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The Central Park Conservancy

By Linda Perney | Staff Writer

You have only to remember what the park was like before the Conservancy to appreciate how successful it has been. During the bad years of the city's fiscal crisis, the Great Lawn was more like a dust bowl than a lawn, the ramble was overgrown and virtually impenetrable. Belvedere Castle was a crumbling wreck; Bethesda fountain had been turned off; and graffiti splotched just about every surface.

Enter Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, appointed Central Park administrator by Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis in 1979. The title was impressive, but that was about it: With no staff and no budget to fall back on, she had to hit the fundraising circuit to come up with the money to fund her salary.

Thus was born the Central Park Conservancy, a combination of private money and public institution all mixed together into a non-profit organization. As the anti-tax fever of the Reagan years began to bite deep into previously sacrosanct public institutions such as the park, these kinds of private/public partnerships became an accepted means of making up budget shortfalls with money raised from the local high rollers. Today, the Central Park Conservancy -- which manages the park under a contract with the city -- is a model copied all around the world by parks that have fallen on hard times. In the city alone, Brooklyn's Prospect Park has its Alliance, Van Cortlandt has its Friends, and Battery Park City has a conservancy all to itself.

Barlow Rogers proved adept at coming up with cash. During her years with the conservancy, she helped raise the millions that funded such projects as the restoration of the Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn, the renovation of Belvedere Castle, and the creation of Turtle Pond. Among the donors were the socially prominent: the Rockefeller brothers, for example, and Mr. and Mrs. Tom Brokaw. Iphigene Sulzberger, always an outspoken supporter of the park, was on the conservancy board. Among the other big names who ponied up substantial contributions were Henry Kravis, Howard Rubenstein, Time Warner, and Mike Bloomberg.

Roaming through Central Park now, it's difficult to fault the conservancy. The graffiti is gone, and the landscape has long been cleared of its rubbish. The Great Lawn is a lawn once again; the Harlem Meer is clear and stocked with fish; the Conservatory Garden has been restored to its earlier elegance, and on spring weekends brides and their grooms arrive to have formal wedding portraits taken among its glories.

You can't, after all, argue with success. The partnership has worked and worked well, provided you accept its basic premise: that Vaux and Olmsted's 19th-century vision was the best -- indeed, the only -- blueprint for the park worth considering. While Barlow Rogers made the appropriate noises about keeping the park relevant to the community, it is no secret that she revered Olmsted and was devoted to restoring the luster to his park. Her successor, Regina Peruggi, seems no less committed to that master plan.

According to Doug Blonsky, the conservancy's chief operating officer, the fact that the park is a landmark helps to keep the plan on track. "We have a lot of protections because we are a landmark," he says. "If someone wants to put up a monument, we can fall back on saying that we can't, because the area is landmarked.

"In working with donors, we put together a list of priorities of what has to be done in the park, based on the plan put together by Barlow Rogers and her team. When we come up with a plan, we meet with all five community boards that border the park twice -- first for a preliminary review and then for a final review. We also get approval from the landmarks commission and from the parks commission."

One example of how park users have altered the park's functions is the Skaters' Circle near the Sheep Meadow. "Every year we meet with the skaters," says Blonsky. "We talk about which events we have planned that might interfere with them, and we talk about how to curb the music, we issue permits. We work together."

Blonsky says the key to keeping the park healthy is respecting it. "This is a living, breathing thing. We get about 25 million visits a year. Take the issue of dogs," he says. "On any given morning, there might be a thousand dogs in the park. And while one dog probably won't cause much damage, that many will. When they're chasing a squirrel through the Ramble, they can damage the plantings. So, you have to be aware of them...."

According to Blonsky, if you take away the cost of policing the park, the Conservancy comes up with about 85 per cent of the park's yearly budget. Most of the money, he says, comes from private individuals, through memberships and gifts. While corporate gifts are important, he says, it's individuals who really come through.

So, what does it cost to contribute? For a dollar, you can donate a daffodil (minimum 25). If you want to spend a little more you can endow a sapling for $1,000. Mature trees go for $2,500 all the way up to $10,000. For that, though, you also get your name incised on a paving stone placed in the Literary Walk.