Native New Yorker Adrian Benepe '78 is at home among the Big Apple's vast network of parks, gardens, and recreational areas. With 28,000 acres in his care he better be.
By Sarah Van Arsdale
In the rounded turret office of New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe '78, chickadees and sparrows flutter at the window feeder, and sounds of children congregating at the Central Park Zoo two floors below float up through the spring air. Here, on an unusually quiet morning, New York City seems innocent, at peace. But then Benepe's pager beeps, and soon he has his cell phone out, and he's asking: "A body? Where?"
That's when the scope of Benepe's job suddenly becomes clear to a casual observer. This position, which he has held since January 2002, is not only about patrolling the grounds of Central Park or deciding how best to cut a ribbon for a playground opening.
"It's New York City, and if you're looking to dump a body, you've got 28,000 acres of woods and meadows in the parks," Benepe says, neatly folding the cell phone away. "There are also drownings at beaches. We do have a life-and-death aspect to our work, often involving water."
Most days, however, life plays a larger role than death, and it's this part of the job—seeing Harlem preschoolers cavort in the spray of a park fountain, or meeting with city officials to discuss ways to make use of a newly available plot of open space—that Benepe enjoys most. To his way of thinking, parks in an urban setting such as New York play a crucial role in keeping things more civilized, more, well, natural.
Not surprisingly, Benepe credits his years at Middlebury with developing his love of the natural world. "At Middlebury, I was struck by the sense of being in the 'Magic Mountain,' on this hilltop with a view of the Green Mountains," he says. The College and its environment still provide respite for Benepe and his wife, Charlotte Glasser '78. The couple, who met while on kitchen detail during their first year, take sons Alex, 16, and Erik, 12, to visit with friends in the Green Mountain State each summer.
"Middlebury in summer is idyllic. The rivers are full, the fields are full of wildflowers. It's just beautiful," he says. But his interpretation doesn't end there; Benepe also sees that Middlebury and its environs are maintained through the vision of the people charged with caring for it.
"Even though it seems the town has changed a lot, the buildings are the same. It hasn't expanded that much, and there's a sense not that time has stood still, but it's still the same. In part, this is due to state and local officials' determination not to allow the town to be ruined." Not unlike Central Park, perhaps the best-known of Benepe's charges.
Benepe takes great pride in showing a visitor the framed original plan for Central Park hanging in a conference room that adjoins his office. Drawn by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1858, the Greensward Plan was selected, Benepe believes, in large part due to a "revolutionary plan" to include sunken transverse roads that would cross the park east to west. (While many people assume that Olmsted and Vaux were simply hired to plan the park, they were just young designers at the time and had entered their plan in an open contest.)
"There's no way they could foresee that one day there would be so much traffic that these roads would be necessary," Benepe says. At the time, the city was only developed as far north as 38th Street, so the area surrounding the park, which begins at 59th Street, was still mostly a landscape of fields and meadows. "Yet somehow they planned for that," Benepe marvels.
The Greensward Plan will be part of an exhibit this summer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the commission that created Central Park. Looking at the plan today, one can see that the park hasn't changed much in the past 150 years; when visiting Central Park one can easily imagine the gentry of early New York strolling the shaded pathways and resting on the familiar green benches.
Benepe is both proud of Central Park and somewhat in awe of it, as seems appropriate given the park's dimensions and history, and the role it plays in the lives of so many New Yorkers and visitors. With more than 26,000 trees, 58 miles of scenic pathways, and nearly 9,000 benches on 843 acres, "Central Park is the world's park," Benepe says. "The concept of the modern democratic park was born in New York City, and its restoration represents a paradigm for the importance of public parks and for the importance of the public-private partnership that makes the park so successful."
Of course, the history of Central Park hasn't been one of uninterrupted idyll. In fact, when Benepe started working for the parks commission in 1979, New York City parks were known mainly as a dangerous breeding ground for drug use and mayhem. His first job with the commission was through the city's innovative park ranger program, an ambitious attempt to enlist a troop of workers to clean up and patrol the city's myriad parks. Benepe was in the first class of 50 rangers who spread throughout the city's green spaces, patrolling the grounds, cleaning up debris, providing an official presence, and making citizen's arrests of vandals and purse snatchers.
"We were primarily environmental educators," Benepe says. "We had badges, but we didn't have any real authority. We just held people until the cops came. We were there to politely tell people what to do." The rangers and city officials had a tough assignment: to clean up the parks and make them a safe haven where residents and visitors could take a stroll with a baby carriage, play a game of softball, or just lie on a blanket in relative serenity amid a city teeming with steel, concrete, and glass.
"Central Park and the other parks in the city were in a terrible state of abandonment, diminishment, and demoralization of the work force. Vandals and criminals controlled things, and there was nothing you could do about it," Benepe says. "Everything was covered with graffiti, lawns were bare, and the Belvedere Castle was abandoned. There were dead trees everywhere. Sheeps' Meadow and the Great Lawn were dust bowls. At the Lake at 72nd Street, the rowboats were covered with graffiti so they looked like floating subway cars."
Today, the parks commissioner is in charge of more than 200 rangers, deputized by the state, who fan out over the city's 1,700 parks, playgrounds, and recreational facilities across the five boroughs. "The parks need to be looked over 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Benepe says. "The job of parks commissioner is more complex than when Robert Moses was commissioner from 1934 to 1960."
Benepe has also noticed a shift in public opinion concerning the city's parks. Where once the public simply observed the parks as a natural refuge for weary city dwellers, more and more people have demonstrated a renewed appreciation for the social values of Olmstead and his cohorts, and a greater appreciation for nature.
"There was a benign neglect due to a lack of money, and the parks were left to go naturally wild. Now there are about 7,000 acres of wetlands, forests, and salt marshes that since the 1980s have been actively managed and restored to natural areas. Ironically, then, some of the parks' areas have been managed into a state of natural being."
Benepe has attracted a lot of attention as parks commissioner. News stories and profiles have appeared on the pages of the New York Times and New York magazine, and he's no stranger to formal attire and photo ops, frequently attending ribbon cuttings and gala benefits for the parks service.
Yet, for all the black-tie receptions, decisions about concessions revenue, and even reports of bodies found in the parks, Benepe remains at heart simply a man who loves both the city of New York and the nature embedded in the city. Walk into Riverside Park with him, and the first thing he does is pick up the stray pieces of trash from the grassy lawn as he approaches his favorite tree, a giant Dutch elm that's provided shade for numerous Benepe family picnics and celebrations over the years. Understandably, Benepe is quite pleased to be parks commissioner in the year of Central Park's 150th anniversary.
"I was there in the bad old days, as a kid and as a teenager, and I participated in the park's rebirth," Benepe says. "Now I see the park beautifully restored—it was just a short time ago that it was a symbol of urban decline, and now it's a symbol of urban growth and rebirth."
Sarah Van Arsdale is a freelance writer in New York City, where she is known to make full use of the summertime free opera in Central Park. Her second novel, Blue, will be published in October.