Costs and Benefits

It didn't immediately look like a mistake. When the city first made the case, many agreed: Common sense seemed to dictate the move to artificial turf.

Months after becoming Bloomberg's parks commissioner in 2002, Adrian Benepe announced the expansion of a pilot program called Green Acres, which had put 12 artificial fields in parks over the previous four years, the majority on asphalt yards. Seven were in Manhattan, where Benepe had been the borough's parks chief under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

"Just the tip of the iceberg," vowed Benepe during a 2002 City Council budget hearing. "We're strong believers, whenever possible, in the use of synthetic turf for a variety of reasons."

One of the primary reasons, he said, was durability. Turf could hold up under high demand, particularly the punishing play of soccer, and it supposedly required little to no maintenance. Benepe singled out the growth of youth soccer and women's sports as fueling a greater need for athletic fields, saying that demand far exceeded what grass could handle. His boss was a big believer in artificial turf too. In his 2001 mayoral campaign, Bloomberg promised to improve parks, and his official biography prominently featured his philanthropic support for "the construction of new athletic fields at city high schools throughout the five boroughs."

Bloomberg had donated $1 million to Take the Field, a nonprofit that installed 42 artificial-turf fields at public schools. Take the Field embodied the public-private partnership model that Bloomberg continues to find so attractive: Seeded by foundation grants in 1999, the nonprofit persuaded the city to match every $1 in private donations with $3 in government funding. It eventually raised $36 million, and taxpayers chipped in $97 million. The project, which concluded in 2008, was instrumental in paving the way for 31 additional artificial fields at public schools, bringing the Department of Education's total number of turf fields to 73. "We just don't have the money for grass," the mayor later told reporters.

New York City's embracing of turf not only reflected Bloomberg's faith in technology but also represented the culmination of a 50-year quest for a manufactured playing surface for city parks and schools. That mission finds its roots on the Upper West Side, at Columbia University's Teachers College, where in 1958 a committee on educational facilities received a $4.5 million grant from the Ford Foundation. The group's first white paper tackled the lack of green spaces for inner-city schools.

"Originally there may have been living lawns and play fields, but the scuffle of too many feet soon turned the grass to gravel, the gravel to dirt and mud," the report said. The researchers worried that young people were increasingly out of shape, particularly city kids: "Whoever invents for rooftop and playground a material that looks like grass and acts like grass, a turf-like substance on which a ball will bounce and a child will not, a covering that brings a slice of spring in Scarsdale to 14th Street in April, will have struck a blow for stability in the big city."

The report inspired three scientists at Monsanto to develop the first artificial-turf product, ChemGrass, and that material evolved into AstroTurf, the nylon carpet laid down at the Houston Astrodome in 1966 and the chief component for millions of welcome mats. Though the city's first artificial athletic fields were similar nylon carpets, by 2002 Benepe was no longer interested in AstroTurf. He had become enamored of the new breed of artificial fields developed in the mid-1990s dubbed "synthetic turf."