Two people enter and walk deeper into Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, New York City, NY, on Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. (Credit: Duaa E Zahra Shah)
The late afternoon sun casts long shadows across Marcus Garvey Park, where broken glass and needles glint against the littered ground. Above, the park’s upper portion sits dark and quiet. Park-goer Kaisa Shaw hurries along the lower path, her pace quickening as daylight begins to fade.
“I never feel safe here at night, and there are parts of the park where I never feel safe at all,” she says.
City parks officials and visitors are grappling with the implications of a $22 million city budget cut, which has led to reductions in park staff, and consequently, cleanliness, maintenance, and safety. In Harlem, at parks like Marcus Garvey, the reduction exacerbates underfunding that has plagued the neighborhood’s green spaces for years. Over time, the percentage of the city budget funds allocated to parks has significantly declined and now stands at .5%, despite Mayor Eric Adam’s promise to dedicate at least 1% of the city’s overall budget to the city’s parks.
Further, there’s a hiring freeze at the NYC Parks Department, expected to remain in place until June of 2026, according to Shekar Krishnan, chair of the City Council’s Committee On Parks and Recreation. As of October 2024, nearly 800 park employees have lost their jobs.
This is all happening at a time when the role of public parks has become more critical than ever. Parks mitigate climate change by cooling and cleaning the air and managing precipitation and floods, and “every bit of vegetation helps,” according to a report by Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that creates parks and protects public land. Parks also remain among the few free recreational options for New Yorkers, particularly essential amid the city’s rising cost of living.
Many of these same New Yorkers are taking matters into their own hands and volunteering to tend their local parks. These volunteers are concerned about the cuts and raise a variety of concerns, chief among them, cleanliness. Debbie Quinones, co-founder of the Harlem Art Park in East Harlem, questioned whether the cuts were responsible for park cleanup crews skipping days because the Harlem Art Park is constantly “overflowing with garbage.”
Deep in Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, New York City, NY, in September, piles of trash could be found at every turn. (Credit: Duaa E Zahra Shah)
Daniel Abram, research and policy project manager at New Yorkers for Parks, pointed to dirty bathrooms. Sydney Slyke, a volunteer, described the upper portion of Marcus Garvey Park in Central Harlem as littered with “needles, glass, and condoms.”
Maintenance at Harlem parks is another worry. Abram highlighted broken benches and playground equipment, while Adrian Kondratowicz, environmental chair for the St. Nicholas Park Board, said a major staircase has been closed for the eight years he’s worked there. Fixing it would make the park more accessible, but Kondratowicz said repairs only happen sporadically.
“The work is done in pieces,” he said. “But it should all just be done.”
Maintenance has been a problem even in the best of times, said Jennifer Ratner, a Friends of the East River Esplanade board member. This is why she started the Friends group a decade ago with other concerned residents. In the years since, she’s watched the East Harlem Waterfront crumble before her eyes. When holes formed along the walkway and exposed the river below, the Parks Department boarded up the gaps so that people could still walk and bike. Eventually, the area was condemned for safety reasons. Other sections of the Esplanade, including the pier, are fenced or blocked off. Ratner wishes for interim measures to keep the park open, safe, and accessible. While stabilization projects are currently in design and procurement phases, construction could take years to complete, according to Ratner. It hasn’t even started.
Safety concerns also plague Harlem’s parks. Ratner said her fight to improve the park’s lighting has spanned a decade. She estimated that more than half the lights in the East Harlem portion of the Esplanade don’t work. The Department of Transportation maintains the lights, but the Parks Department has to request new lights. For that process to even begin, the Esplanade Park’s manager has to locate all the lights that have burned out—a tall order for just one person, especially given that the park is 1.74 acres.
Marcus Garvey Park is a site of frequent drug use, according to Abram and Kondratowicz, the park advocates. It’s a place where “people go to shoot up,” Kondratowic said. Slyke, the volunteer, said the upper portion of the park is a “haven where people can do whatever they want because even police won’t go up there.” The New York City Police Department didn’t respond to questions about the frequency of patrols at Marcus Garvey Park.
Income and race are associated with disparities in access to green spaces, according to a study published in Landscape and Urban Planning, an international journal of landscape science, planning, and design. Debbie Quinones, co-founder of the Harlem Art Park, said the Parks Department treats Harlem’s parks worse than its downtown counterparts. Quinones recalled one incident where cobblestones in the Art Park were merely covered with tar, while wealthier neighborhoods received professional repairs. She said that she had to reach out to many partners, including Madison Square Park Conservancy, an organization with more resources and better connections, just to get the park cleaned a day before an important event.
Hoping to turn things around, Quinones is organizing a week of formal, coordinated legislative visits around Earth Day 2025, urging parks groups to meet with their elected representatives to propose recommendations and push for increased funding and budget allocations. Her efforts are driven by the belief that funding decisions favor those who “can’t be messed with.” She also acknowledged that mobilization demands significant time and effort, something Harlem’s community groups often struggle with.
“Some groups have the capacity to meet at noon,” she noted, “but I don’t. I have a regular job to keep.”
Hayley Tessler, coordinator at Riverside Park Conservancy, said that larger parks with private donors can sometimes rely on conservancies to fund projects, but parks in less affluent areas don’t have that luxury. Some Harlem parks don’t even have basic amenities like grass, trees, or playgrounds, said Jessica Elliott, vice chair of Community Board 11 in East Harlem.
“Kids don’t have anything to do,” she said.
In the absence of adequate city support, park volunteers (there were 410,000 of them, as of 2023), community members, and nonprofits have stepped in. Tessler said the parks have fewer full-time employees each year, so organizations like Partnerships for Parks have mobilized volunteers to clean, plant, and paint. Partnerships for Parks trains community groups, corporations, nonprofits, and educational institutions to take on park projects. Yekaterina Gluzberg, volunteer project manager at the organization, noted a 50% increase in requests for these programs last spring compared to previous years. It’s difficult to keep up with demand. Despite the surge in volunteer interest, Gluzberg said volunteers cannot replace the reliability of full-time staff.
“Anything you see that’s really nice in the area has been done by our group and volunteers,” Ratner said of the East River Esplanade.
She feels like most people are unaware of how much philanthropy and volunteerism sustain the parks. Daniel Abram, project manager of research and policy at New Yorkers for Parks, goes even further, suggesting this might be why the government feels it can cut the parks’ budget— because it sees volunteer New Yorkers doing the work.
But as Kondratowicz of the St. Nicholas Park board pointed out, “It’s not that we do their job, and they get a pat on the back…Where has the money gone over the years?”
Beyond the challenges of crowdsourcing time, work, and money, grassroots efforts often face bureaucratic barriers. Both Ratner and Elliott said park advocacy takes decades.
“We’re constantly at the mercy of whoever is in charge and their new agenda,” Elliot said, adding that advancing any park project requires both coalition-building and navigating the system.
Ratner said geography is an added challenge, with some parks crossing multiple community boards and elected officials’ districts, involving many stakeholders and decision-makers. It’s difficult to “rip, cut, and take credit,” she said, with so many cooks in the kitchen. Groups like hers need the Parks Department to help with logistics, insurance requirements, permits, and signage, all of which would make fundraising easier.
Tessler pointed out that libraries can close once a week, make a point, and reverse budget cuts, as they did recently. But parks, on the other hand, are open all the time. It’s this openness that allows Sydney Slyke to walk her dogs at Marcus Garvey, Friends of Harlem Art Park to host Latin jazz concerts, and Esplanade Friends to arrange yoga sessions on the East River.
All of this stands to suffer under the 2025 budget cuts.
“It’s hard to understand what we’re losing when we’ve already lost so much,” Elliott said.
The New York City Parks Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment by phone or email.
About the author(s)
Duaa E Zahra Shah is an MS student at Columbia Journalism School and is interested in covering conflict, education, and migration.