Brooklyn, 2014: Where your writer spent Saturday evening explaining to his 2-year-old that she couldn't ride the public-park carousel because grown-ups in evening wear had paid for a private event on the painted ponies.
This was in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the beautiful new green space straddling Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo, the neighborhood the Walentas family and their development firm Two Trees effectively created in the space left begind when manufacturing abandoned the waterfront.
The carousel itself, named for Jane Walentas and now a 'gift to the city,' was purchased by her for $385,000 and brought to New York (and enclosed in a gorgeous $9 million jewel box she comissioned). It was, the New York Times reported, part of the family's plan to 'turn the waterfront beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, then abandoned, into a marina and shopping complex.'
Rides are free for kids under 3, and $2 for the rest of us. We were among the families whose kids stared sadly at the horses at 7 on a beautiful evening, an hour after the carousel closed for public use.
What did they pay? Emails and calls to Walentas and the non-profit that operates her carousel went unreturned, but it was surely a bit more than renting out Chuck E. Cheese.
The park where the shopping complex would have been was built under the Bloomberg administration, with the support of then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and a few million contributed by the Walentases, who'd made many times that from their investment in the neighborhood and stood to bring in more if the park added to its appeal, as it has.
Because it's right on the water (you may recall the haunting images of the carousel, still lit, surrounded by the rising river during Sandy), the park costs $16 million a year to maintain. To pay that bill, there are luxury towers inside the park, and more slotted to rise.
Those who've come here since 2001 may not realize what a new phenomenon the luxury park is - and how conservancies that bring in private money, along with private developers who've taken the lead in building new parks, have turned open, public spaces into curated ones, full of amenities and pricetags signaling who does, and doesn't, really belong there.
The socialite founders of Washington Square Park's conversvancy reportedly planned to replace 'unsightly' hot-dog vendors with 'new and different' options, including a $5 ice-cream sandwich. Madison Square Park houses a Shake Shack, in a building paid for by its conservancy. The High Line - the symbol of the business district's spread west and south - is a place where families casually drop $100 on lunch. The south steps of Union Square are colonized by a tent-housed shopping boutique every Christmas.
Our public spaces are becoming commercial ones, billboards for nearby companies and developers - and places pitching pricey goods, not unsightly hot dogs.
Mayor De Blasio has yet to say where he stands on the Brooklyn Bridge Park buildings, or the plan for a new restaurant inside Union Square. Those are troubling signs.
Some things so obvious I'm embarrassed to have to write them: The city has a lot of ways of generating money. The parks shouldn't be one of them. No one should feel priced out of them, or out of place in them.
Some simple standards, the sort I'd share with my daughter:
1) Park concessions shouldn't cost much more than a hot dog. A simple measure: no more than twice the cost of a subway ride.
2) No commercial events. No GoogaMooga (the food, drink and music festival in Prospect Park the past few summers); no beer for sale at SummerStage. Bring your own, or buy a falafel and Coke.
3) Regularly used common spaces, like ice-skating rinks or carousels, should not be available for rent at any price, or time.
4) Spaces that are meant for private events, like the Boathouse at Prospect Park, should be available at cost, and on a strict first-come, first-served basis.
The parks are one leading indicator of what the city means by public, an issue that touches on schools, policing and every other service it provides. To see if Mayor de Blasio is serious about ending his 'tale of two cities,' or if he's just trying to extract a bigger cut from private interests to continue business as usual, watch the parks.
hsiegel@nydailynews.com
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