“We’re Doing It Ourselves”

The Collapse of New York City’s New Deal Park System

There is good reason for historians to take a dismal view of New York City parks in the 1970s. At the start of the decade, New York City’s economy was on the brink of collapse. In order to avoid bankruptcy and defaulting on its bonds, New York City in the mid-1970s was forced by creditors to relinquish control over its budget to a group of regulatory agencies, the most powerful of which was the Emergency Financial Control Board. This new “crisis regime” mandated major reductions in spending and drastic cuts to the city’s labor force. Crippled by harsh austerity, New York City allowed its infrastructure to crumble. Potholes were left unfilled, street lights sat broken, and city development projects came to a virtual halt. Because it was an agency completely funded by the city and not subject to state or federal mandates, the Parks Department bore a disproportionate brunt of the cuts. City funds for parks dropped 26 percent from 1975 to 1979. From 1972 to 1978, the number of full-time annual employees working for the Parks Department dropped by 30.4 percent. Where in the late 1960s, over 6,000 full-time workers were tending the city’s parks, by 1974, the number dropped to 4,800. By 1981, the department only had 2,900 full-time annual employees with an average age of 55. ⁶

The city exacerbated the manpower shortage by almost exclusively cutting the jobs of lower level staff, while protecting high-level and highly paid administration and supervisory positions. The result was a Parks Department top-heavy with managers and desperately short of workers actually on the ground sweeping, painting, and gardening. In 1977, the Daily News compared the Park Department’s reduced payroll with the personnel quotas the city estimated would be needed to properly maintain parks. The department employed only 15.5 percent fewer foremen, senior supervisors, assistant park directors, and other bureaucrats than recommended. Layoffs of green-uniformed “parkies,” however, were brutal. Only 80 of the 957 recommended park attendants were left on the payroll. The department that year hired just 1,165 of 2,709 recommended laborers, 85 of 180 gardeners, and a shocking 4 of an authorized 54 custodial assistants. The average shortage of workers cleaning and maintaining parks was 65.2 percent. ⁷

Not only was the Parks Department top-heavy, it was poorly run. In 1968, the Lindsay administration created a massive superagency called the “Parks Recreation and Cultural Affairs Administration” in an attempt to limit waste and duplication of services. By the mid-1970s, the cumbersome agency had become an infamous “political dumping ground” used by Mayor Abraham Beame to dole out management posts as political rewards to supporters, its poor reputation matched only by New York City Off-Track Betting. Parks offered the mayor’s office a bounty of patronage opportunities. Contracts for the right to sell concessions were awarded to insiders. Street trees were planted in front of the houses of powerful clubhouse leaders. “Parks have always been a ‘problem agency,’” admitted a budget official in 1975. Frustrated by the pressure to hire “hacks” rather than competent park experts, Commissioner Edwin J. Wiesl resigned in 1975 after just twenty months in office. Three other park commissioners served short and unmemorable terms under Beame, none with terms lasting more than a year and half. ⁸

For the city’s parks, 1976 was a particularly bleak year. After hiring 2,783 season workers to help during the previous summer (already down from 3,997 in 1972), the Parks Department only hired 594 and slashed the capital expenditures budget by US$40 million. The result was a near complete halt on tree care, pruning, playground repair, and the rehabilitation of statues and fountains. In Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the budget for capital expenditures dropped from US$243,884 in 1974–1975 to zero dollars in 1977. The number of employees in the park dropped from 85 to 67. With only enough staff for bare necessities like snow removal, the park stopped preventative maintenance. Plants began to wilt. Playgrounds were covered with rubbish. Trees began to die. ⁹

In 1975, Weisl wrote to Mayor Beame warning about the devastating effect further budget cuts and the labor shortage would have on parks and playgrounds in the city. “Studies show that when, because of attrition, a recreation director leaves a playground, vandalism triples within a year …. In 1967, some 600 recreation directors manned the city’s playgrounds; today we have only 324 recreation directors.” Any savings gained from cutting salaried workers, Wiesl argued, would simply be offset by the cost of repairing vandalized equipment.

Weisl’s prediction proved correct. Even in previous decades when the city had been economically thriving, park maintenance had been near impossible. Much of this was the fault of Commissioner Robert Moses who overbuilt a sprawling park system during the New Deal, when he had 30,000 federally funded civil servants on hand. Having never devised a plan about how to actually maintain 572 parks, 900 playgrounds, 104 swimming pools, 535 tennis courts, 890 playing fields, thirteen golf courses, seven ice-skating ponds, six beaches, four stadiums, and three zoos, Moses in subsequent years tried to compensate for a staff shortage with strict restrictions about how his parks could be used. By 1960s, as the number of employees dropped to 6,000 and a new generation of users began to rebel against Moses’ heavy-handed “keep off the grass” approach, city parks slowly began to fall apart. ¹⁰

By the mid-1970s, the condition of the city’s parks reached a new nadir. Marine Park in 1974, complained the New York Post, was a “wasteland of garbage and broken equipment with only three working swings.” At Brighton Beach, only six of the twenty-eight women’s bathrooms and three of the men’s toilets were working. Red Hook Park in Brooklyn was covered with broken glass, with ten broken swings surrounded by weeds, a sandbox with no sand, a missing slide, four of the six drinking fountains broken, dying shrubbery, and a locked comfort station covered with graffiti. Vandalism became an overwhelming problem. Monuments, comfort stations, and fountains were smashed and covered with graffiti. Playground equipment and benches intentionally destroyed by bored teenagers were too numerous to be fixed by a skeleton park staff. Perhaps most distressing, vandals had begun to strip and steal century-old statues, monuments, and plaques. In Prospect Park in 1975, thieves vandalized four historic urns standing three-feet high at the park’s entrance and stripped them of their bronze. Later that year, vandals swiped two bronze eagles, Neptune’s trident, and the tail of a merman. In 1974, police caught four men trying to drag away the 400 pound bust of John Howard Payne, composer of “Home Sweet Home.” ¹¹

Budget cuts did not just lead to increased vandalism. Parks in the 1970s were also unsafe. As the city slashed the size of the police department, parks were only sporadically patrolled. Many became open-air drug markets. Robberies were statistically rare when compared to surrounding neighborhoods, but thefts became a major problem, particularly with groups of teenagers grabbing bikes from younger kids. After forty bike thefts in the Prospect Park in just one month, for example, a group of bicyclists in 1975 organized a regular safety caravan in which riders could circle the park while accompanied by a scooter-mounted police officer. ¹²

The Crisis Regime and New York City’s Parks

In the face of such dire circumstances, where did the idea emerge to privatize the city’s parks? ¹³ The answer was surprisingly not found in the boardrooms of the crisis regime that took over city finances in the mid-1970s. Although they called for harsh austerity measures and a smaller and more efficient city government, the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), Emergency Financial Control Board, the Temporary Commission on City Finances (TCCF), and the Mayor’s Management Advisory Board pointedly did not champion privatization as a realistic or desirable alternative for delivering essential city services. In minutes of board meetings, published reports and interviews, the Wall Street bankers, labor leaders, university deans, social scientists, state government officials, and real estate leaders who led these regulatory agencies spoke little of either devolving park management to volunteers and self-help groups, contracting out park maintenance to private companies or load-shedding parks by selling them to corporations or nonprofits.

Rather the leaders of New York City’s crisis regime, like Felix Rohatyn, were progrowth, technocratic liberals who retained a faith in state-sponsored redevelopment and hoped to make a streamlined public sector more scientific and efficient. They turned to management consultants who offered an alphabet soup of new computerized programs like the integrated and financial management system and the management by objectives system that would help the mayor centralize power and modernize an archaic bureaucracy. In December 1975, the Bureau of the Budget issued a “management improvement plan” for the troubled Parks Department filled with jargon about an “inventory management and control system” and a “mechanical improvement program.” The Parks Department did not implement any of the recommendations but promised to provide stronger oversight and clearer objectives for employees. Rather than designate staff to each park and playground, the department created small three-man mobile maintenance crews that could perform repairs on demand. In 1974, the department also experimented briefly with using the “Maynard Operation Sequence Technique” in Brooklyn parks to improve efficiency. ¹⁴

The crisis regime was decidedly uninterested in “contracting out” park management and maintenance to private companies. One reason for this antipathy was that the city for decades had already outsourced building repairs, office maintenance, and streetlight maintenance. Rather than encouraging competition and efficiency, the process was notoriously susceptible to corruption and graft. “In the matter of contracting work to outsiders, Mayor Beame has stated that such work has been reduced to a minimum,” reported the board of directors of MAC in 1975. “There was an agreement by members of the Board that the package should contain a statement advocating a reduction in outside contract work to the lowest economic level that is feasible.” ¹⁵

Rather than push for more outsourcing, the crisis regime demanded the city develop a more scientific and transparent process for awarding the few contracts it already gave out. In the case of the Parks Department, regulatory agencies hoped to fix an infamously corrupt concessions system. Parks outsourced concessions to private vendors who paid rent to the city based on a percentage of their sales. As it relied on the bookkeeping of concessionaires, the arrangement was notoriously easy to bilk. In 1976, an audit by the city comptroller revealed “an outdated and abused system.” Concessionaires failed to report gross revenue and abused contract loopholes. Politicians awarded franchises to cronies. Food stands and restaurants were in horrific condition. Illegal hotdog carts crowded park entrances.

In response, the Parks Department, corporation counsel, and comptroller’s office created a committee to award contracts and rigorously enforce standards. But the committee only met twice and park concessions continued to be dysfunctional. In 1977, for example, the committee tried to curtail the number of illegal hotdog peddlers by establishing a formal bidding process that would award exclusive rights to a single company. The result was a chaotic “hotdog war” that embarrassed the city. John Zervas of “Yum Yum Hot Dogs” paid US$80,000 for a five-year contract granting him sixty pushcart locations in Central Park. He soon earned the nickname the “peddler king” of Central Park, as he physically confronted illegal pushcart owners and demanded they pay thousands of dollars to work as subcontractors. The city soon revoked Zervas’s contract after reports of him beating up a hotdog stand owner. As the peddler king fought the breach of contract in court, the Parks Department switched to selling licenses to individual pushcarts. ¹⁶

While opposed to outsourcing, the crisis regime did consider load shedding some responsibility for parks. But rather looking to private corporations or nonprofits, the crisis regime turned to the federal government for help. Federal manpower programs, for example, helped supplement a reduced municipal labor force. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) signed by Nixon in 1973 provided a block grant for cities with high rates of poverty to train and hire disadvantaged residents. In 1975, the city used the funds to hire 2,332 temporary workers for the Parks Department. By 1978, CETA workers made up almost 35 percent of park staff. From 1973 to 1975, the city also launched the Work Relief Employment Project, a “workfare” program in which 1,600–1,800 welfare recipients worked part-time for the Parks Department. In subsequent years, the city cobbled together hundreds of additional part-time workers from its “Public Works Program” and various other small federal grants. ¹⁷

The crisis regime however did not regard federal manpower programs as a long-term solution for delivering city services. Programs like CETA were contingent on a fickle Congress. Municipal unions were wary that federal workers would displace their members as well as exacerbate racial tension in their ranks. Victor Gotbaum’s DC-37, for example, successfully lobbied for CETA workers to receive union benefits. But more controversially, Gotbaum also pushed the city to use the federal funds to rehire laid-off union members. As many of these rehired civil servants were older white ethnic men, some African American and Puerto Rican applicants resented seeing CETA not used for its intended purpose. A generational and racial divide soon split the Parks Department, as older white ethnic managers who avoided layoffs by virtue of seniority were in charge of a cadre of young, primarily unskilled African American, and Latino part-time CETA workers. Although they were hard working and eager, CETA workers needed several years on the job to match the productivity of the fifteen-year veterans they replaced. “The few CETA people that we have been able to hire lack the basic experience necessary to enable them to play important roles in our programs,” complained commissioner Wiesl. ¹⁸

Some crisis regime leaders advocated for a more ambitious load-shedding plan. The city could simply hand over the city’s largest parks to the federal government. The idea had gained impetus in Washington a decade earlier. Fueled by a burgeoning environmental movement, the Department of Interior under the leadership of Secretaries Stewart Udall and Walter Hickel had ambitiously expanded the national park system. After visiting the city in 1969, Secretary Hickel announced support for the Regional Plan Association’s idea to create the nation’s first urban national park at the entrance to New York Harbor. In 1974, the city handed over 13,000 acres of city parks in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island to form part of the Gateway National Recreation Area (GNRA), an enormous financial relief for an overburdened park system.

The success of the GNRA sparked a debate during the fiscal crisis about whether New York’s other large struggling parks, in particular Central and Prospect Parks, should be federalized. Proponents like Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein and Senator Daniel Moynihan argued that Central Park already was a “federal park” in that it was a national landmark visited by thousands of tourists and maintained by CETA workers. Local environmentalists hoped that the National Park Service would have the expertise and resources to better protect wildlife and vegetation. Others predicted that vandals would cease to deface parks with the majesty and dignity of Liberty Island or Yosemite. Although opponents successfully convinced the city not to give up its two crown jewels, the Parks Department still tried to create an ersatz version of Yellowstone. In 1979, Commissioner Gordon Davis launched an “Urban Park Rangers” initiative funded by private grants. Several hundred idealistic college-aged “rangers” trained in ecology and donning smokey-the-bear hats and imitation National Park Service uniforms, patrolled the park and conducted tours. ¹⁹

The privatization of New York City’s parks thus did not have its genesis in the crisis regime. This is not to say that the bankers, state officials, real estate, and business leaders choking the city with harsh austerity measures had no ulterior motives. Some saw the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to lower taxes, abolish rent control, reduce entitlements for the poor and provide more subsidies for development. But it would be misleading to characterize them as “neoliberals” avant le lettre. These power brokers were still veterans of an older liberal downtown growth machine who believed in a strong and well-managed public sector. When they spoke of partnerships between public and private, they largely meant publicly subsidized, large-scale urban redevelopment that would revive the city with new highways, convention centers, and apartment towers.

The Grassroots Privatization of New York City’s Parks

Rather than in the boardrooms of Wall Street, the privatization of the cities parks emerged at the grassroots level. Much of this was initially pragmatic. Faced with reduced city services, local volunteers created a shadow Parks Department that picked up litter, patrolled parks, and tended to plant life. The range of their efforts was remarkable. In Central Park, volunteers drove a makeshift ambulance in an old Ford van equipped with an oxygen tank, stretcher, and first aid equipment. Treating an average of 300 accident victims a month, the van was one of many volunteer ambulance corps rumbling through the city. In the East Village, the East 11th Street Block Association, formed by a coalition of artists, Puerto Rican, white ethnic and gay residents to fight upzoning in the early 1970s, cleared a trash-filled lot to create “Stuyvesant Alley Garden,” a small landscaped park with murals and makeshift sculptures. Along Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, the “Neighborhood Committee for the Asphalt Green” fought to prevent the city from demolishing an abandoned Municipal Asphalt Plant and converted the space into a park and arts center. In Prospect Park, the “Flower Corps” planted chrysanthemums without permission from the Parks Department. ²⁰

Park activism though was more than a pragmatic hodgepodge of stopgap solutions. Volunteers were also fueled by a diverse array of radical park ideologies with roots in the 1960s. Some championed community control and decentralization. Others pushed for historic preservation and hoped to remove modern structures to restore parks to their original Olmstedian design. Others aimed to radically democratize park design and enable local residents to build their own DIY playgrounds and gardens with recycled discarded materials. The rollback of the state during the fiscal crisis offered a space for a wide variety of these antiauthoritarian and “post”-modern park ideas to take root.

A largely white and middle-class neo-Olmstedian school of park reformers emerged in the gentrifying brownstone districts adjacent to Prospect, Central, and Fort Greene Parks. Starting in the 1950s and accelerating in the late 1960s, a new white middle class had begun to buy and rehabilitate old town houses. Fueled by a passion for historic architecture and Victoriana, the young enthusiasts also turned to parks with a similar drive to restore and preserve the nineteenth-century past. “In the last few years … the brownstone revival movement has almost miraculously transformed many of the neighborhoods bordering Prospect Park,” explained the Daily News in 1973. “The sounds of crowbars ripping out plaster, and saws buzzing through fresh lumber in Prospect Heights, Park Slope and other neighborhoods have also signaled a comeback for La Belle Prospect.” ²¹

Neo-Olmstedian historic preservationists viewed parks as works of art that since the 1930s had been abused by recreationalist park reformers like Robert Moses. Just as they battled to protect their nineteenth-century town houses from urban renewal, the new middle class also fought to rescue Victorian buildings, fountains, and walkways from modernization. In the 1960s, groups like Friends of Prospect Park, Save Central Park Committee, and Friends of Fort Greene Park battled to save a Camperdown Elm, stop the demolition of a historic boat house and prevent the erection of ice-skating rinks, an indoor polo arena, children’s farms, and other recreational facilities. In response to this rising tide of activism, the city in 1966 appointed prominent historic preservationists Henry Hope Reed, Jr., and Clay Lancaster to new advisory “curator” positions in Prospect and Central Parks. By the 1970s, this small core of neo-Olmstedian activists had produced influential historic books about the parks, led several successful campaigns to rehabilitate sections of the parks, and developed a powerful fund-raising base to raise money for tree care, tree planting, and historic preservation. ²²

Another wing of poorer activists ranging from Black and Puerto Rican nationalist groups to white countercultural squatters drew from a body of transnational anarchist ideas that had begun to circulate around cities in the late 1960s from Amsterdam to Berkeley, CA. Groups like the Green Guerillas were “radical horticulturalists” who helped local residents occupy and build gardens in some of the more than 60,000 vacant lots scattered around the city, around 75 percent of which were owned by the city. Other “radical recreationalists” built adventure playgrounds. Originating in Denmark and England during the 1940s, adventure playgrounds allowed children to build their own play equipment using material salvaged from the rubble of then war-torn cities. In the 1960s, they were rediscovered by the counterculture and anarchist writers like Colin Ward as they tapped into the antiauthoritarian politics of the era and mapped well onto the abandoned buildings and lots of deindustrializing cities. In the late 1960s, the Lindsay administration’s Parks Department valiantly tried to adopt many of these radical ideas while retaining the older Progressive goal of a centralized and modern recreational park system. The result of this attempt at “planned spontaneity” was a handful of cerebral vest-pocket parks and adventure playgrounds designed from the top-down by architectural experts. In the 1970s, in the empty spaces left by a contracting state, New Yorkers began to experiment with more radical DIY approaches. ²³

The Institutionalization of Park Activism

As the fiscal crisis deepened, park activism slowly became institutionalized, particularly in gentrifying areas with growing numbers of white middle-class residents. The process began as activist groups in individual parks first consolidated. In 1975, for example, “Central” and “Prospect Park Task Forces” formed to coordinate dozens of groups ranging from the “Park Slope Tree Corps” to “Save Grand Army Plaza.” The “Council on the Environment,” a citizen’s group initially organized by Mayor Lindsay in 1970 to research pollution, joined with the Green Guerillas to form a “Street Tree Consortium.”

New unified “task forces” and “consortiums” soon gained financial support from large institutional nonprofits. The Parks Council, Horticultural Society of New York and other older, established park advocacy groups provided equipment and expertise. The Vincent Astor Foundation, Heckscher Foundation for Children, and Estee Lauder Foundation gave grants to local organizations like the Negro Action Group who built adventure playgrounds. In September 1975, fifty-five prominent politicians, Catholic bishops, business leaders, and leaders of community action programs formed the Citizens Committee for New York City (CCNYC) to support volunteer campaigns and self-help initiatives sprouting around the city. At CCNYC’s first citywide convention of block associations, more than 1,300 neighborhood activists giddily exchanged ideas about tree planting, public safety efforts, and cleanup campaigns. Organizers at the conference boasted that over 10,000 block associations were active in the city with the number rising. ²⁴

Along with large nonprofit institutions, individual New Yorkers also opened their wallets to directly support park volunteers. This marked a radical shift in park philanthropy. New York City parks had long relied on private gifts. But in previous decades, these came almost exclusively from wealthy socialites who sponsored individual fountains, statues, or recreational facilities. (Most of these donated white elephants were subsequently difficult to maintain.) In the 1970s, middle-class New Yorkers now donated money to support the mundane delivery of common city services once performed by the public sector. In 1972, the Parks Council’s “Urban Improvement Program” printed the “Liveable New York Catalogue” listing small improvements for regular citizens to purchase for their neighborhoods: a single tree, playground equipment, a sculpture, renting a street cleaner. In 1976, the Central Park Task Force wrote an article in New York Magazine entitled “32 Ways Your Time or Money Can Rescue Central Park” with examples like “Fund a summer intern … $700; Restore a shrub bed … $100.” Within two weeks, they were overwhelmed with appreciative letters and checks from local residents totaling US$25,000. ²⁵

As the vise of austerity closed tighter, city officials and municipal unions in the mid-1970s slowly shifted from full-fledged opposition to reluctant partners with park volunteers. Police departments were one of the first agencies grudgingly to reach out. In the early 1970s, the city began to fret about the rising number of untrained citizen patrols and vigilante groups patrolling parks. Despite grumblings from the rank and file about union busting and a mentally unstable element among volunteers, precincts around the city reluctantly created “auxiliary police units” in which gung ho citizens donned police uniforms and carried nightsticks. By 1977, the Central Park Community Council supported 162 auxiliary policemen, fifteen volunteer playground watchers, and fifty members of a bike patrol. ²⁶

Other branches of city government soon followed. The city began to award diplomas to “tree paramedics” if they completed a course offered by the Street Tree Consortium. In 1976, Mayor Beame officially announced his new openness to volunteers. Assuring municipal unions that his goal was “not to substitute but to supplement” unionized workers, he hoped to recruit thousands of new volunteers to fill vacancies in city agencies. In June of that year, the mayor announced the formation of partnership between the City and State Parks and Recreation Departments, the Parks Council and the Citizens Committee for New York City to launch a new “citizens campaign” to mobilize volunteers and provide incentive grants to the city’s block associations and neighborhood groups preserving parks. “The project is a four-way partnership involving two levels of government and two private groups,” explained the mayor of the new public–private program. “As such, it’s an excellent example of the kind of cooperation and participation which will help the City solve its problems.” ²⁷

By the late 1970s, privatization filtered its way up to the boardroom of the crisis regime. In 1977, the TCCF issued its influential final report “The City in Transition: Prospects and Policies for New York” listing its recommendations for New York City’s future. The bulk of the widely read report outlined plans for streamlining and modernizing city bureaucracy. No section proposed privatizing city services. But after pages that championed “management efficiency,” “simplification,” “centralization,” and “rationalization,” a small section looked hopefully to the work of volunteers transforming the city on the ground. “There must be a new and receptive attitude toward innovation and experimentation in the City’s bureaucracies, which, over the years, have become enormously resistant to change. First, the city’s residents must be more involved in the delivery of public services. The use of volunteers has been criticized on the grounds that volunteers take away jobs from municipal employees. There is, however, a transcendent issue, the maintenance of services at a time when the city’s future demands this. Virtually every service provided by the City —hospitals, parks, police, schools, libraries, children’s services, social service—would benefit from increased volunteer efforts.”

This embryonic version of privatization though was rooted in the radical politics of the 1970s. In a striking passage, the report, written by downtown power brokers, urged the city to embrace radical experiments that sounded almost anarchist—“worker cooperatives in the Sanitation Department.” The greatest possibilities for these experiments though were in the city’s parks. “Community groups could assume responsibility for the care and maintenance of local parks as part of an experiment not only to cut costs but to promote neighborhoods and neighborhood pride.” ²⁸

The Birth of the Public–private Park

By the early 1980s, several New York City’s parks were “privatized.” But while the term had emerged as a new ideological buzzword for conservative policy makers, the parks themselves were not uniform. Each was managed and funded by a unique public–private hybrid of activists, nonprofits, local businesses, and government that coalesced in ad hoc fashion during the previous decade. “Conservancies” led by wealthy donors and middle-class neo-Olmstedian activists now managed Central and Prospect Parks. Local corporations, universities, museums, and libraries joined with activist groups to rehabilitate and maintain Madison Square, Union Square, and Bryant Parks. The city’s Green Thumb program officially leased abandoned lots to radical community gardeners and former squatters in poorer areas.

The many shortcomings that surfaced in the 1980s of these new hybrids has been well documented elsewhere. Critics charged that privately funded parks in wealthier, white neighborhoods received more resources. Others questioned whether a park run by local business improvement districts would grant citizens the same free speech rights and democratic access as a truly public space. Community gardens helped revive neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. But in doing so, activists unintentionally “pioneered” poorer districts and sparked a new wave of gentrification. Speculators soon pressured the city to sell community garden lots for private development.

The next part of the story that still needs to be told is how this hodgepodge of parks by the 1980s started to perform such strong ideological work. How in the hands of a new generation of city leaders did this medley of ad hoc privatizations become an overarching strategy of privatization? How did a new city growth machine transform the anarchist impulses of park activists in the 1970s into a near-religious conservative discourse celebrating market forces and free enterprise in the 1980s? It will be up to a new generation of graduate students and young scholars to unpack this complex history.