Missing Moses' Muscle

A s spring turned to summer and the City Council weighed Mayor Bloomberg's proposed budget for this year, protests erupted over some of the cuts recommended by City Hall. Pols rallied to stop the closure of 20 fire companies. Day care workers facing layoffs marched across the Brooklyn Bridge. One advocacy group went to federal court to block cuts to AIDS housing services. But there was little furor over the 13 percent cut that the mayor proposed for the Department of Parks and Recreation—the largest reduction faced by any major agency.

No news there. Despite controlling 19.5 percent of the city's land, the Parks Department has relatively little political pull, and that translates into disappointment every budget season. Bloomberg has increased the Parks budget by an inflation-adjusted 13 percent during his time in office, but that's failed to keep pace with the overall city budget, which grew 24 percent. The result is that Parks, which by some accounts garnered 1.4 percent of the budget in the 1960s, will get only 0.44 percent of city spending in fiscal 2011. Among the 10 largest U.S. cities, only Philadelphia and Houston spend less per capita on parks than New York does. The number of full-time employees at the department is 1,000 less today than it was in 1987.

The modern Parks Department dates back to 1934, when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia unified the then separate borough parks systems under one agency and named Robert Moses its commissioner. Moses would rule for 26 years, more than doubling the acreage of the system, increasing the number of playgrounds from 199 to 777, establishing pools, beaches and parkways. Moses' fearsome behind-the-scenes power—he simultaneously ran several state and city entities—bolstered the parks. "Politically it was part of the Moses empire," says Gordon Davis, an attorney who served as Parks commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch. "So you didn't fuck with the Parks Department."

But it wasn't just Moses' political heft that helped build the modern park system. His singular skill at attracting federal money, at a time when New Deal work relief programs were dispensing billions, positioned New York's parks as prime beneficiaries of Washington's largesse. Moses' stewardship of Parks was not without critics, who valued quality over quantity and thought his designs for park space and equipment were dreary and unimaginative.

When John Lindsay became mayor and appointed Thomas Hoving commissioner, creativity in using parks took precedence over creating new ones (although Lindsay's team did originate "vest pocket" parks to provide smaller open spaces in neighborhoods where bigger plots of land were unavailable). Cultural events—plays, concerts and "be-ins" arrived in city parks. But Hoving left the job after a little more than a year, and over the next decade, the department had six commissioners.

Meanwhile, city finances deteriorated to the point that parks capital projects had to be scrapped in 1978 because the city was shut out of the bond market. After Koch became mayor, several people turned down the Parks job, says Davis, who eventually accepted it. Davis built on what was left; for instance, he changed the construction of park benches when he noticed which design had survived a blitz of vandalism in Red Hook Park. He took to the airways to restore confidence in parks. But money was still the toughest battle.

"The fight for resources was a real full-time effort that always involved a little shenanigans on my part," Davis recalls. This included an effort one year to retain seasonal employees that he was supposed to fire. Budget officials caught his attempted sleight of hand and unsuccessfully pressed Koch to fire the commish.