Crumbling infrastructure and muddy lakes in Riverside Park have infuriated local residents, who have blamed city hall for failing to provide much-needed funding for the green space for years.
In recent months, the Upper West Side has taken on the appearance of a Roman ruin: century-old staircases have crumbled into piles of ragged stones, cobblestone paths have given way to overgrown hedges, and rainwater pools have turned lawns and sidewalks into swamps of mud and murky water.
“It looks like worn carpet,” said Jonathan Weiner, 70, a Columbia University professor who has lived near the park for 20 years.
“There’s a lot of things that make me a little sad when I think back to 20 years ago,” he told The Washington Post.
Joel, a father on the Upper West Side who regularly brings his son to the park, said the site’s condition is “unnecessary.”
“The city is running a park like this. It’s ridiculous. They should mow the grass,” he said, pointing to the closed entrance. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that entrance open.”
Even the Riverside Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the park with the city’s parks department, acknowledges its dire condition. – But they say city hall doesn’t provide enough funding to maintain basic repairs and maintenance.
“The current administration has made huge cuts to the parks budget — years of austerity, years of cuts,” The Nature Conservancy CEO Merritt Birnbaum told The Post.
“We and many of our colleagues at other parks advocacy groups in the city have been screaming until we’re blue in the face that we need more funding for parks, not less.”
Riverside Park stretches along a narrow, four-mile corridor along the Hudson River from 72nd to 158th Streets and has earned a reputation as one of the city’s treasures.
The park was first designed in the 1870s by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous architect who also designed Central Park, and features large rock cliffs, rock outcrops, tree-lined walkways, and stone verandas overlooking the river.
Designed by Robert Moses in the 1930s, the park was extended over the railroad tracks where the Amtrak tracks now stand, with new walkways and verandas on the sloping lawns that run to Riverside Drive, as well as a playground and long walkways lined with flower beds.
However, since these works were completed, little has been done to upgrade the park’s infrastructure, leaving deficiencies visible. – In some cases, literally.
At night, it’s not uncommon for the sidewalk lights to be turned off, plunging large areas of the park into darkness. Support pillars for the railway tunnel below pierce the sidewalk in places. Fenced-off areas currently undergoing repairs are common. During storms, people must avoid huge puddles that remain for days after the rain has stopped.
Birnbaum called the dire situation the “new normal” in Riverside, saying severe weather in recent years combined with the park’s aging drainage system has led to the disrepair.
“If you look at the weather last September, it was the wettest September in over 100 years,” she said. “We’ve never had anything like this before, and this park is where all the water that runs off the west side of Manhattan gets into.”
But erratic weather and old water pipes are just two of the causes, Birnbaum said, explaining that if the city had paid to repair the park, the problem might not have arisen in the first place.
“What’s happening in the parks right now is deferred maintenance. The city builds buildings but doesn’t allocate funds for maintenance,” she said.
“The Parks Department is doing the best they can with an increasingly small budget, which has been drastically cut and continues to be cut,” Birnbaum said. “They don’t have enough staff or resources to even keep things in a basic state of repair. We see that every day in Riverside.”
Birnbaum pointed to the hiring freeze currently in place at the Parks Department as an example of the systemic neglect that is contributing to Riverside’s problems. Mayor Adams is currently planning to cut the Parks Department’s budget by $55 million in fiscal year 2025.
In the 1970s, the Park Service had about 11,000 employees, but in recent years that number has fallen to about 7,000, Birnbaum said, but in the last 50 years, the service has opened about 200 new parks.
“I don’t understand the math. How can we have 200 more parks and 4,000 fewer park staff?” she said.
Adam Ganzer, executive director of the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, shared similar statistics.
“City parks take up 30,000 acres of city land, 14 percent of the city, and yet we don’t have enough park patrol officers to cover those 150 people,” he said.
“If there’s no one to operate the mower, the lawn won’t be mowed.”
Ganzer believes Riverside’s problems would begin to solve if Mayor Adams followed through on his campaign promise to allocate 1 percent of the city’s budget to parks, but he doesn’t understand why Hizzoner won’t follow through on that initiative.
“We’ve seen very little in the last few years except budget cuts, but what’s happening in Riverside is indicative of what’s happening citywide,” Ganzer said. “I see this as a real downfall for the current mayor.”
“The Parks Department’s proposed budget is $582 million out of a $110 or $112 billion budget. That’s 0.5 percent of the city’s budget. You can’t balance the budget by cutting parks,” he said.
“It starts with resetting everyone’s perception of the budget and recognizing how little money we need to fully fund our parks system.”
City officials told The Post they remain committed to reaching the 1 percent goal under Adams’ administration, and recently made funds available for a Parks Department program that gives low-income New Yorkers paid training jobs to help maintain parks.
“The data is clear – our parks are safer and better maintained than they were at this time last year, and as we have always said, we aim to reach the 1% goal under our administration,” a city hall representative said.
Parks Department representatives said $300 million has been invested in Riverside since Adams took office in 2022, and they highlighted that an $8.66 million renovation of the beleaguered Dinosaur Playground on 97th Street is scheduled to be completed by summer 2025.
Birnbaum said Riverside Conservancy and Parks Department staff who maintain the park every day are working “exceptionally hard” and have been invaluable in avoiding problems as much as possible until the needed funds are raised.
“I’m really proud of our team and the team at the Parks Department for continuing to do more with less,” she said, but added that without support from the city they’re fighting a “losing battle.”
“This is a screaming moment for the city’s parks right now,” Brinbaum said.
“They’re cutting off the oxygen to our parks, and there’s only so much the conservation community can do. We’re really trying the best we can.”
