Shiho Fukada/AP Photo
Drummers once faced access issues in a park where a fitness club recently had its gear seized by police. New York, New York, July 2007.
“There is probably no other place in the public domain that’s a great equalizer like a park, and park equity must be important,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said at the dedication of a Brooklyn ball field. One section of a Harlem park could use some of that park equity. New York spent nearly $8 million to restore and reinstall a 166-year-old fire watchtower in Marcus Garvey Park that had been dismantled and put into storage. It reopened in 2019. Another fixture in the same park, the Lion’s Den, a decades-old informal workout club, didn’t get the kind of love the historic tower did. Club members stored their punching bags, weights, and other equipment in a tent overnight. Last week, New York City Parks Department employees, backed up by the NYPD, swooped in to get rid of the tent and everything in it.
It was yet another predictable, preventable spectacle of municipal disinterest and gratuitous police overreach unfolding in one of America’s most storied Black neighborhoods. The city said that the tent violated prohibitions against storing personal goods in the 20-acre park. Jamel Ali, the community fitness club leader, said he had an informal agreement with the city. Until he didn’t. “That park was one of the worst parks in New York City until me and my friends started doing what we’re doing,” Ali told Patch, a local news outlet, last week. “Something has to be done to enhance our park so that we don’t have to take it upon ourselves to make us healthier.”
The workout gear seizure, the second in three years, was a five-star public relations blunder someone should have seen coming. New York isn’t alone in its disparate treatment of parks and park amenities and the people who use them. The COVID-19 pandemic has crystalized the importance of green spaces for local residents. But while municipal officials like to feel good about parks, they frequently shortchange those spaces and allow small-scale conflicts to balloon out of control.
Parks have saved the mental health and physical well-being of Americans during the pandemic, especially when gyms and recreation centers were closed. Green spaces provided mental relief and outlets for exercise, particularly for young people and adults who suffer from hypertension, diabetes, and other conditions that exercise can help moderate. Young men in Harlem also noted that the fitness club had its origins in an effort to reduce gun violence.
Yet urban parks have been weaponized throughout American history as a way for the powerful and the privileged to deny people of color access or the amenities found in green spaces in white places. A new Urban Institute report notes that formerly redlined communities (whose residents were denied subsidized home loan credit through racist practices) have less green space and are typically more crowded. Parks in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods are often in disrepair, if they exist at all. Newcomers in gentrifying neighborhoods complain about the improvised solutions to poorly maintained or nonexistent facilities and sometimes shut down longtime informal practices or activities. Not surprisingly, wealthier white neighborhoods generally enjoy pristine parkland with gleaming recreation equipment.
Urban parks have been weaponized throughout American history as a way for the powerful and the privileged to deny people of color access.
New York park funding has gyrated wildly over the past two years. Former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cut park budgets and staff as financial crises loomed during the earliest months of COVID-19, just as city residents swarmed park space. Funding recovered in fiscal 2022, thanks largely to federal relief money, but Adams arrived just in time for COVID relief funding to wind down. On the campaign trail, he had pledged to allocate 1 percent of the city funding to parks. But his preliminary fiscal 2023 spending plan lopped off park funding to $500 million (essentially to where it was in 2021), 0.5 percent of the nearly $100 billion budget. One city councilor told Politico that he wants to see a $1 billion commitment, and it may be up to the city council to find the money elsewhere.
Now, the disinvestment has had a perverse upside promoting both civic engagement and safety. Staff cuts meant that if residents wanted less trash, neater fields, and fewer rats, they would have to handle park upkeep themselves. Some New York neighborhoods even set up volunteer cleanup groups. Keeping up with park maintenance reassured residents and visitors that the areas were busy—and safe. But this is hardly an efficient or fair way to keep all the city’s parks maintained and clean.
In particular, when access conflicts do occur, they are best handled by local leaders and mediators in tandem with city officials in order to avoid any police involvement. The fact that the club returned with more equipment after the first clear-out is a textbook case of a totally legitimate need not being met, and locals doing it themselves. Residents who just want to work out in their own park shouldn’t be treated like criminals carving up new turf.
However, there is a positive example of park equity right in Marcus Garvey Park today which should serve as a template for resolving the fitness club’s conundrum. The Drummer’s Circle, a group of Harlem longtimers and African and Caribbean immigrants, set up a performance area in 1969, in part to carve out safe spaces in high-crime Harlem. Decades later as the neighborhood improved, the whites moving in called police to complain about the “noise.” Some even threatened violence. After moving to different areas in the park, the drummers got a permanent location. Two years ago, at the height of the pandemic, the city began renovating that spot.
The Lion’s Den fitness club is now working to raise their own funds to buy a Parks Department–sanctioned storage unit. One place to look for a few more dollars for the group—and other New York parks—might be the NYPD’s $11 billion budget.
