The Corporate Campaign to Save Madison Square Park
By Benjamin Holtzman
In the late 1970s, after a decade of budget cuts had decimated the New York City park system, an ambitious former Parks Department official named Donald Simon came up with a radical plan to save Madison Square Park and — he hoped — parks across the city. Simon believed that the park’s setting in a Manhattan business district could catalyze the park’s revitalization. If the corporations whose headquarters overlooked the park could see how their fortunes were tied to the park’s conditions, Simon believed, they would contribute funds that could provide the maintenance, security, and management necessary to revive the park. This support would allow the park to break free from unstable city funding and management. Cash-strapped officials would be convinced to turn over responsibility for managing the park to a private organization that was funded by corporate donations. In short, the park’s salvation, Simon believed, would come by looking beyond the longstanding guardian of parks — municipal government — to private actors.
This sign welcoming visitors to Bryant Park notes that the park is “renovated, funded, and managed by the Bryant Park Corporation.”
While Simon did not realize his goal in Madison Square Park, his vision nonetheless anticipated the larger transformation of the New York City park system. Over the next several decades, private organizations — often supported by nearby real estate owners, businesses, corporations, and affluent residents — gained a significant role in managing city parks. While only a few of these organizations existed in the 1980s, nonprofit organizations devoted to fundraising for and managing city parks have rapidly expanded in the decades since, growing to at least fifty by the mid-2000s.[1] “The level of involvement from both private citizens and corporations and nonprofit groups,” Parks Department Commissioner Adrian Benepe explained in 2004, “is the way of doing business now.”[2] The Bryant Park Corporation and the Central Park Conservancy in particular pioneered new models of park management in which private nonprofit organizations have taken a leading role.
This article examines how Simon’s little-known, long forgotten, and ultimately unsuccessful campaign in Madison Square Park had a critical role in facilitating the park system’s transformation toward becoming reliant on sectors outside government. At the same time, it illustrates how a major lynchpin in this process — convincing the city’s business and corporate elites to accept a greater role in caring for parks — encountered significant hurdles along the way.
Madison Square Park sits between two of Manhattan’s renowned avenues of commerce and wealth: Madison and Fifth. But the severe cutbacks to the Parks Department that began amidst the city’s fiscal troubles in the late 1960s did not spare even the parks in Manhattan business districts. Between 1968 and 1975, the number of full-time department employees declined by nearly 40 percent.[3] The austerity measures that followed the city’s near bankruptcy in 1975 further decimated department budgets. “The fiscal crisis has meant cutbacks on cutbacks,” as the New York Times described in 1976. “Park maintenance is almost abandoned and corrective work impossible.”[4]
In addition to the park’s deteriorating conditions, by the late 1970s, Madison Square Park had also become “the site of daytime drug dealing and a place where derelicts drink and sleep on the benches,” the Times reported.[5] Though race was never explicitly evoked in calls to clean up the park, most of the park users deemed “undesirables” — those drinking, sleeping, or selling drugs — were African American, fostering racialized fears about the dangers the park poised.
Madison Square Park with the Metropolitan Life Insurance building in the background.
Source: Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. “General View - Manhattan - Aerial view - Madison Avenue - East 23rd Street.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 4, 2020. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-c329-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Simon believed that there was little hope that exhausted municipal resources could provide the necessary maintenance, security, and programming to improve Madison Square Park. Instead, he turned to corporations like New York Life Insurance and Metropolitan Life Insurance whose headquarters not only abutted the park, but who were also major landlords in the area. These corporations, Simon asserted, could come to recognize that devoting funds toward the “reversal of the park’s decline” was a smart investment, as it would be “mirrored in a stronger demand for rental space.”[6] Improvements would also lead to “a better employment situation, easing the task of attracting competent personnel.”[7]
Such a plan had never been tried on the scale that Simon envisioned. But Simon was not alone in believing it could succeed. He found an ally in his former boss, Richard Clurman, who had served as Parks Commissioner in 1973 under Mayor John Lindsay. Clurman enthusiastically embraced the concept. “You pick a park, one in bad condition, and you treat it as a company would treat its corporate plaza, completely with private sector funds,” Clurman explained. The private sector could provide “the funds and the people to relieve the Park Department of a responsibility it can’t meet because of budget strictures.”[8]
Simon’s plan also received a major boost from the Ford Foundation, which awarded him $25,000 in seed money in January 1979 to create an organization called Urban Park Plazas. This gave Simon the startup funds to move the project forward as he sought long term support from neighboring corporations.[9]
The vision of Urban Park Plazas was at once simple and profound. Simon believed the park could be vastly improved without the millions of dollars a major renovation would require, an amount the city did not have and that would be difficult to raise from corporate neighbors alone. Urban Park Plazas “does not agree that in the absence of large-scale rebuilding of the park, nothing can be accomplished.”[10] Instead, the principal idea, Simon described, is to drive out “the unwanted elements” by getting more people to use the park through providing programming such as free music.[11] “Large numbers of people,” the group believed, “tend to drive away the drug dealers and derelicts who by their very presence give the site a dangerous appearance.”[12] What’s more, vast improvements could come to the six acre park simply by hiring a few private maintenance workers to supplement municipal pruning, painting, and trash removal. Finally, by providing centralized management where none then existed, UPP would coordinate these efforts and ensure that the park would not fall back into disrepair.
But Simon’s idea was also profound. In an era in which corporate donations for parks were rare, no one had proposed that their efforts alone could — and should — revitalize a public park. What’s more, as UPP explained to potential corporate supporters, the goal was not simply renewal, but “taking the management and maintenance of Madison Square Park out of the hands of the City which does not and cannot afford to maintain it and putting that management into private hands for private profit but for public use.”[13] “In the future,” Simon believed, “other companies will be paying to supplement city services, because the city just doesn’t have the money anymore.”[14] Simon was convinced the model could not only succeed at Madison Square Park, but could be reproduced throughout Manhattan.
With the Ford Foundation’s support, UPP approached the park’s four major corporate neighbors. “This plan,” Clurman wrote to the President of Metropolitan Life, should be seen as “a commercial venture for the four companies involved, not as a piece of philanthropy,” explaining that reviving the park could in short time “raise the value of real estate in the participating buildings as much as $2.00 a square foot.” The improved park would “please your employees, improve the whole neighborhood, increase the value of your property and set an example which would likely be followed in as many as ten or twenty other locations around the City.”[15]
Simon and Clurman depicted themselves as public servants who recognized that parks could flourish with support from the corporate sphere, advantaging all involved. “You would be right in not expecting me, primarily, to be interested in increasing the value of your real estate,” Clurman explained to one corporate executive. “But I am very interested in the proposition that in some cases the private sector, for its own benefit alone, can take on certain municipal functions that the City is too broke or too tangled to undertake effectively and in so doing actually enrich themselves at the same time they improve the City.”[16]
The corporations, however, were hesitant to assume the role that had heretofore been provided by the Parks Department. The sentiment that parks should remain a service supported and controlled by government was one that proved exceedingly difficult to overcome even amidst declining municipal resources in the 1970s. Urban Parks Plazas proposed that each of the four corporations contribute $100,000; they offered far less. UPP raised only $64,000 in its initial fundraising campaign.[17] “We are pleased and excited about this unique effort by the private sector to rehabilitate and enhance this historic portion of New York City,” professed the President of Metropolitan. But his support was tempered by a reminder that private initiatives could not fully substitute for public services. Indeed, city involvement was necessary to successfully “clean up the park,” Metropolitan’s Vice-President proclaimed.[18]
William Rudin of Rudin Management; Richard Shinn of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; and R. Manning Brown, Jr. of New York Life Insurance company discuss the Urban Park Plazas project.
Source: Fred Ferretti, “Private Funds Help Park to Get More Loving Care,” New York Times, November 1, 1979.
These corporate neighbors, however, slowly warmed to the idea of participating in the park’s renewal. While UPP continued to fall short of its fundraising goals, seventeen landlords and companies surrounding the park contributed to its $100,000 budget in 1980.[19] “We’re doing this because we can’t wait for government to do the things that have to be done,” Lewis Rudin of Rudin Management explained.[20]
Park Commissioner Gordon Davis also endorsed the effort to spur greater private support for the park.[21] Parks officials even allowed UPP to take over “tree care, fence repairs, horticultural improvements, bench repair, replacement and panting” in return for the Department adding personnel for basic maintenance, supplies, and litter pick-ups.[22]
City papers marveled at how “private funds are being used to maintain a public park.”[23] The Times described how “the rakes, clippers, plastic leaf bags, brooms and salaries” of the park’s cleaning crew “were being paid for by two insurance companies, Metropolitan Life and New York Life; the Helmsley‐Spear real estate concern, and the Rudin Management Company.” UPP’s success, the Times wrote, was a scarcely noticed “pleasant little revolution.”
While UPP successfully built support for its corporate-led revitalization, this “little revolution” ultimately proved to be short-lived. Despite its initial momentum, UPP found that private funding did not rise to the level of sustaining both the organization and the park’s revitalization. The organization folded in the early 1980s.
However, Simon’s vision for greater private sector involvement in – and ultimate control over – parks would prove to be prophetic. Simon played an important role in helping to promote a nearly identical program one mile north of Madison Square in Bryant Park.
The initiative was led by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (BPRC). The group’s revitalization plan was similar to the one developed by Simon, whom the group hired as an early advisor. “The problem in Bryant Park is under-use,” as the group’s first executive director, Daniel Biederman explained, echoing Simon.[24] “The void of activity permits a variety of law-breakers to operate there with little fear of apprehension,” BPRC’s early promotional materials described, leading “many to believe that Bryant Park has been abandoned by its caretakers and neighbors.”[25] The BPRC’s goal — like UPP — was to increase park usage, while securing financial support for the park’s revitalization from surrounding corporations and landlords.
But the BPRC also learned from UPP’s shortcomings. Rather than just focus on corporations and landlords — who continued to prove hesitant to support a service still understood to be the domain of government — the BPRC sought to convince a broader constituency of the necessity of looking beyond government to improve Bryant Park. Indeed, the initiative itself was forged largely by the New York Public Library whose renowned main branch filled half of Bryant Park’s nine acres. The library’s stature helped the project receive funding from numerous foundations, the endorsement of city officials, and even support from the leading park advocacy group. This constituency ultimately enabled the BPRC to win over the corporations and landlords surrounding the park; their financial contributions provided a substantial portion of the funding that underpinned the project in the years ahead.
This array of support from the business sector and beyond allowed the BPRC to accomplish what UPP could not. In 1985, the Corporation signed an unprecedented agreement with city officials that paved the way for the private organization to take authority over matters such as maintenance, repairs, events, concessions, security, and overall operations and management. In the years ahead, this new model of private nonprofit organizations gaining a role in managing parks spread throughout New York and, in subsequent decades, across the country to cities from Miami to Anchorage and from Boston to San Diego.
The Madison Square Park campaign illustrates how the route toward private organizations supporting and running parks encountered significant hurdles. It took both time and varied strategies to convince the private sector – corporations, businesses, landlords – that they should provide financial support for what had been understood to be a quintessential municipal service: public parks. Despite its failure, Urban Park Plazas was an unrecognized step toward transforming parks to being understood as public spaces that could and should be supported and even run by organizations outside of government.
Benjamin Holtzman is an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College. He is the author of The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2021).
[1] Citizens Budget Commission, Making the Most of Our Parks, June 2007, 2.
[2] Jennifer Steinhauer, “For Parks, It's Not Easy Getting Green,” New York Times, May 21, 2004.
[3] Deirdre Carmody, “A Rise in Deterioration of City’s Parks is Feared Because of Budget Cutbacks,” New York Times, August 11, 1975.
[4] “Park Travesty,” New York Times, May 5, 1976.
[5] Fred Ferretti, “Private Funds Help Park to Get More Loving Care,” New York Times, November 1, 1979.
[6] Urban Park Plazas, “A Proposal to Provide Management, Supervision, and Supplemental Maintenance Services at Bryant Park,” October 16, 1979, 2. Folder: “Urban Park Plazas ’80, ’81, + ’82.” Bryant Park Corporation Archives [Hereafter BPC], New York, New York.
[7] Urban Park Plazas, “Madison Square Park Revitalization Program. Pilot Project. Final Report,” January 16, 1980, 2. Folder: “Urban Park Plazas ’80, ’81, + ’82.” BPC.
[8] Quoted in Ferretti, “Private Funds Help Park to Get More Loving Care.”
[9] John Lewis, “A Broom and Bloom Effort for Parks,” New York Daily News, December 18, 1979.
[10] Urban Park Plazas, “A Proposal to Provide Management,” 1.
[11] “With Company’s Help, a ‘New’ Park,” New York Life News (Likely late 1979 or early 1980). Folder: “Urban Park Plazas ’80, ’81, + ’82.” BPC.
[12] Urban Park Plazas, “A Proposal to Provide Management,” 2.
[13] Richard M. Clurman to Richard R. Shinn, President, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, July 10, 1979. Folder: “Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, 1979-1981.” BPC.
[14] Ferretti, “Private Funds Help Park to Get More Loving Care.”
[15] Clurman to Shinn, July 10, 1979.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Urban Park Plazas, “Madison Square Park Revitalization Program. Pilot Project. Final Report,” January 16, 1980, 2. Folder: “Urban Park Plazas ’80, ’81, + ’82.” BPC.
[18] William Sweeney, “Cleaning Up the Yard,” Metrolines, Vol. 1, No. 6, December 14, 1979. Folder: “Urban Park Plazas ’80, ’81, + ’82.” BPC.
[19] Robert W. Poole, Jr., “Adopting City Parks,” Dollars & Sense, July 1980, 3.
[20] Ferretti, “Private Funds Help Park to get More Loving Care.”
[21] Ibid.
[22] Urban Park Plazas, “Madison Square Park Revitalization Program: Annual Report, January 1 – December 31, 1981 and 1982 Proposal,” January 1982, 1. BPC.
[23] Ferretti, “Private Funds Help Park to Get More Loving Care.”
[24] Quoted in Stan Pinkwas, “Taming Bryant Park,” East Side Express, May 27-June 2, 1982.
[25] Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, “A Plan for the Restoration of Bryant Park,” April 1980, 2. BPC