The Parks Fill Up With People As Heckscher, Hippies Add Life To New York's Vast Wilderness

There's a kind of madness. August Heckseher, Commissioner of Parks in the New York City, meets with hippie leaders from the East Village. The hippies, in rites of love, have clashed with cops in Tompkins Square Park.

Police brutality. Make love not war. Immoral, amoral people. Bongo drums. Peace and quiet. Decent folk. Puerto Ricans and Negroes. Conflict of interest raises its scarred and tawdry head. At 5 p.m. the office staff goes home, leaving Heckscher with the hippies. The spring afternoon melts into darkness.

"Yes"

Heckscher emerges with a settlement. He wants a press release to go out. The hippies smile, "Yes." Together he and they--a bow tie and flowered robes--draft a release, run the mimeograph machine, stuff the releases into envelopes.

And excitement. One hundred and thirty five thousand people flock to the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park to share an evening with Barbra Streisand. Around the Meadow rises a wall of trees, dark and mysterious. In the distance loom the colorfully lit buildings of the city.

The crowd roars as Barbra, its Barbra, comes on the outdoor stage. She, in a flowing pink gown, is but a twinkling spot in the distance. Around her, her lovers, who listen together to her voice. "There couldn't be 135,000 people," says Commissioner Heckscher, "They'd all have to be embracing. But then a lot of them are."

And hope. The Jazzmobile, a small pickup truck whose back has been converted into a stage, drives into a "play street" in Central Harlem. The street is closed to traffic; in its squalor the children play.

It's early evening. The Jazzmobile stops, and out climb three jazz musicians. Men and women sitting on their dirty stoops rise and walk over to see what's going on. Kids come running, pushing, fighting, laughing. The trio starts to play. It's an evening whose gaity relieves for a moment the oppression of dirt, disease, and hunger. "We're buying time," Heckscher says. "But you have to buy time in any way you can and hope that some how things will grow better rather than worse."

And magic. Nickle hot dogs and free beer, the soft midsummer night air, and trees enchanted in the hazy light. Men stroll with their wives on the Mall; lovers lie quietly in the grass; kids running twisting in the crowd; the band plays a slow waltz of the 1890's. On a warm June night 50,000 New Yorkers gather in Central Park to celebrate the good old summertime. "Look at all those people," says the Commissioner. "Isn't it exciting!"

And toughness. He drives through Bushwick, a low income neighborhood in Brooklyn, with members of the Bushwick Task Force. The parks and playgrounds are desolate; the fences torn down, the benches ripped apart. A dog lies dead in the corner of Mount Washington Park where it has lain for three days. One longs for lights, and music, and the play of children. Instead there is fear and a lonely silence. Heckscher stares into the night, "There's a feeling that time is running out."

The madness, the excitement, the hope, the magic, and the toughness are all part world of the New York City Department of Parks. Three years ago Central Park at night was a sombre, haunting place; Morningside Park, which borders on Central Harlem, was called the most dangerous park in the country.

Some of the loneliness and danger remain but the city's parks are becoming colorful, crowded, festive places where picnickers, bicyclists, strollers, and families with their children come to enjoy the freshness of the open air.

In the dramatic rebirth of New York's parks, three men have played key roles. John Lindsay had the vision to understand the role that parks play in an urban society. Thomas Hoving, his first Parks Commissioner, now director of the Metropolitan Museum, has the genius to translate Lindsay's vision into spectacular "happenings" that reoriented the attitudes of an entire city toward its parks. And August Heckscher, the present commissioner, is expanding on Hoving's work and creating a structure that will make it endure.

But the new administration's philosophy has not been without opposition. Last summer Henry Hope Reed, Curator of Central Park, attacked Heckscher, his boss, for "Commercialization" of the park.

The charge emerged in the aftermath of the Streisand concert. The crowd had left Sheep's Meadow strewn with garbage, the refuse of a festive evening--papers, beer cans, food, old bottles, and a single black miniskirit. The mess took three days to clean up. Reed charged that the landscaped beauty of Central Park was being lost in a deluge of commercial events--shows, concerts, happenings.

Heckscher responded immediately, "Henry Reed has a mistaken pastoral ideal of parks and landscapes. He simply doesn't like to see things happen in the parks. But what good is a park if people are afraid to use it?" Litter is a problem, but Heckscher is happier worrying about garbage than violence and vandalism. "We've been lucky in the parks," he says. "We've been able to work great changes by simply calling upon the people, by saying 'Come on in, the weather's fine.' And the people have responded."

Scholar

Heckscher is a scholar and a historian. He came to the Lindsay Administration in March 1967 from the Twentieth Century Fund, a small research foundation, where for fifteen years he pursued a quiet, academic life as the Fund's director--and served from 1961-1963 as President Kennedy's Special Consultant on the Arts.

He responded enthusiastically to Lindsay's invitation to join the city government. "I found I could put my ideas to the test of action," he is fond of saying.

The fundamental principle of Heckscher's philosophy of parks is a deep commitment to the individual. "The great city would seem to be the very embodiment of the mass, the death of individualism in its most obvious and dramatic form," he explains. "Here are millions of men and women crowded together, lacking the space which gave to rural living a natural privacy and independence, dependent for their sustenance upon bread and circuses.

"But none of my discoveries of the past months has been more unexpected than the degree to which a city like New York is made up of cohesive neighborhoods and passionately concerned individuals. The image of the mass dissolves in an awareness of sharply defined communities."

Out of his emphasis on the individual--his fear of the tendencies of society to make men smooth and round, rather than angular -- has evolved Heckscher's program for neighborhood parks. "Parks have always been the gathering placed for the people, the point where the values of the community are celebrated, where the business of the community is done, where everything from courtship to conspiracy has its birth."

To deal with a park in terms of the facilities which surround it and to fully involve a community in the life of its park becomes essential. "Every park is the sea into which the rivers of the surroundings neighborhood run," says Heckscher.

Last summer, for example, the Parks Department opened a small "Check-a-Child" playground in Union Square Park, where busy housewives can leave their children while they shop. For 25c an hour the Parks Department gives the children professional supervision in a modern play area. The business leaders of the Union Square shopping district contributed the money for the playground.

The Harlem Cultural Festival, sponsored by the Parks Department, was a similar community development program. In a series of seven different shows, the Festival brought together entertainers who dramatized the cultural heritage of Harlem. An evenings of soul music, one of sports, another of clothes design and modeling -- to make the people of Harlem aware of their own sharp identity within this blurred and sprawling context of urban life.

Heckscher is encouraged by the involvement for communities in park planning. "People seem to have ideas about everything," he says, "very firm and often quite sophisticated ideas. Not to take them into account would invite the failure of any projected work. To create clear vistas stopped by identifiable objects; to shape places which are open and do not become overrun; to give to the public scene a legible character -- these are important to the maintenance of independent man."

Putting the neighborhood philosophy into practices is the job of Courtney Calender, director of the Parks Department's Office of Community Relations. Calender, a young Lindsay radical, explains Heckscher's philosophy in the context of city-wide decentralization. "It's simple," he says. "Pro-