park — in Coney Island, a tent city that was reportedly used by homeless people was leveled Tuesday. Although the waist-high weeds had been flattened, beer bottles and clothing piles remained, as did evidence of the former residents' intent to come back — one person's bicycle was locked to a tree.
According to Mr. Benepe, the homeless encampments in Calvert Vaux Park are on private land, not city parkland.
"Anyone can go to the parks department's Web site and see that this is parks department land," Mr. Croft said.
He frequently butts heads with Mr. Benepe, as the two have fundamentally different views of what how parks such as Calvert Vaux and Fresh Creek should be treated.
"We concentrate our maintenance efforts on the parks that people use," Mr. Benepe said, noting that existing resources don't permit every park to be kept in perfect condition.
For Mr. Croft, it is "the city's negligence that prevents the public from enjoying wonderful public places," not the lack of public demand.
Calvert Vaux and Fresh Creek are both former landfills that were bought by the city and never developed. The city has planned a $40 million redevelopment project in Calvert Vaux Park, but construction has yet to begin.
"We always gave priority to developed parkland," a former parks commissioner, Henry Stern, said. "They're basically triage decisions as to what you can fix and what you can't."
"A lot of these areas — you might call them the untended fringes of the emerald empire — simply don't get the attention that Rome does," he said.
Artificial turf installed in city fields can heat up to a blistering 162 degrees even on a mild summer day, a Daily News investigation has found.
"My feet are burning! I had to dump cold water on my shoes just to walk around," Yannick Pena, 9, complained to his mom on a recent visit to Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx, where The News found the turf hit temperatures of 145 to 160 degrees on an 80-degree day.
At Staten Island's Greenbelt Recreation Center, where turf temperatures reached 149, park regular Diana Stentella, 58, wondered how kids survived the heat.
"When they play soccer here, do they have an ambulance to take the kids away?" Stentella said. "On a hot, humid day you would faint out here."
Over two mildly warm days last month, The News took surface temperature readings at five synthetic fields across the city accompanied by NYC Park Advocates, a group that has been critical of the fake grass.
At all five, temperatures at the synthetic fields soared roughly twice as high as at nearby natural grass ones, from a low of 144 degrees at the Greenbelt Recreation Center on Staten Island to a scorching 162 at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.
"It's sadistic that the city is installing a product which gets so hot and is actually expecting the public to play on it," said NYC Park Advocates President Geoffrey Croft.
"Clearly, artificial turf presents many serious public health and safety issues that the city simply refuses to address," Croft said.
The scorching temperatures are just one of the nagging fears critics have about the turf, an infill made of recycled crumb rubber from old tires.
The city has installed the turf at nearly 100 parks and playgrounds across the city. An additional 68 projects are in the works.
Earlier this year, The News reported concerns that the millions of tiny crumbs contain heavy metals like lead and cadmium, as well as volatile organic compounds and other chemicals.
"This is very alarming," said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum when told of The News' findings. "Now this, on top of the other questions we have. There needs to be a moratorium on these fields."
Despite the uproar, a city Department of Health study concluded this spring that the chemicals in synthetic turf fields cause no known health problems.
Health officials acknowledged fake fields can get excessively hot and can cause more heat-related problems, especially in children.
When confronted with The News' findings, the Parks Department also conceded high temperatures can be a problem at turf fields.
They said they were in the process of installing signs warning visitors of the dangers at fields across the city.
"The temperatures can get very high during the heat of the day. But people are smart. They are not going to use a place that is uncomfortable to play on," said Liam Kavanagh, first deputy parks commissioner.
Kavanagh also said the city plans to stop using the crumb-rubber infill because of excessive heat and switch over to a carpet-style turf.
One of the fields The News tested, in Macombs Dam Park, already has the new turf - and still tested as high as 160 degrees.
"My feet always blister coming out here. The bottoms of my shoes feel like melted rubber, it gets so hot," said Luis Coronell, 33, who regularly takes his 10-year-old nephew, Andres, to play on turf field because there are no real ones in the neighborhood.
"You bring the kids out here, but you can't do anything because the turf gets too hot," Coronell said. "This turf is a killer."
The late Harry Sommerfield's body is buried in a Brooklyn cemetery - but his tombstone is among the many pieces of rubble illegally dumped in a Brooklyn park.
Hidden deep within a weed-infested, garbage-strewn section of Dreier-Offerman Park in Coney Island, a Post reporter recently uncovered the discarded tombstone of the Manhattan underwear salesman who died 70 years ago.
Geoffrey Croft, president of the watchdog group New York City Park Advocates, said, "I've seen and heard stories about all sorts of things people dump in our parks, but a tombstone? That's a first."
The Bloomberg administration says parks are in better shape than they've been in over 40 years, but a Post investigation published Sunday found many neglected areas of parkland used as hideouts for rampant drug use, prostitution, homeless camps, and even "chop shops" to strip stolen cars.
Illegal dumping, however, is also among the biggest issues facing the parks system. The Post, while inspecting 70 parks over nine months, found many barren areas littered with items like abandoned cars and boats, construction debris, opened steel safes, some Vegas-style slot machines and Sommerfield's tombstone.
Sommerfield was buried two miles away from Dreier-Offerman at Washington Cemetery in Bensonhurst after dying in 1938, two months shy of his 61st birthday.
His desecrated gravestone was spotted near the Bay 44th Street section of the 77-acre park, covered in weeds between a broken police barricade and a rusted box spring.
It calls Sommerfield a "beloved husband and father." It's been replaced at the cemetery with a larger stone within a family plot.
He was an underwear salesman, a lifelong New Yorker and son of German immigrants, according to his death certificate.
Cemetery workers said it's unclear whether the original stone - which apparently has been lying the park since it was replaced at least 30 years ago - was stolen, then dumped, or if a monument maker replacing it decided to save some bucks on trash fees by tossing the original in the park.
Attempts to reach family members who knew Sommerfield were unsuccessful, and cemetery workers said they had no contact information for the family or the maker of the second gravestone.
Dreier-Offerman is also filled with homeless camps and drug addicts, and parts of it include weeds more than 12 feet high. The park is also littered with tires, construction debris and rusted cars with license plates dating back more than 20 years.
Even a creek that runs through the park that is supposed to separate Coney Island from the rest of Brooklyn is waterless and filled with debris and cars.
Despite the blatant blight, the park should be seeing better days ahead. It is slated to undergo a $40 million makeover by 2011, city officials said.
Regarding illegal dumping in parks citywide, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said, "you might find an abandoned car in a park that was dumped 15 years ago, but it's quite obvious that the average city park is better than it was 15 years ago and much better than it was 30 years ago."
The city's plan to redevelop the Ridgewood Reservoir suffered a setback this week when city Controller William Thompson rejected a Parks Department contract to design the site.
The agency should not have awarded the $3.3 million contract without "a full understanding of all the issues pertaining to any new development" of the environmentally sensitive area, according to a June 23 letter from the controller's office to the Parks Department.
In addition, having an architect selected by the agency also oversee an environmental assessment of the site could be a conflict of interest, the letter states.
Geoffrey Croft of New York City Park Advocates, who believes the reservoir area should remain untouched, said Thompson is doing the right thing by "nipping the contract in the bud."
"Unfortunately, once you pay a designer it's often hard to undo plans in the Parks Department world," said Croft.
Four years ago, the city Department of Environmental Protection turned over the 50-acre, defunct reservoir site - located next to Highland Park at the Brooklyn-Queens border - to the Parks Department.
Parks officials are floating several plans to redevelop the area, currently filled with dense shrubs, trees and wetlands. Under one scenario, an old basin would be filled to create ballfields and other recreational facilities. The idea has some activists up in arms.
Thompson said that would require up to 1 million cubic yards of fill being trucked in through local streets, causing years of noise, pollution and traffic woes.
Parks officials have said they will weigh community concerns before finalizing designs.
"We plan to review the controller's concerns and meet with the controller so that the design contract and the planning can move ahead on this great park," a Parks Department statement said yesterday.
One of the key goals of PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg's sweeping environmental initiative, "is to ensure that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park or open space," the agency added. "Highland Park in Queens is one of eight large parks being redesigned to help achieve this goal."
The agency has also pointed out that local church leaders have been urging the city to provide more ballfields for children.
Thompson, who is eying a run for mayor next year, has been vocal in his concerns about the site.
Last month, he and environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned a column for The New York Times heralding the reservoir an "accidental wilderness" rarely seen in the five boroughs.
Thompson and Kennedy said the city should instead spend the money on improving ballfields at Highland Park.
"Parks - Are we losing important green space including parks and playgrounds? NO. The new stadium project will actually create more acres of parkland than currently exist including a new six-acre park on the Harlem River, a track, tennis courts, racquetball courts, basketball courts, a soccer field and an ice skating rink."
Excerpt from a mailer paid for by the New York Yankees community relations department and sent to neighborhood residents in the Bronx during the "public review" period of the Yankee Stadium ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure) application to construct the new Yankee Stadium on public parkland.
INTRODUCTION
In June 2005, without a single public hearing and over the course of just eight days, City and State elected officials alienated 25.3 acres of historic South Bronx parkland to allow the New York Yankees to build a new stadium. As part of this action, the Bloomberg and Pataki administrations and the Yankees organization repeatedly promised the community that not only would the parks be replaced but even more parkland would be provided in return. However, a close examination reveals that just 21.78 of the 25.3 acres are actually being replaced, resulting in a net loss of nearly 4 acres. Whenever this deficiently has been exposed, the City's Department of Parks and Recreation has constantly altered the numbers to create a false impression. Of the replacement park acreage the city now claims, 58% (12.5 acres) already existed as either mapped parkland or, in one case, as a school yard. Also lost is the long promised dedicated funding desperately needed to maintain the replacement parks. And that's only the beginning of the broken promises.
Various State and Federal laws pertaining to the alienation and conversion of municipal parkland to non-park uses require that new parkland acting as a replacement must be of equivalent or greater value. For a variety of reasons, the local community has long argued that the replacement parks fail to meet the criteria, and that they fail to provide a similar level of usefulness or location. The city has attempted to pass off a disparate collection of parcels as "replacements," including building replacement parkland on top of existing parkland. Many of these concerns can be summarized as follows:
The plan calls for replacing large linear parks that provided active recreation with smaller park features spread out in many areas and over wider distances – up to 1.4 miles away – some on top of parking garages.
More than half of the replacement parkland the City is relying on to meet its obligation has existed as mapped parkland that the public has used for decades.
Former park amenities such as a heavily used natural turf ballfield and an asphalt ballfield are not being replaced with similar active recreation facilities. In the case of the asphalt ballfield, the City has simply refused to acknowledge its recreational use.
Parkland acreage previously used for active recreation is being replaced, in part, by a concrete pedestrian walkway. Some of the replacement acreage is also passive park acreage from other projects that were either promised under other park plans or previously unrelated to the stadium project.
The replacement plan substitutes parkland that was free and open to the public with a significantly larger pay-to-play tennis concession – in a flood zone.
The replacement parkland plan also carries significant environmental and public health impacts. The project destroyed 70% of the community's mature trees, and aims to convert much of the previous parkland's natural features such as grass into artificial and impervious surfaces. The health benefits provided from the previous natural park features were numerous and critical to the well-being and safety of a community that suffers from the highest asthma rates in the country. As noted in the project's environmental impact statement (EIS), the health benefits from the replacement trees alone won't be realized for decades, if ever.
A proposed police station in Queens is facing opposition from a parks activist who says the plan would appropriate parkland illegally and requires the approval of the state Legislature to be built.
"It's not like they're putting in a designated precinct for the park like in Central Park. There are no guarantees that those cops would be patrolling the park," Mr. Croft said in an interview.
Mr. Kelly, who testified at a police budget hearing at City Hall yesterday, said the new building is needed to replace the current structure on 43rd Avenue. The Parks Department is reviewing the proposed precinct location, he said.
Council Member Peter Vallone Jr., who represents parts of Queens and is chairman of the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said the plan for a new precinct in the park is "welcome news."
"The crime rate there is higher than any park outside Central Park, so it makes sense," Mr. Vallone said. Last summer, 43 crimes were recorded in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, second only to Central Park's 90, according to a report by the police department.
While generally supportive of the precinct, Mr. Vallone described Mr. Croft's objections as "legitimate issues" that need to be addressed before the precinct's location is chosen. "It's a tricky task because you don't want to take away parkland," he said.
Mr. Croft is currently a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city to prevent the construction of a proposed restaurant in Union Square Park.
