Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out about a former city parks commissioner whose new job is to help oversee a single park, in Upper Manhattan. A reminder: It’s Day 2 of our Metropolitan Diary challenge.
Adrian Benepe was once responsible for all 1,700 parks in New York City. Now he is responsible for one, Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan.
He calls it “one of the greatest parks in New York City.”
“It may be the most beautiful,” said Benepe, who has just signed on as the managing director and chief development officer of the Fort Tryon Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that works with the Department of Parks and Recreation to look after the 67-acre park. “Certainly the most magical and mysterious.”
Looks aside, it is “unique in the ecosystem of New York City parks” because it is essentially the same as when it was laid out just over 90 years ago, he said. “Nothing significant added, nothing significant taken away.” That sets it apart from Central Park and Prospect Park, to which features like playing fields, amphitheaters, swimming pools and skating rinks have been added.
But it needs work, he said.
Benepe has a past with this park. He got an introduction in the 1990s, when he was the Manhattan borough commissioner of the Parks Department, the job he had before he became commissioner of the entire agency in 2002. His secretary said, “There’s a woman who says she’s Dr. Ruth on the phone for you.”
Benepe thought it was a prank. But the distinct voice on the line was unmistakably that of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the star of call-in shows about sex and relationships. She had lived in the neighborhood for years and said the park wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.
“We walked around the park, and she was right — it was falling down,” Benepe said. He offered to help set up a nonprofit similar to the Central Park Conservancy, which has raised more than $1 billion to maintain and improve that park.
Benepe’s arrival is the next step for Fort Tryon Park. The group’s board decided to add a full-time leader to work with the park’s part-time director and hired Benepe, who had left the Brooklyn Botanic Garden after five years as president and chief executive.
“During the last 20 years the park has made a remarkable recovery,” Jeff Bauml, the conservancy’s board chairman, said. But he added, “There is an incredible amount of infrastructure that needs revitalization to bring it back.”
Fort Tryon Park is different from, say, Central Park: It was created in the 1930s from a Gilded Age estate that had belonged to C.K.G. Billings, a mogul from the Midwest.
Then someone even wealthier came along — John D. Rockefeller Jr., who bought the estate with an eye to turning it into a park. Some accounts say that Billings decamped to another estate he owned, on Long Island. Others say he leased a 27-room apartment on Fifth Avenue for $25,000 a year (about $716,000 a year in today’s dollars).
Benepe said that Rockefeller’s motivation was concern about development, with apartment buildings marching up Fort Washington Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard. Rockefeller reached an agreement with the city: If he built the park, the city would take it over. He hired Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architecture firm started by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park and Prospect Park. One corner of the old estate became the Cloisters, the medieval-art outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was underwritten by Rockefeller.
The Olmsted design for Fort Tryon Park provided for terraces with breathtaking views up and down the Hudson River. Benepe wants to develop a restoration and management plan for the woodlands in the park, which he said had been neglected.
“The garden areas have been well restored since the 1990s, but the woodlands have become overgrown as nature took its course, as there was almost no maintenance for decades,” he said. “It has to be done in a sensitive way. It’s become a good habitat for birds, especially. We want to maintain that habitat but restore it and then manage it. It’s a challenge.”
Weather
Expect partly cloudy skies and a high near 85. Tonight, cloudy conditions will continue with a low near 70.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Independence Day observed).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
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The latest New York news
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Pride march: The New York City Pride March, a jubilant celebration of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, came as the Trump administration targeted several New York City hospitals that have provided care for transgender young people.
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Candidates are campaigning after dark: For candidates eager to show they will meet voters where they are, that has sometimes meant club crashing, bar crawls or other late-night adventures. Zohran Mamdani did it last year. Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist and ally of Mamdani, did it this year in her campaign against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, whom she defeated in the Democratic primary for the U.S. House last week.
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Democratic leader under fire: Carmella Charrington, a Democratic district leader in Brooklyn, has apologized for a social media post from last year that amplified antisemitic comments and conspiracy theories. She said it was a “mistake” to recirculate the post.
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Carriage rides resume: Horse-drawn carriage rides returned to Central Park after a six-day voluntary shutdown. The rides were halted after a horse bolted and an 18-year-old fell out and died. A City Council hearing next month will consider a possible ban.
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The Metropolitan Diary challenge: It’s Day 2 of the Metropolitan Diary challenge, and we’ll help you write your own. What makes for a good Diary, you may ask? A good story that happens to be set in, and capture, the essential New York-ness of the city. Missed Day 1? It’s not too late to start.
The test for Jeffries
Right now Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s chances of becoming speaker of the House look good, assuming the Democrats win a majority in November. No other Democrat has stepped forward to challenge him.
But my colleague Annie Karni writes that Jeffries will have to contend with anti-establishment candidates who are all but certain to be elected — among them Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, democratic socialists who ran with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s backing. Many democratic socialist candidates consider Jeffries an establishment politician who has held back some of their progressive goals. They also feel that he has been too closely aligned with the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, which has become a liability for many Democrats.
So Jeffries will have to negotiate with Avila Chevalier and other progressives. But it’s not clear what they want and what he will be able to offer — and he will be under pressure from more centrist Democrats, who have already warned him about the risks they see if he does too much to appease the left.
METROPOLITAN diary
Rebounder
Dear Diary:
On the first morning of the year’s second or third false spring, my 10-year-old son and I went to play basketball at our local playground court. It’s a true Robert Moses special, hemmed in on one side by the Cobble Hill trench, and on the other by Columbia Street’s on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The court is loud, even on an otherwise quiet Sunday. Before a nearby concrete-recycling plant closed last year, the dirt it spewed would sometimes cover the ground with a thin layer of dust that rose with each dribble.
On this day, we were alone, except for a father pushing a baby in a bear suit on a swing set. I reminded my son that he used to be a baby in a bear suit, but he didn’t seem to remember or care. He was too focused on the task at hand. The task, of course, was balling. My job was to rebound.
After about 10 minutes, a car pulled up to the traffic light just beyond the fence.
We are a nearsighted family, and so all I can tell you is that it was a light-colored car full of basketball fans. They cheered for us, calling out from across the park.
Did they call us by name? We couldn’t hear a word. Did we know them? We couldn’t see. All of our shots were falling through the net, as if the temporary audience had granted us superpowers.
The light changed, and the car drove on.
“Who was that?” my son asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“They were cheering for you, too,” he said, as if this provided an additional wrinkle to the mystery.
It was just what Robert Moses might have had in mind: myopic beauty on an island in the middle of a tangle of highways.
— Emma Straub
Ms. Straub is an author and owner of Books Are Magic. Her most recent book is “American Fantasy.”
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Sprucing Up a Magical, Mysterious Park appeared first on New York Times.
