Sponsor-Subsidized Loitering

Checking in on America's Greatest Corporate Park

When I need to be forced to work I go to the New York Public Library’s main branch on 41st Street. It’s not close to my apartment, but something about the Rose Reading Room with its intricate details, stone walls, and pastel ceiling mural of a summer sky compels me into a state of productivity I can’t achieve in my boxers at home or spinning around in a desk chair at my office. An army of library employees keep tourists out of the reading room and hush anyone who makes noise— it’s the world’s greatest free co-working space! But this post isn’t about the library, it’s about Bryant Park, the square of green the library sits in.

After a few hours of work, I decided I’d get coffee and do a lap of the park. Today it’s 72 degrees and sunny with low humidity, absolutely peak loitering weather which meant I spent longer in the park than planned… and I have thoughts. Bryant Park is subtly one of the most important public spaces I think in the entire world, the place that birthed several paradigms of public-space management and urban design. A lot of ink has been spilled about it, including by me, but it’s important enough that I think it’s worth checking up on now and then.

To quickly recap: The park, which today is spotlessly clean and full of tourists and office workers was essentially an open-air drug market in the 1970’s, with high-profile murders and muggings occurring inside its walls. Under the guidance of placemaking grandaddy William H. Whyte, park administrators instituted several groundbreaking design measures. First, contrary to established wisdom they got rid of the park’s walls and drastically increased the width and number of entrances. Whyte theorized that a more open park would naturally deter crime because it would reduce places to hide or conduct activity outside the view of the street and surrounding offices. In doing so, the park applied Jane Jacob’s famous “eyes-on-the-street” concept whereby a well-watched place is generally a safe one. Next, a fleet of movable tables and chairs was installed across the space. From Whyte’s seminal book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

“A wonderful invention— the movable chair. Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make room for groups, move away from them. The possibility of choice is an important as the excercise of it. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put.

Remarkably, no one stole them, and today the park has enough chairs and tables to host a small university graduation. As Whyte pointed out, people arrange them in their own ways.

Dragging them to the edges of the fountains.

Using them as footrests

Or using them for backgammon

The other thing the park has a ton of is games. These were quite popular despite being a workday.

Except for the guys with their own backgammon board, all these games are provided by the park itself. Each station has a park employee dutifully handing out balls, chess pieces, and shuffleboard sticks. They even have their own special metal chair.

Bryant Park probably has the most people working in it per square foot of any public space in NYC. It is spotlessly clean and has the nicest public bathroom in the city with an actual attendant who will watch your luggage while you pee.

This is a Doin-Things park, there really isn’t room to lay in the grass or commune with nature. The one area with high potential for passive lounging - the lawn, was closed to prepare for a concert series.

Besides sitting, the park did embrace one other passive activity: reading. These cool library carts were scattered throughout the park including one geared towards kids. There was also a cart specifically for newspapers which older visitors were enjoying.

It’s all incredibly pleasant, clean, and ordered with the supervised activity zones all performing as designed. But I think the ultimate impact of Bryant Park is less in its movable chairs and lack of walls than in how it’s managed. Bryant Park is the pinnacle of a certain style of public space, the corporatized public space. I don’t mean corporatized metaphorically, the park is literally run by a non-profit Corporation.

Some context from Thomas Dyja’s book New York, New York, New York which chronicles the decades of NYC surrounding Bryant Park’s renaissance. In the late 70’s the State and City were coming back from the brink of financial ruin. The strategy at every level of NY government was to shrink spending and encourage private investment and philanthropy. Mayor Ed Koch slashed the municipal budget and cut 10% of the city’s patronage-driven workforce. With the City’s spending locked down by creditors, Koch called for a legion of“urban pioneers” to rebuild New York in the government’s place. At the state level, Governor Hugh Carey aggressively cut corporate taxes and instituted tax credits for firms willing to locate in the City. The mayor made vacant public lots available for banks, media organizations, the Javits Center, and other corporations willing to build new offices and facilities with sweetheart deals. At every level, the government seemed to be saying: We make the city a good place to do business, you make the place a little nicer. This approach helped save the City, and also drastically changed the dynamic of public space. Wealthy New Yorkers could donate directly to places like Central Park through newly set-up foundations and conservancies. Business Improvement Districts were invented so merchants and property owners could pay for security and sanitation in commercial corridors. Private money began to flow into places and functions that used to be the domain of the public sector. These ideas ended up being exported around the world. Koch and Carey are in many ways the spiritual fathers of Boris Johnson, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Riordan, and all the urban leaders who worship at the altar of the private-public partnership.

This is the environment that Bryant Park emerged out of. The corporation was started by a coalition of connected New Yorkers including the former chairman of Time Inc and the Rockafeller brothers. Each was inspired by a genuine sense of civic duty and noblesse oblige, but also by their business interests and connections in Midtown Manhattan. The corporation they formed leased the park from the city in exchange for the rights to operate it. Dan Biederman, the lifelong president of the BPC grasped before many that a park under this arrangement needed to act entrepreneurially to thrive. Biederman insisted on a restaurant in the park that would pay rent and contribute to upkeep. He understood that parks could host events that attract sponsorship, and he deftly navigated the city’s philanthropy scene. He knew that since the Corporation had its lease in place he could largely do what he wanted without outside interference. By the time the Corporation shut down the park for renovations in the late 80’s, Biederman had increased Bryant’s operating budget by six times what it had been under public administration. Fast forward to today, the Corporation makes fifteen million in revenue from the Park’s Winter Village holiday market, including three million in sponsorship, another two million each from restaurant rental fees and concessions, and another million and a half from other sponsorship sources. The majority of the Corporation’s twenty-five million dollar revenue is from entrepreneurial activity. Bryant Park’s renaissance showed that a park could be a festival ground, a constant stream of revenue-generating performances and activities. The money raised by these activities would pay for the chairs, flowers, and racks of newspapers that people could enjoy between Winter Markets.

These moves were controversial, especially the idea that the city would lease a public park to a private entity. Union Square also experienced a renaissance around this time fueled by private investment but the City never gave up the land. Public outreach and input from local businesses was required. It’s way too simplistic to say if Bryant Park’s arrangement is “good” or “bad,” but it is far from the ideal of what a public park was first imagined to be. As Dyja writes, this era undid the fundamental assumption of Olmstead and other early 20th century progressives that:

“Parks were fundamental to a democracy; they were shared land devoted, as Adam Gopnik writes to ‘commonplace civilization’; public space controlled by common trust and expectations. The inability of New Yorkers to share and care for their parks expressed the loss of trust.”

The legacy of places like Bryant is revealing that parks aren’t just socially or ecologically valuable, they can make cash. Once it’s established that a park can make money we start to think a park should make money. Whereas once parks could simply exist now have to hustle. Part of Brooklyn Bridge Park was shaved off for a private hotel and members club, which contributes to the park’s maintenance in place of taxes. Fort Greene Park has an outdoor movie night sponsored by Paramount Pictures showing Paramount movies. Domino Park is a collaboration between the city and the developer Two Trees, who fund the park in exchange for being allowed to build higher than typically allowed on their adjacent apartment towers.“Value-capture” schemes, sponsorship, and concessions are now a major parts of any park’s operations. The result for the end-user is intensely programmed places, fun, and clean, but also lacking in much of the casual peacefulness or spontaneous everyday activity that makes many parks great. Bryant Park was architecturally inspired by the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris but I can’t imagine a more different vibe. There isn’t even a playground in Bryant.

The real tragedy of places like Bryant Park is that it perhaps sets too high a bar. People see that the public sector can retreat from the management of a place and we can end up with a pretty good result. The Parks Dept today gets less than 1% of the city’s budget. The Department has a smaller staff than it did in 1986. The 80’s taught the city that by involving the private sector it could do more with less, and instead of redirecting the savings from places like Bryant Park towards places outside the tourist belts of Manhattan, the City took it as an opportunity to slash its spending… forever.

Despite the immense bi-partisan popularity of parks it is impossible to imagine an American city making a public space the size of Bryant Park (let alone Central Park), without the help of the private sector. Democratic institutions can no longer make us the things we want if they don’t have a clear market case or lavish private funding. Maybe this is the way things have always been. The library I work out of, as incredible a public resource as exists in the whole world, was funded primarily by Andrew Carnegie. But when public space is given up it is rarely gained back, and the erosion of trust and funds for the public sector can’t be easily repaired. This model has also lead to a disparity in the quality and accessibility of public spaces, favoring areas that can attract sponsorship and investment while neglecting those that cannot. There are many well-used, well-loved plazas and public spaces that would kill for a quarter of the staff of Bryant, but, being outside of commercial areas, have no way of raising revenue. The shift from a purely public realm to one where private interests play a dominant role in shaping and maintaining communal areas has to be undertaken critically. Sitting and doing nothing in the grass doesn’t “generate value” — but at the end of the day its my favorite thing to do in a park, and I can play shuffleboard and ping pong in a bar.

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