One To One; Veronica White-NYC Parks & Recreation Commissioner

Hello, I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York. Welcome to One to One. Each week we address issues of timely and timeless concern, with newsmakers and the journalists to report on them, with artists, writers, scientists, educators, social scientists, government and nonprofit leaders. We speak with each, one to one. Imagine yourself being entrusted with the care and tending of miles and miles of parks, golf courses, lakes, trails, not to mention tennis courses and pools. I'm delighted to welcome Veronica White, the new-ish parks and recreation commissioner. She's no stranger to our parks, she grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, her backyard, Shore Road Park, a lawyer. She was founded in the Director of the City's Center for Economic Opportunity, and she

follows a long line of distinguished leaders of the Parks Department, which keeps adding thousands of acres to the system. Welcome, thank you. So your department oversees 29,000 acres, parks, 3,500 employees, 152 miles of coastline. What's a huge domain? Is there any other city in the country that has so much parkland? Absolutely not. The York City has the best and most wonderful parks and it's been tremendous investment under Mayor Bloomberg and under First Deputy Mayor Patty Harris. It's been like a new revival of some of the Moses era in terms of investment in parks. And the acreage of the parkland has been growing. And growing, we've added parks in different areas and very creative opportunities, sometimes in terms of adding parks and fresh gills in Staten Island, in terms of former landfills. Other times it's working with the private sector and purchasing different pieces of property that then we add to the park system. It's really an amazing system. And Governor's Island, is that part of the park system now? It is a part of the park city system. It's run independently as an independent nonprofit, but it is a city park.

Visitors in New York will often look at the high-rise buildings and they'll talk about, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the cluster phobic and all the concrete. It seems to me that if you live in New York, you probably have more access to green and rustic areas than many people who live in less urban areas. Absolutely true. One of the goals of the Bloomberg administration was to get everyone within 10 minutes of, of being able to be an open space outdoors and we've been doing that and we have a huge increase in numbers of people able to walk 10 minutes and be in a park, being a playground to be outdoors and get recreation, great for health and great for other things. But the other big, big, big part that people don't know, I think, is that 10,000 of our 29,000 acres are natural areas. So they're forests and marshes and wetlands and really great places where people can go, take their children, go on hikes and learn so much from our urban park rangers, learn at our nature centers. One of the things that I want to do at the Park Department is to be able to have a whole campaign so that people understand what opportunities are out there for them and for their children, both in terms of learning and science and learning from the folks that work

in our natural areas and also having those healthy opportunities to get out, take a walk and all kinds of things in our natural trails and so many of our beautiful parks. And they're all just to simply ride away. Yeah, I'm Birmingham, Alabama and I remember one, a few years ago I was visiting my mother down then I was looking for some place to walk and there's almost no place to walk and so I chose the big cemetery, you know, because it was what was most like a park but then they put me out of the cemetery because they didn't allow, they didn't know about walking in the cemetery. I put out of the cemetery but I think that often if you are in the middle of Central Park or if you were in Riverside Park and I'm sure it's true of some of the parks and the other brows, you feel like you're in the country. Absolutely. Go up to Pelham Bay Park, you went to Van Courtland Park, you can walk in forests and woodlands and it's just an amazing experience for people and people love that and I think it's important that people get out and understand that and understand it's not just even about the playground and they're corner but understand you can get on the subway and go up to the Bronx and visit a whole new woods and you don't have to get in a car and drive off to another state to see so much of the beauty that we have. Right, since we were talking about numbers, how many trees have you in New York City Park?

Do you have a tree count? We did a tree count, I think Commissioner Stern started the tree count, some years back so there's over 4 million trees. Unfortunately in Sandy we lost about 20,000 trees. Did you? Okay. In the streets and in the parks as well but we have under our million trees campaign that Mayor Bloomberg initiated, we plant trees each year and we had planted 20,000 trees just prior to Sandy so we're barely neck and neck with mother and nature on this one. Okay. Okay. Talking about Sandy, how were the city's park areas affected by that storm and how are you addressing? I just started at the Agency as Commissioner in August and when Sandy hit, it's just amazing to me, the Parks Department employees, how they work, how hard they work and what they do in terms of trying to protect not only our parks but really the communities beyond. So for four days leading up to the storm, our staff was out working, actually people in the community were volunteering as well, putting up sandbags, also we were making sure that all of our vehicles were moved out of the low-lying areas as you mentioned earlier, 152 miles of the coastline or parks, so it's a huge domain in terms of what areas we need

to protect. So we did our best in terms of protecting our facilities, protecting our staff. Many of our staff did ride out the night in our marinas and other areas where they were trying to protect facilities. Amazing amount of work for four days leading up to the storm. Immediately after the storm, the Park Department employees were out assisting with the humanitarian efforts, assisting with food and other items like that because obviously that relief and those are efforts really far more important than just the Parkland. And then after a few weeks and we were able to really get back and focus on our parks, it's all been about trying to get them opened. Ninety-eight percent of our facilities are open now, but a number of our recreation centers, for example, were in zone A and they were closed. In addition, we kept some closed longer even though they were repaired because we used them as facilities for children's services, children to be able to use them for showers if they were in a facility that lacked those amenities during the time of Sandy and the weeks following Sandy. But now most of our facilities are open with the major exception of our beaches and boardwalks and doing a tremendous amount of work right now out in the Rockaways and Coney Island.

That kind of damage that you have to the beaches. So we lost about 70 feet of the beach, if you can imagine, when you hear the numbers to shocking to me, but when you go out and you see it, you see this, the boardwalk and then where there used to be a long beach to walk out to the water there now is very little beach in some of the areas. So we're working with the Army Corps to try to bring sand back to each of the different beaches. And the meantime, what we're working with the Department of Design and Construction to rebuild sections of the boardwalk to make sure that the beaches will be open. So all of the beaches will be open in all the boroughs of the summer, four Memorial Day and time for Memorial Day. The boardwalks will be rebuilt much more slowly. It can all be done in just a couple of months. So basically, what we're doing is opening islands where we're only to have concessions, where we'll have restrooms, where we'll have our lifeguard stations so that people will be able to get out and access the beaches. And in Staten Island, what was the situation there? Similarly, losing a tremendous amount of sand, losing the beach and in terms of the boardwalks and issues with the boardwalk as well. So in all of the areas, what we learned, for example, is the wooden boardwalk does not survive as well. I was about to say, are there going to be water? Are they going to be, what are they, what's the material?

We used, we have used wood in the past, which we haven't, you know, we don't use them anymore, for the most part. We use recycled plastic lumber, people say, RPL, RPL, recycled plastic lumber, looks more like the wood, and then we also use concrete. So in our not-salling-tific study, but in our observations, post-sandy, what we see is that the concrete survived, the concrete is there and the concrete's stable. Interestingly, we stopped using wood not to protect the boardwalk, but to protect forests and other countries. It was all about the global environment, right? As part of Plan My Sea and looking at the issue of climate change, the mayor, and said we should stop using tropical hardwoods in 2007. But now we know it's not only good for the world, it's also good for New York City because we can't afford to rebuild boardwalks, right, after every one of these major ones. Right. Now there has been criticism. I think the article was in the New York Times recently that certain parks, like Central Park, maybe Riverside, get all of the attention and all of the private money. You know, you have the Central Park Conservancy. I think I'm sure there's something for Riverside Park, which is one that's close to me. Well, other parks, maybe like blushing metals, corona park and morning site park, don't

get that extra attention. We were very grateful for all the conservancies. I think what's missed in some of those articles and some of those stories is that a lot of what a conservancy is all about is stewardship, and that stewardship can actually be dollars, and that's wonderful, and we love dollars. As everyone in any public agency would need, especially for our parks and our park system, the stewardship is also about volunteers, and it's about volunteers in many ways. We have volunteer gardeners in different communities. We have an amazing group called the Bronts River Alliance that has helped us do so much with the Bronts River. Each of those conservancies do a tremendous amount of work for the parks department, and we're very appreciative of that, and while it's the dollars are important, as I say, it's time, talent and treasure, and the dollars are good, but as the time and talent is really also important. In every dollar that someone gives to any of our conservancies, be it Prospect Park, Riverside Park, as you mentioned, or Central Park, it's great because it enables us to keep these parks wonderfully open and Central Park at the number of people that come through the park. 40 million visitors a year. It's just tremendous the number of people.

Is it the most used park in the city in turn? I think it's the most used park in the world. Really? 40 million in terms of it. Just think about that upkeep and that maintenance. It's a city park, and we put money in it from the city budget, and well, we should, but it's also great to be able to keep it in the condition of the same with those 40 million visitors by having the tremendous amount of money, such as the gift from John Paul, and which is a really, really, it's an asset. From me, I think I look at it differently, I guess maybe I'm more of a half-class full-type person, but it brings parks into something where I think people think of as universities or hospitals or other kinds of cultural institutions where they're great places to give money to. People don't necessarily think of parks that way, but we are a huge and important part of any city and for New York City in particular our park system, so it's great. I think the Paulson gift raised people's attention to the fact that we could use dollars as well, and it's important for our parks to have private dollars, and I think that that raised the bar for people to think about gifts, you know, and important as our libraries of course are, and our medical institutions, and our universities, parks and open space are tremendously important.

How much does it cost now to adopt a city, a Central Park bench? I think it's $7,500. Okay. Okay. I love to read the plates. Yes, they're beautiful. But you can get one in four, try and park for $2,500. Oh, well. There you go. It's chaff around. Yes, indeed. Depending on what your park is. According to the Wall Street Journal article, there was, has been an increase in crime since Central Park. At least it was. This story was, there was increase in 2010 compared to the year before, and I know like last year, I think it was in November, it was shocking to hear about the rape of a woman who was in her 70s in Central Park, in daylight. Is the trend in crime, has the crime been trending upward in the park, and it's been so much. Another question of, you know, in broad daylight, a woman in the park, it's those kinds of situations that are just really terrible that come to light, that are there, that are happening. Right. But the real thing is that the park system in terms of crime is really, it's, the climate isn't really increasing. I mean, we work very closely with NYPD on these issues. I mean, there are issues of, you know, sometimes cell phones, which is a problem throughout

the city and throughout also the transit system. What's the problem? It's a problem to just being a pain in the net. No, no, being taken. So I think that, oh, I say the crime is up a lot of it is around that. And it's hard to sort of hard distinguish at times as it's taken from me, was it taken because I left it on the bench, while my child was playing in Randall's Island Park. So, you know, we work out these things, the PT but the really, the crime is not increasing. Okay. Yeah. And I really feel it's important for people to understand that, because I think that in gender and fear and people about using the parks brings us back to the 1970s on a time when people were concerned and worried about going into parks. And I think it's important for people to know our parks are safe, and we really do a lot in terms to make sure that they are. We work closely with NYPD. We have our own parks enforcement patrol that works with us in the parks throughout the city. We're going to take a short break. Then we'll be back with more with Veronica White, the city's commissioner of Parks and Recreation. Did you know CUNY leads the way for students with disabilities? CUNY leads, means linking employment, academics, and disability services. If you're a CUNY student with a visible or invisible disability, the City University

of New York offers eligible students free career development and placement services. To find out if you qualify, visit cuny.edu slash CUNY leads. CUNY leads to the career I always wanted. Welcome back to One to One. I'm Cheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York, and I'm talking with Veronica White, the city's commissioner of Parks and Recreation. I think most New Yorkers know about the treasures of Central Park, whether it's the Delicort Theatre, whether it's the Ramboal, or the Boat Basin, or whatever. What are some of the city's park treasures, not necessarily Central Park, but park treasures that are less well-known that you'd like people to know about? I'd love people to know more about Fresh Kills Park. It's amazing. Which one? Fresh Kills Park.

It's an amazing park that we're opening bit by bit, and doing bits and pieces of, you know, as we get capital dollars, and as we grow the park, so we're just outside of Fresh Kills. This is a beautiful park that we've renovated called Schmool Park, which is an older park. We're going to be open soccer fields on another side of, called Al Hall of Fields, just next month. In an addition within, it's going to be a huge area for natural habitat for people to see if we have deer there at this point now. This was formerly a city landfill. So we open the park at different times now, for example, for kayaking, and we have these what we call sneak peaks at Fresh Kills, and bring people from the community out, but people from all over come out. They've got to Staten Island, and they see what was formerly, you know, a very negative blight on the community is now going to be a beautiful, beautiful park. So that's a kind of... So is it a new park? Or has it been a new park that we're creating? Yes. Yes. And it's very large, and it's very, very nice, and I think that that's something really, really, really terrific that people should know about. And that's going to be the big park for the borough. Well, there's Staten Island truly a borough of park, so we have the whole green belt system, and we have clove lakes park, which is where our offices are out there. And Staten Island is an area where we're able to do more acquisition because of some land

that is still available and undeveloped, and it's a borough that the elected officials on Staten Island, and particularly borough-present Malanaro, have been particularly helpful to us in making sure that we can acquire certain private properties, some example that some camps out there that might, you know, be better, better served as being part of the park system, as opposed to being developed for housing, which is probably not the best use for what the community would want. So we're working very closely on different acquisitions with different groups on Staten Island to add even more acreage to the park system. It's very important for New York City to have that green space, that open space, not only for any environment, but also for families to have an opportunity to be able to go within their own neighborhood to get out and about to bike, to stroll, to play sports. Right. Now, you live on the west, on the upper west side. Where do you take visitors to the city? All over. All over the city might come in, and actually my sister lives in France, and I have a lot of relatives in France, and people are always coming to my house and say, I take them, and I like to get them out of Manhattan and other boroughs as well, because as you said before, people know about that.

Back to Bay Ridge, for example, where I'm from, beautiful park along Shore Road, it's where I learned to ride a bike as a child, and it's a beautiful park system as well. I'd like to get people into the Botanical Gardens, for example, and in Brooklyn as well. That's a big park, which people, you know, a lot of New Yorkers do get to it, but out of towners don't get to public park as often as I think. For a try, in fact, there's a favorite of mine, it's just such a beautiful natural setting and up there, and you look over at the palisades, and then you get the two workers to get to go to the glaciers at the same time. Right. So try to schedule things so that people can get out and see our parks and other opportunities in the different neighborhoods and communities beyond just the central area of Manhattan. Okay. One big change in the city of the last, say 15 years or so, has been the development of the waterfront so that New Yorkers actually have access to it. You know, I happen to, unfortunately, have to live near Hudson River Park, and I ride my, I think, you know, ride my bike along the river is my favorite thing to do. Are there further plans to claim more of the waterfront for public usage? Really.

I mean, I think a goal of the city is that in all the boroughs, we should be able to, the waterfront should be accessible and there should be green ways so that people can get on a bike or take a walk or stroll across and through the waterfronts. So we've made a lot of headway in different boroughs, but we have a lot more work to do in that area in some terms than some of the other boroughs. But people could not have imagined even 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that you could get in your park, get in a car at, I mean, I'll start eating a bike at Battery Park and go all the way up, up, up, up, up the way you can do now and all the around. I mean, the goal would be to be able to go all the way around. Right. I lived in Manhattan, but similarly in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens, people are really would like to have access to the waterfront. It's a great opportunity for families and we're working very closely with different agencies in the city, as well as community boards to figure out exactly how we can make more of that area part of the park. Yeah. The east side along the river, along the east areas, is far less developed than the west side. I'm wondering why that is, or if there are plans for the east river. There are plans and we're working with the number of city agencies, and particularly the economic development corporation, to create more parkland on the east side as well. I know.

Is that street support part of your domain or is that not? It's separate. It's okay. How do you have a park in there, but for the most part, it's not under the domain or the parks department. Okay. When I bypass, bypassed or through the parks on the west side, I see so many kinds of activities going on. Arts classes for kids, story and song hours for kids, movies in the park, dance classes, tennis of course. High skating, kayaking, fishing, but there are even more other park department sponsored activities. I understand it. Computer classes for teenagers, activities for seniors. Tell me about some of those. We have an amazing recreation center throughout the city, and we also have an amazing recreation center leader, Anika Holder, who basically does so much in trying to get so much of our programming out of doors, because we find people prefer and enjoy being out of doors as well. So we have both free programming in parks, through our public programs, whether it be our urban park rangers, or recreation center divisions. Just a few weeks ago, when it snowed, all of our recreation center folks were out in parks

throughout the city. We bring sleds for children that don't have sleds, we offer hot chocolate, people just absolutely love it. And I was up at 103rd Street in Riverside Park for it, if my team was out in parks throughout the five boroughs, and engaging people and having fun and bringing our sleds along so that children have an opportunity to do these things. But we have everything. It's from storytelling to dance to all kinds of classes, and people love it. They love being able to exercise outdoors, and they love getting together in those kinds of communities. And if you go into any park, it's just amazing the degree of programs we have that are available, free of charge to people. What other areas of the city are in need of more parks and recreation facilities? And many areas are. What we've tried to do is take advantage of opportunity as they strike. So for example, the high bridge is a part of the park system. It's been closed for many years, I think some 40 years. You have to tell us what the high bridge is. So as you drive up, you see it over from the Harlem River Drive. You can see this beautiful bridge that looks like a Roman aqueduct, and that's how it was designed, that it was originally part of the water system. So connecting the communities from Manhattan, from the high bridge community to over

to high bridge in the Bronx, the Bronx communities, they really had no access between the two communities for many, many years. So we just started construction and it'll enable people from the Bronx to be able to go over and use our Manhattan high bridge center, which has facilities and has a pool. And it's really a wonderful opportunity for people to be able to exercise while crossing the bridge, rather than worrying about public transportation or getting in a car. And also be able to connect these communities together in a way. So it's looking at some of our facilities that have been either closed for years or areas where we can bring in more open space to the parkland and trying to work with the communities to see how we can get that open. We have lots of planning sessions. It was our partnership of parks, worked very closely with communities in both boroughs to think about what we would do and how we would get this high bridge open. And I think it was a dream that now it's the going to go up and you see that the construction is actually happening in the middle of the open next year and it's a really, really beautiful park. Are there any parks that are underused, I find it hard to believe there would be any? So lots of parks we could get more people out in certain areas that's definitely true.

And we try to make sure we bring those opportunities that you talk about, riding your bike around, what we do is we have on our parks department website, lots of opportunities through our recreation division and through all of our boroughs to get people out for walks or tours to our historic homes to which are many of them are in our parks as well as to bike rides to and all kinds of exploring with our folks from our natural resources group. We have a whole really science division within the agency, a little known fact and basically people that know so much about nature that very, very helpful for young children, much more, many children like being outside and learning rather than being in the classroom and learning. It's a wonderful opportunity for parents to bring their children to our nature centers, which I think we could have many more children from different communities out. So I encourage people to look at our websites in a particular look at some of the opportunities that our urban park rangers provide and then our nature centers provide and bring their children out to learn so much because I think hands-on learning on site is just so much more exciting and so much easier to learn than for children so I think that's really great opportunities. Now the high line is that under your purview?

Yes it is. It's a public park. Is it finished now or is there still more to come, we're just starting third phase of the high line right now? Okay which is going to go from where to where? It's going to go up to as far as 34-3, so it'll be the rest of the elevated rail yard. Okay, where does it end now? In the 20s and it's going to go to 30th or 3rd Street, okay, have any idea of how many people are using it? It seems like a lot. It's a lot. It's in the millions. It's amazing as you see, as you sound like you're out and about New York all the time, so you can see when you go they have crowded. It is. Did you call it a huge success? It's an amazing success and the friends of the high line or if you can graduate and all the work they've done together with City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burton and the Parks Department in building this wonderful park and it's been a great public private partnership and it will continue to be. Are other cities copying anything like it to your knowledge? You know other cities come all the time to look at it because the opportunity to think about what it is that they could do with their rails and whether they should be turned into trails or into parks or into something akin to the high line so we have lots of folks

from other cities coming and looking in our parks, whether it's coming, looking at Brooklyn Bridge Park or the High Line or Governor's Island and looking at what we're doing because we are the City of Parks. We've got about two minutes left. What are your priorities going forward? One of the things we're doing is we're starting what I'm calling a conservation corps and it's to bring a new generation of people into the Parks Department. So we're going to be hiring new college graduates and we're going to be starting in September and it's an opportunity people to come in, work in the Parks Department, learn about environmental issues and really hopefully be part of the City Workforce going forward. Would these be college graduates? Okay. We're going to bring them in and be a great opportunity for them to either have a career in the Parks Department or maybe they decide that they would like to go to forestry school afterwards when they learn a lot about what it is that we do and to really awaken more young people to the environment and the issues of climate change and realizing that the park system is a huge part in environmental resource for New York City. I know one thing that most New Yorkers are familiar with are the used to be called the web workers, the welfare recipients who were brought into work in the parks as in return

for their welfare checks and you'd see them in their sweat church, the T-shirts in the park. Is that program still going on? We do still have that program and there are people in it and we also have a program called the Parks Opportunity Program, which is a huge success. I come from a background in anti-poverty work before starting at the Parks Department. It's the most successful program in workforce development. So we bring in people that were on welfare, basically they came into the agency and they're paid and at the end of the day what we hope for them is that if they need an educational credential we help them get that GED and we help them get into a permanent full-time job. Some of them stay with them. That's the parks department. Some of the parks department and some elsewhere. The idea is to build up their resume and to get them the experience and the credentials they need to get them a job. And how many people are in that program? And any given moment is between 1,500 and 2,200. Okay. We work closely with the Human Resources Administration here in the city and it's a great program. I met a gardener up in Gertona Park who had started in that program, graduated and through the program and it has been at the Parks Department for a number of years and

it's a really wonderful opportunity for people. It's always great to see them because you know you could just do something for them and you're always happy to see people who are doing things for the parks so it's sort of like a win-win. It appears to be. And people love to work outdoors and people in the Parks Department are very happy. It's a great thing because you're outside. It's physically therapeutic and people recognize that but it's also, it's therapeutic for all of us when we're outside and enjoying our work and I think people come in and they work in the Parks Department. We'd love to be able to employ everybody from our pop program, unfortunately we can, but we enable them to have success elsewhere as well by giving them a job training and help them get GEDs and other credentials for them. Okay. I've learned a lot about the parks, the New York City Parks Kingdom today. It is quite a kingdom. We're out of time but I want to thank Veronica White, the New York City Parks and Recreation Commissioner for joining me today. If you want to learn about programs and events in your area, go to the Comprehensive website at nyc.gov-parks for the City University of New York and one-to-one, I'm Cheryl McCarthy. If there are any people you'd like to hear from or topics you'd like us to explore, please

let us know. You can write to me at Q&E-TV 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10016, or you can go to the website at cuny.tv and click on contact us. I look forward to hearing from you.