Kiss Your Grass Goodbye
If Protesters Swarm Lawn

By Henry J. Stern
May 14, 2004

Central Park, the best-known green space in the world as we know it, is once again under assault.

Over the last hundred and fifty years, the great park has bravely borne periodic inappropriate incursions resulting in temporary encroachments. In most cases, those who seek to misuse the park are well-intentioned, and sincerely believe that the particular intrusion they support will serve the public interest and not injure the greensward. They are usually in error.

The latest threat to the park is a proposal by a group called “United for Peace and Justice.” One must respect the imagination of those who have organized radical front groups over the years for the ingenuity of their ever-changing nomenclature. Old hands like Leslie Cagan have lost none of their touch. All three major words in the group’s name, an adjective (in this case) and two nouns, represent good things that decent people support.

UPJ wants to use the Great Lawn for a rally protesting the Republican National Convention, which will be held in New York City from August 30 to September 2. The date they propose is August 29, a summer Sunday when the park would normally be enjoyed by fifty thousand or more citizens, depending on the weather.

We all know that any decision on permits for political events must be content-neutral. It doesn't matter what it is the applicants want to endorse or protest, how long we have known them, or whether or not we like their views. Both Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken must be treated alike, as they deserve.

That having been said, we proceed to discuss the appropriateness of the particular site which has been sought, the Great Lawn of Central Park. Both the City of New York and Parks & Recreation are prepared to offer alternate sites in a large park or public place. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, but not the right for hundreds of thousands of people to gather anywhere they desire anytime they choose.

The Great Lawn of Central Park is a special place, very different today than it was in 1982, when a large anti-nuclear rally was held there. Let me explain why this is so. The lawn and its surrounds were completely made over by an $18.2 million restoration, funded by the City of New York and by the Central Park Conservancy, which since its founding a generation ago, has raised an incredible $270 million in private gifts for a public park, with Richard Gilder contributing $17 million in a challenge grant for the restoration of the park.

The lawn project, which took over two years to complete, includes underground drainage, surface irrigation, substantial new topsoil and Kentucky bluegrass cover. It transformed a battered, dried-out area into an extraordinary green island for the public to enjoy. It was much more than a restoration, because the old lawn never was like the lawn we enjoy today.

The Great Lawn is a 13-acre oval area just north of Turtle Pond, mid-park between 80th and 85th streets, and bounded by a half-mile hex block pathway. Ninety-two trees grow on the lawn, including American and English elms, red and sugar maples, four varieties of oaks: pin oaks, red oaks, white oaks and one burr oak. Flowering trees abound, including four crabapples and 24 cherry trees. Eleven silver lindens and two little leaf lindens adorn the lawn with their classic beauty. Dogs, noble creatures that they are, are not allowed on this lawn, because Parks wants small children to be free to crawl on the grass, without their parents having to worry about humans' litter or animals' deposits. Today, the lawn is intended to be a sanctuary for the gentlest among us. But this was not always the case.

For many years after World War II, for lack of lawn and soil maintenance and for want of city dollars for capital restoration, the lawn, the pond and their borders had degenerated into a large dust bowl and silted mudflat. The lawn's highly compacted soil made it impossible for its surface to absorb rainwater, which led to erosion as the runoff water clogged the catchbasins on both sides of the lawn. This resulted in even minor showers flooding the lawn and the pathways that border it, creating small ponds. The meager green cover that did survive, which consisted primarily of the hardiest of weeds, was repeatedly trampled into the dirt. The lawn was a public embarrassment.

The last two events held on the old lawn were the premiere of the Disney movie Pocahontas, on June 10, 1995, and Pope John Paul II's visit on October 7, 1995. The Disney event was the first for which the city demanded and received one million dollars from the sponsors, half of which was used for Central Park restoration, and half for parks around the city that cannot generate revenue on their own. The opening was a major public event, showing that the park was safe at night. The pope’s mass held in Central Park was inspiring to the many thousands who attended. It was reasonable and proper to use the area for those events; because the lawn was great in name only, there was nothing left to destroy.

Later that October, the city closed the area and, with the help of the Central Park Conservancy, began the most extensive renovation project in the park's history. It took many months to remove the broken-up asphalt pathways that surrounded the lawn, and to dredge the clogged Turtle Pond of 3,000 cubic yards of sediment, which was soil that had washed away from the oval over the years. Before the dredging hundreds of turtles, weighing up to 45 pounds, were carefully moved to new abodes in the nearby lake.

Then 25,000 cubic yards of topsoil, specially engineered to resist compaction, was placed over the old lawn area, and 10,000 linear feet (almost two miles) of drainage lines were laid several feet below the new lawn surface. An additional 10,000 linear feet of drainage lines were placed deep below the lawn in order to release water trapped underground from the old Croton Reservoir that occupied the site from the 1840's until it was drained in 1931. The lawn, built on the reservoir site, was completed in 1936 by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. At that time the area was not marked for softball fields, athletics not being permitted there until 1950, when eight diamonds were built.

Although the old reservoir was drained 73 years ago, its stone walls were not removed. They remain today, at one point marked by a historical sign where they emerge from underground west of the lawn. Some of the reservoir water is said to remain embedded under the lawn. Without the deep drainage lines just installed, this seepage could create sinkholes after severe rainfall, undermining the effort to stabilize the lawn. To insure that the new sod will remain irrigated and produce deep roots that would anchor it firmly in the lawn, 11,000 linear feet of irrigation lines were installed just below the surface, with 275 pop-up sprinkler heads.

The new lawn was planted with five varieties of Kentucky bluegrass, with a sprinkling of perennial rye. This is done to avoid a monoculture, because if one variety were attacked by disease or blight, the lawn would be destroyed. To give the roots a chance to penetrate nine inches deep into the sandy loam topsoil, the lawn was closed to the public for nine months. If the roots were not anchored in this way, a person who slid on the lawn could move the sod like a bad hairpiece. The lawn was opened in fall 1997 for passive recreation, and in spring 1998 for more active use (primarily little league baseball and softball.)

The result of this extensive, expensive and time-consuming restoration is more than a lawn; it is an ecosystem. The amount of wear the grass can safely tolerate is carefully measured by experts in horticulture. In their view, philharmonic and opera concerts can be held four times a year. In the six years that the new lawn has been open, there was one ticketed entertainment event, which caused considerable damage to patches of the sod. It should not be repeated.

The seating capacity of the Great Lawn, as measured by concert attendance, is 60,000. The standing capacity ranges up to 85,000, but so many people standing cheek by jowl would be devastating to the grass they tread on for hours. Park officials believe that a crowd of over 75,000 would be excessive for the space.

The estimate of attendance for the rally proposed for August 29 is 250,000. Many people will have traveled to New York from all over the country and abroad for the occasion. The estimate could be exceeded as tension builds before the event, which may be viewed worldwide as the climactic demonstration of the American resistance.

The officially estimated attendance at the anti-nuclear rally in 1982 was 600,000. We know that these figures are substantially exaggerated by promoters and advocates in order to overstate the success of their client or cause, but if the actual attendance in 2004 is even one-third of the 1982 estimate, the enormous crowd would create a highly destructive situation for the park and its plants. If the police closed the park because of overcrowding, those excluded would back up on Fifth Avenue and Central Park West, expressing their displeasure and blocking traffic by their sheer numbers. This would create a situation that would very likely lead to violence, which is sometimes the desire of a few or more of the demonstrators or organizers of the event.

Even if everyone behaves, the large number of people there would cause serious and costly injury to the Great Lawn, necessitating its closure to public use for a period of some months to a year to allow the grass, which would have to be replanted, to establish new roots. In addition, the overflow that would seek to attend (possibly twice as many as those who could fit on the lawn) would overwhelm neighboring areas of the park, disturbing the aquatic habitat surrounding Turtle Pond, trampling grass, injuring saplings, breaking branches off trees for better vision, and leaving tons of litter. The crowd would undoubtedly be far too large for the narrow pathways to accommodate, so the greensward would bear the brunt of the invasion. This destruction of parkland has nothing to do with the character of the participants, the worst damage for the park having occurred at an Earth Day rally in 1991, presumably attended by ardent conservationists.

Another aspect of this situation is that, if one rally is permitted to be held on the Great Lawn, Parks will be unable to deny future permits to any other group that seeks to use the site. The federal courts are relatively strict on the issue of equal protection of the laws, as well as First Amendment claims, whether they are eventually upheld or not. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for the city to defend a position that certain rallies, but not others, are to be permitted on the Great Lawn. It would be totally impossible for the city to raise private funds to help restore an area of the park that is periodically permitted to be destroyed.

Fortunately, alternate sites are available where citizens can gather in large numbers to express their views. The Manhattan location most widely used for public gatherings is Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, across from the United Nations. It stretches from First to Second Avenue, south of 47th Street, which can be closed off. For any overflow, surrounding streets are available and have been used in the past for that purpose. The surface is paved, except for the Katharine Hepburn Garden, which would have to be screened off so as not be damaged by a large crowd.

If the demonstrators prefer more open space, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park would be a reasonable site. The New York City building in the park (erected for the 1939-40 World’s Fair and now used by the Queens Museum of Art and the World's Fair Ice Skating Rink) was an early home of the United Nations General Assembly, before the UN headquarters in Manhattan was built. (If you didn’t know, the first meeting of the General Assembly was held in Central Hall, Westminster, London, on January 10, 1946.) The partition of the area of the British Mandate over Palestine (territory that had been taken from the Ottoman Empire after World War I) that led to the creation of the State of Israel was approved by the General Assembly in Flushing Meadows Park on November 29, 1947, a fact which United for Peace and Justice may, or may not, appreciate.

If anyone should fear that the combined weight of the protesters will cause the parkland to sink lower than the adjacent shoreline of Willow Lake, a body of water created by Moses, the Commissioner, for the first World’s Fair, they need not be alarmed. The events that took place in the Red Sea thousands of years ago are highly unlikely to transpire today, despite the historic and geographic resonance that one may infer.

The First Amendment gives all Americans the right to protest the actions of their government, a right unavailable in many countries throughout the world. The Constitution does not, however, give organizers of mass demonstrations the unrestricted right to choose a site which will result in substantial destruction of public property, particularly living things which take years to grow, when other sites are readily available.

We are proud of our civil liberties. We enjoy the unusual beauty and delicacy of Central Park. With good judgment, we can have both, without damage to either.