November 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 14

Letters
We hope the articles you read in Parks & Recreation are thought-provoking and engaggaging, and we want to hear your opinions on what you read in these pages. Through social
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Citizen Involvement Means Better Parks for All

Adrian Benepe

The recent piece, " Private Money,
Public Parks, " represented a view
that is heavily slanted against public-private partnerships in city parks,
and it was short on facts, yet long on
conclusions.
The reality is that those of us who
have run an urban park system understand the valuable role of citizen
involvement in the lives of city parks,
and we know that in many cases, the
rebirth of our parks was made possible by private-sector sparkplugs.
The article's basic premise -that
public-private partnerships for parks
are inherently bad, and are somehow
contributing to a worsening of urban
parks, is simply wrong. For more
than a century, charitable contribu-

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Parks & Recreation

tions and voluntary support have
been the bedrock of much that we
take for granted in this nation, and
are among the elements that separate
America from other nations. Universities, hospitals, museums, performing arts centers, social services
and public health programs - even
the local elementary school or Little
League - have long enjoyed the support and leadership of citizen leaders
and donors.
And while some believe the idea
that private philanthropy to public
parks has sharply increased, the reality has long been that many of our
best-loved parks, in the vast rural expanses or in inner-city neighborhoods,
exist because of philanthropic donations of huge sums of money and vast
assemblages of land by generous citizens almost a century ago.
The most prominent example,
of course, is the legacy of John D.
Rockefeller Jr., whose donations of
land and money created or improved
Acadia, Great Smoky Mountains,
Mesa Verde, Grand Teton, Shenandoah and Yosemite National Parks,
along with California's Humboldt
Redwoods State Park and Fort Tryon Park, a beloved inner-city park in
the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Public-private partnerships built the Statue of

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Liberty, and a century later both restored it and reopened Ellis Island as
a museum. The 80,000 acres of San
Francisco's Golden Gate National
Recreation Area (GGNRA) are managed in a unique partnership between
the National Park Service and the
GGNRA Conservancy. And on the
National Mall in Washington, D.C.,
private philanthropy played a major
role in helping rehabilitate the Washington Monument.
Every city in America can provide
a similar story of private philanthropic largess, without which there might
not be a beloved park, amphitheater,
skating rink or ballfield.
There is another essential misunderstanding held by some people,
who believe that gifts from donors
only help " wealthy " parks, and that
poor people are turned away. Much
is made of the extraordinary private
support that has turned Central Park
from a crime-ridden dust bowl to a
safe, beautiful oasis for 40 million
visitors a year. But few know that the
park's most frequent users include
the residents of East, Central and
West Harlem, and those who live in
public housing projects that adjoin
the park on the Upper East and Upper West Sides.
In Buffalo, New York, the Buffalo
Olmsted Parks Conservancy partners
November 2013 - Parks & Recreation

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