New York City’s aging parks need nearly $6 billion over the next decade to catch up on repairs after years of underfunding and neglect, according to a new report being released Tuesday.
The sweeping study by the Center for an Urban Future found dilapidated conditions and growing needs at parks around the city: Bridges and retaining walls are crumbling, while broken and clogged decades-old drainage systems turn fields and trails into ponds.
“It’s a piece of infrastructure that we don’t think so much of in terms of parks,” said Jonathan Bowles, the group’s executive director. “But they’re there and they’re huge.”
An average city park is more than seven decades old and hasn’t seen a major renovation since 1997. Twenty parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens haven’t seen significant upgrades in a century, the study found.
“For decades New York City has provided too little money for basic maintenance and too few staff — including plumbers, masons and gardeners — to keep critical parks assets from deteriorating and mitigating problems before they grow,” according to the report.
“Just as years of underinvestment in New York’s century-old subway system led to a transit crisis, the maintenance challenges at city parks could quickly get a lot worse if more isn’t done to upgrade and maintain these aging assets.”
The two most critical challenges facing the parks are decades-old retaining walls and drainage systems that are slowly crumbling — creating safety and flooding woes, the report found.
Of the 65 parks surveyed by the group, nearly half had noticeable drainage issues lingering two days after a rainstorm.
The drainage system failures mean that large swaths of Flushing Meadows in Queens remain covered in water for weeks, Bowles said. At Forest Park, several roads and paths flood every time it rains.
Additionally, the report found that the retaining walls, which provide essential protection against landslides and erosion, are crumbling and may now be a danger.
But the depth of the problem remains unclear as the Parks Department is still conducting a system-wide comprehensive needs assessment, which includes wall inspections.
“Virtually every retaining wall you see has a crack in it,” one Parks Department official told the report’s authors. “It’s a safety issue.”
The bridges that cross the streams, lakes and ponds in city parks are also in rough shape: 21 percent of them were found to have “serious deterioration” or are “not functioning as originally designed,” data analyzed by the CUF shows.
Additionally, the study reported that the group’s inspection of 65 city parks revealed that:
- A quarter had sidewalks or streets with dangerous cracks, paving issues and general degradation
- The Parks Department has no formal system for street, sidewalk or stair maintenance
- A third had bathrooms with notable issues, like broken stalls or plumbing problems
The new assessment of the multibillion-dollar list of city park needs follows a recent report by city Comptroller Scott Stringer that found shoddy oversight of parks construction contracts has cost taxpayers an estimated $5 million.