Play ball, write some code, sip a cappuccino. (Dattner Architects)

Let's take this plan for a spin. (Dattner Architects)

Last month, Douglas Durst walked away from the Friends of Hudson River Park advocacy group over a disagreement with the trust that runs the Manhattan watefront park. The key dispute had been over what to do with Pier 40, the libertarian park's former cash cow that has become a drain as its pilings deteriorate and the parking garage cum ball fields ever so slowly sinks into the river.

The trust believes that housing should be among the options considered for shoring up the pier's finances, and by extension its pilings, a move that would likely require a major overhaul of the pier. Meanwhile, Mr. Durst insists housing is undesirable and unnecessarily expensive, and the better option is to keep the pier largely as is, adaptively reusing the space to more efficiently house the roughly 1,400 cars that park on the pier, freeing up room to create commercial space, likely occupied by tech firms, art galleries and other decidely downtown tenants.

Last night, Mr. Durst presented his plan at a public meeting, where it was warmly if cautiously received. The plans were prepared by Dattner Architects, a response of sorts to similar schematics for housing drawn up by SHoP Architects for the Trust. They show tight little stacks of cars, cubicles, lawns and ballfields, a scheme that is not markedly different from what is there already, just with a few things moved around to make room for the offices. (The Observer could not attend the meeting but was provided with a copy of the proposal along with Mr. Durst's remarks.)

"We think this concept is compelling because the space available at Pier 40 for office use is exactly what is in greatest demand today by the fastest growing sector of New York’s Economy," Mr. Durst told the audience. "Tech firms want large floor plates, high ceilings, large windows and unconventional and interesting space."

The plan calls for consolidating parking in the middle of the ground floor, using car stackers, which would eliminate the need for parking at the edges of the building and on the upper floors. The plan would also boost the number of spaces to 2,000, increasing income as a result. Even with more cars, this move frees up the perimeter of the ground floor and the entire mezzanine level for some 415,000 square feet of office space and an additional 99,000 square feet of retail—an impressive spread about as big as a mid-size office tower.

The middle of the mezzanine level would still be occupied by two large ball fields while the entire roof would be turned into public open space. Currently half of it is given over to parking, with a mix of fields on top, but now, there could be vibrant plantings and six different tennis and basketball courts along the roof.

"Our concept is a relatively simple way to preserve the current uses of the pier and also provide the additional revenue to help the entire park," Mr. Durst said.

Another benefit, he argues, is that it will be easier to get changes to the act governing the park's operations to allow for commercial development than for residential. The whole reason the pier has any money making uses, rather than just being public open space like the rest of Hudson River Park, is that when the park was first created, it was mandated that its ongoing operations be funded by the park, rather than the city or state, and three piers were set aside for development, this being one of them.

The Durst proposal projects a net annual profit for the park of $10 million a year, almost twice what the pier has historically made for the park.

Mr. Durst stressed that he and Ben Korman, a fellow board member who could not attend the meeting but also supports the plan, were offering this as a proposal for the public, not for themselves. "We are presenting this concept today as interested citizens who care about Hudson River Park and its future, not as developers interested in building out this project," Mr. Durst said.

David Gruber, chair of Community Board 2, said the room was packed and many were genuinely interested in the idea, if still non-committal. "I don't have a horse in this race, housing or no housing, but what I liked about this reuse is, the idea of housing on the pier after Sandy—I don't know if anyone's thinking of that anymore," Mr. Gruber said.

Mr. Gruber said that it was important to have options for the community to consider, including housing, and the board would be convening a forum in February to debate them all.

"What I do know is, we've tried big box stores and Circ de Soleil, we've tried everything, and people are tired of waiting," Mr. Gruber said. "There's a real sense in the community that something has to happen and people just want to make sure they do the right thing."

Correction: A previous version of this article said the presentation was given at a community board meeting. It was instead presented at a meeting of the Hudson River Park advisory council.

Sink or swim. (David Shankbone)

When Sandy swept into the town almost two months ago, Hudson River Park—as its name might suggest—was among the places inundated by the swelling sea under more than a dozen feet of water.

The surge washed over the historic piers and brand-new lawns, filling skate parks, swamping ball fields, submerging mini golf holes and surrounding the merry-go-round. Yet much of the park, in the traditional sense, came through fine."I think we lost only five trees and a few plants,” Madelyn Wils, president and CEO of the Hudson River Park Trust, said at a post-Sandy conference last Thursday.

It was the more manmade features, the development that undergirds the park and pays for its upkeep, that struggled to weather the storm.“The buildings, however, did not fare quite as well," Ms. Wils explains. "We’re still without power, because we are on our own grid, and we’ve had to work on our own to restore that.”

This is only the latest, and in some ways the least, of the troubles on the waterfront, where a bitter disagreement between Ms. Wils and the park's biggest backer, developer Douglas Durst, reveals cracks in the public-private model by which the city’s parks are so often built and maintained these days. These partnerships are both sustainer and straightjacket, leading to the creation of more parks in a generation, but also limited means to keep them up and running. Call them libertarian parks.

On October 29, the very night Sandy hit, Mr. Durst, the iconoclastic developer, was scheduled to appear before Community Board 2 to present a study he had recently paid for out of pocket on the dilapidated Pier 40, the earliest centerpiece of the park.

The 14-acre pier, built just off Spring Street in 1964 as the New York base for the Holland America Line, has more than  2,000 parking spaces along with two massive ball fields. Also home to a kayak launch, two harbor cruises and the New York Trapeze School, the pier is not only an asset for the community, but also for Hudson River Park itself, as it generates some $6 million a year in revenues for the park trust.

But the pier has slowly become a drag on the park, its roof starting to crumble—leading to the closing of a rooftop soccer field and a number of parking spots—and the nearly 4,000 pilings holding up the two-story structure starting to give.

While Ms. Wils and the trust estimate the price of repairing everything to be as much as $125 million, Mr. Durst had planned to go before the community board and argue that the repairs could be made for only $30 million, and that they should be paid for as soon as possible with the trust’s money.

The meeting was rained out, and now Mr. Durst pegs his plan at $44 million, because he believes the central ball fields, along with some other important pieces of the pier’s infrastructure, should be elevated out of the floodplain post-Sandy.

Mr. Durst has long been a staunch advocate for the park, serving since 2002as chairman of the board of Friends of Hudson River Park, an affiliated group that acts as both a fund-raiser and watchdog for the trust that operates the park. He was also its largest donor, giving a total of $2.3 million over that span and frequently buying the biggest tables at the annual fund-raising gala.

Since the summer, Mr. Durst began to float an idea that the pier should be fixed up as soon as possible, with the parking consolidated to the lower floor, and the upper areas turned into office space for tech firms and art galleries. The ball fields and other facilities would remain intact.

Meanwhile Ms. Wils and other Friends board members have been pushing for an approach in which a private developer would come in and pay for the repairs, along with what is expected to be a transformation of the pier. It would no doubt be a grander project, but also a more expensive one, and probably a more privatized one too.

Housing has been bandied about as a sort of panacea—ever since Richard Meier built his Perry Street “lofts,” who wouldn’t want to live on the Hudson River waterfront?—but locals also hate the idea of allowing the park to become some millionaire’s backyard.

That is why Mr. Durst has been pushing his plan for adaptive reuse on his own. It is also why Mr. Durst quit the Friends board last week. His name has already been wiped from the advocacy group's website, along with that of vice-chair Ben Korman, who used to run the parking at Pier 40 and also quit the board in protest.

“There was a difference of opinion of the direction that the park should go in,” Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Mr. Durst, told The Observer on Friday. “Douglas is still deeply committed to the park, but given his difference of opinion from the leadership of the park, it became impractical for him to continue with the trust and with Friends.”

One person close to the situation said this amounted to “a pissing match” between Mr. Durst and Ms. Wils, who was appointed president and CEO of the trust in June 2011. “He’s taking his ball and going home,” said the source.

But in many ways, the pair, who both share a passion for the park and its future, would not even be having this fight if Hudson River Park were not so desperate for funds, a conundrum that is at the very foundation of the park's creation.

It goes without saying that every open space needs money coming in, but for Hudson River Park, it is especially crucial. This is, after all, one of the first public-private, or “self-sustaining,” parks created in the city. Championed by Governor Pataki and launched through an act of the Legislature in 1998, Hudson River Park has become a popular model for fostering new parks, particularly for the Bloomberg administration.

The public-private model has taken hold everywhere from Governors Island to the High Line to Brooklyn Bridge Park, the idea being that the government pays the up-front costs of getting the parks built, but after that it is up to quasi-public agencies to keep them up and running, usually through a mix of commercial activities and fund-raising.

It is a controversial arrangement, since it can often mean that what was once public space must now be given over, at least in part, to private interests. But many supporters of the model, especially in this age of fiscal austerity, argue that without such arrangements, the parks would never get built at all. Those privatizers are winning for now.

On Monday, Brooklyn Bridge Park announced it was seeking developers for the third apartment complex to be built on public land on John Street, within the waterfront park, while a competition earlier this year to develop housing at Pier 1 attracted some of the city’s top builders. On Wednesday, prospective tenants for historic buildings on Governors Island, ranging from local chefs to national chains, will tour the island, hoping to open up shop in one of the 48 pre-Civil War structures. And when the third section of the High Line broke ground in September, nearly one-third of the construction funds came from the Related Companies and Oxford Properties, which are developing the Hudson Yards project the elevated park will surround. All of them are hoping to cash in on the parks, which will benefit the public too, but the question remains: who benefits more?

This is not how it always was. Look at the original urban park, Central Park, which was developed in part to buoy real estate values uptown, but was largely paid for and maintained by the public, as a public benefit that subsequently paid for itself through rising property values.

The Bloomberg administration last year touted the $2 billion boom that resulted from its $150 million investment in the High Line. But the city contributes almost nothing to the ongoing operations of the park—easily the most expensive for a park of its size, with a $9 million annual budget.

In 2008, The Regional Plan Association did a study that found the Greenwich Village segment of Hudson River Park had generated $200 million in economic development while only costing $75 million to build up to that point. Yet very little of that money was reinvested in the park. Meanwhile, capital funds from the city have fallen from a high of $42 million in 2008 to only $7 million this year, due to recessionary cuts at City Hall. Operating expenses for the park are roughly $14 million a year, almost all of it coming from the trust.

“The biggest thing that concerns me is that Hudson River Park was the first in this new, quote-unquote sustainable park model,” Holly Leicht, executive director of advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, said in an interview. “What we’re seeing right now is not very reassuring for this model.”

This debate is at the heart of the fight between Mr. Durst and the rest of the park’s leadership. He wanted up-front investments to protect the park, while other board members wanted the private sector to pay—perhaps rightly so, since the park could barely afford even the $30 million-to-$44 million tab Mr. Durst had touted.

“If it was up to me, not one more dime goes into Pier 40,” Diana Taylor declared at a recent board meeting. “Period.” (In addition to being a Friends board member, Ms. Taylor is, of course, Mayor Bloomberg’s girlfriend and in some ways his surrogate.)

The problem is that the legislation that created the park—by virtue of it being the first—is the most restrictive of the public-private parks in the city. It limits residential and certain other types of development and caps leases at 29 years. In comparison, more than 1,000 apartments will be built as part of Brooklyn Bridge Park, with leases up to 99 years.

The trust has been lobbying Albany for years now to relax the restrictions, often to fierce outcry from locals, who oppose most forms of new development. (It’s the Village and Soho, after all.) So far, everything from an outpost of Cirque du Soleil to a Major League Soccer stadium has been proposed, but all have been sunk by neighbors.

The trust insists it does not favor housing, it simply wants that as one of the options on the table. “The community needs to understand that if they want a park, they need to be willing to do what it takes to maintain a park,” Ms. Wils told Crain’s in May, when she unveiled plans for a 115-room hotel and 800 apartments on the pier—but with expanded open space as well, a palliative to all that development.

“It’s never what you want to do, for sure,” said Rob Pirani, a vice president at the Regional Plan Association and member of the Governors Island Alliance, that park’s watchdog. “It’s the difference between a real estate project and building a neighborhood.” But he also conceded that without the public-private partnerships, public officials might not have agreed to underwrite these parks in the first place.

Meanwhile, the entertainment complex Chelsea Piers, the other big money-maker for the trust, has sued, alleging two decades of deferred maintenance on its piles. The repair costs have been estimated at $100 million, a price the trust could hardly afford. (The fact that there is an expensive place for people to rock climb, ice skate and drive golf balls on what is ostensibly public land, meanwhile, gets at the heart of the problems with this type of park. It’s a nice amenity for the neighborhood, but only for those who can afford it.)

There is some hope on the horizon, as the park’s third major commercial project, Pier 57, is finally getting underway after years of delays. Young Woo, a hip downtown developer, has teamed up with designers Lot-Ek, known for building with shipping containers, to transform the pier into an artisanal market. Cute, but again, commercial. There will be a public walkway around the pier and expansive open space on the 1.6-acre roof—but there would be even more public space without those stores. The proposal was just approved by the Community Board last week, the first step in the months-long public approval process.

“Despite these and other challenges, including the recent impact of Superstorm Sandy, the Friends and the trust remain wholly committed to working together to secure resources for the park and sustaining its future,” Ms. Wils and Friends executive director A.J. Pietrantone said in a statement released after Mr. Durst’s departure.

Ms. Leicht hopes they can pull it off. “I do think getting it right here is essential before we continue to forge ahead on these types of parks,” she said.

Adrift. (HRP Trust)

Even before Hurricane Sandy buried it under more than a dozen feet of water, Hudson River Park was struggling to stay afloat.

The past decade had seen substantial progress on the long-planned park, made possible by the demolition of the old West Side Highway (which provided some of the initial funding) and the realization New Yorkers actually wanted to return to the waterfront (which provided the drive). By last year, more than 70 percent of the park had been completed, including many of the piers, transformed from places of work into ones for play, and the generous esplanade connecting them all, running from the Battery all the way up to Riverside Park.

But the grass is not always greener in a new park. Like so many other open spaces created in recent years, Hudson River Park receives limited public funding. Instead, it is expected to generate its own revenue through not only fundraising but also development within the bounds of the park, everything from floating restaurants to parking garages. Everything from rock climbers at Chelsea Piers to the tourists taking Circle Line cruises contributes in its own way.

At one time, Pier 40 was the park's biggest single source of funds, but increasingly, it has become a drag on the park, and a dispute over its future has led to the departure of one of its biggest backers.

Built in 1958 as an air marine terminal for the Holland America Line, Pier 40 is actually one of the younger protrusions from the park, and also the biggest, at 14 acres. But unlike its predecessors, Pier 40 has not been substantially rebuilt to accommodate its new uses, chiefly as a parking garage but also as a popular downtown ballfield (one of the few) as well as being home to a few harbor cruisers (Affairs Afloat and the Hornblower), a dog run, a kayaking company and a trapeze school. The parking alone brought in $5 million a year.

That was before the pier began to crumble. There has been growing concern over the piles holding up the pier, which have only been intermittently repaired over the years, and part of the roof has begun to collapse, closing one of the three ball fields. The Hudson River Park Trust, which runs the parks, pegs the cost of fixing the pier at $125 million, at least $80 million for just the piles. This is money the trust argues it can hardly afford to spend, and it wants to foster some new type of development, most likely housing, to help offset the cost.

Pier 40, located between Spring and LeRoy streets in the Village, has gone from a buoy to a concrete boot dragging the park down.

But Douglas Durst, chairman of Friends of Hudson River Park, a booster group affiliated with the trust, believes the cost of preserving the peer has been greatly exaggerated, and he has been pushing his own plans for the pier for months now, to shore up the piles and then adaptively reuse the structure, adding offices for tech firms to the mix of parking and sports, providing fresh funds and space for a booming Silicon Alley downtown. He has also proposed gallery space.

Mr. Durst even went so far as to pay for a study of the costs of repairing the piles, which was revealed this week in The Villager, where the developer pegs the cost at only $30 million, or as much as $44 million if money is spent to raise the ball fields, which he believes should be the case following Hurricane Sandy. (Ironically, his study was completed just four days before the storm hit, and Mr. Durst had been poised to present it to the local community board on October 29, the day Sandy made landfall in New York.)

Without support for his plan either at the trust or Friends of Hudson River Park, late last week, Mr. Durst left the group, stepping down as chairman. Already his name has been scrubbed from the Friends' site, as has that of Ben Korman, a vice-chair who also stepped down. Mr. Korman used to run the parking operation on the pier and supported Mr. Durst's plan.

"There was a difference of opinion of the direction that the park should go in," Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Mr. Durst, told The Observer on Friday. "Douglas is still deeply committed to the park, but given his difference of opinion from the leadership of the park, it became impractical for him to continue with the trust and with Friends."

Justin Sadrian, a Friends board member and managing director at private equity outfit Warburg Pincus, was named acting chairman in the wake of Mr. Durst's departure, a promotion already reflected online.

Pier 40, flooded during Sandy. (HRPT/Flickr)

Mr. Durst believed that his expertise in matters of development was being ignored, and he had openly questioned the desire to build housing on the pier, which he told The Villager "doesn't work." Part of the problem, Mr. Durst argued, was that additional development would add to the cost of shoring up the piers—the more built up top, the more that must go down below to hold it up. He wanted the trust to spend money now to protect it, but other board members insisted there was no funds for such work.

“If it was up to me, not one more dime goes into Pier 40," Diana Taylor declared at a recent board meeting. "Period.”

One person close to the situation said this amounted to "a pissing match" between Mr. Durst and Madelyn Wils, who was appointed president and CEO of the trust in July 2011. "He's taking his ball and going home," said the source.

In a statement, Ms. Wils and Friends executive director A.J. Pietrantone said: "The Friends of Hudson River Park and the Hudson River Park Trust are extremely grateful for the many contributions of Douglas Durst and the Durst Organization to Hudson River Park  His philanthropy and advocacy for the waterfront and this distinct New York City amenity have had a profound effect on the quality of life for countless New Yorkers."

Mr. Barowitz said that Mr. Durst, who has not only provided his time to the Friends group but also his money as its biggest donor, would still continue to advocate for the park as a private citizen. Mr. Korman, who could not be reached by The Observer, will attempt the same, as he told Capital New York, which also reported the split.

"With the recent organizational changes made to the Friends, and my growing discomfort with regards to the Trust’s management, I felt that my advocacy would be more effective outside the Friends framework," Mr. Korman wrote in an email.

Losing two well-to-do backers seems like it could cause a serious blow to the park at a time that it is already desperate for funding, but another Friends board member said it should not have a material impact on the day-to-day operations of the Trust.

In many ways, this is a debate about the nature of how parks get built, maintained and funded in the city. New York has seen a number of public-private parks pop up in the past decade, from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the High Line. The city or state will help pay to build these grand edifices, but unlike Central Park or Prospect Park before them, the city takes little role in the new parks ongoing upkeep. Instead the parks are left to fend for themselves.

(Granted, most ever major open space from Central Park to Bryant Park now has some sort of conservancy, friends group or business improvement district that helps pay a good chunk of the costs for running it, ever since the city began divesting itself of this responsibility in the bankrupt 1970s.)

The argument over who should pay what is playing itself out here, as well. Mr. Durst and Mr. Korman believed the park should front the money to fix Pier 40, and then bring in new tenants to help cover those costs and add to the maintenance kitty going forward. But the bulk of the park's leadership insists it cannot pay for these fixes up front, and instead wants a private developer to come in and cover them.

In the past, there has been flirtations with everything from building schools here to an outpost for Circ de Soleil, all of which have been defeated for one reason or another, most usually through public outcry. Earlier this year the MLS had even considered it as a possible site for a soccer stadium, but transportation and crowding concerns from the surrounding community quickly stymied that idea.

Among the options the trust would like to see on the table is housing development, currently forbidden by the Hudson River Park Act of 1998, and SHoP Architects was even hired to make a compelling case for such a model earlier this year. The trust insists it is agnostic on which approach would be most suitable, and while housing would probably be the most lucrative—this is housing on the Hudson River waterfront, after all—locals tend to hate residential development, particularly on waterfront plots within public parkland (see: Brooklyn Bridge Park).

The trust has been working for the past year with lawmakers in Albany to try and revise the park act to allow for more types of development. Beyond restricting housing, the legislation limits leases to 29 years, which is seen as too short a time frame to attract a developer who would shoulder the costs of fixing up the pier as part of a larger development package.

But this may be the least of the park's problems at the moment. It remains without power six weeks after the Sandy storm surge washed over much of the park, including totally flooding Pier 40. "Most of our plants are O.K.," Ms. Wils said during a panel at a post-Sandy conference hosted by the Municipal Art Socity and Columbia on Thursday. "They're made to survive underwater, well not underwater, but they can put up with some flooding. I think we lost only five trees and a few plants."

"The buildings, however, did not fare quite as well," she said. "We're still without power, because we are on our own grid, and we've had to work on our own to restore that."

Meanwhile, there is some positive development news, as Pier 57, a cultural and shopping hub also long in the works at 15th Street, won approval from the local community board earlier this month. It will offer activities and access to the pier, as well as desperately needed funds to the park.

Whether something similar will get built at Pier 40, especially before the structure should deteriorate beyond repair, remains to be seen.

"Despite these and other challenges, including the recent impact of Superstorm Sandy, the Friends and the Trust remain wholly committed to working together to secure resources for the Park and sustaining its future," Ms. Wils and Mr. Pietrantone concluded their statement.

"Now with Douglas out of the way, the trust can start to work cohesively on fixing this pier," said the park source. The trust just has to convince Albany, and its angry neighbors, of the same thing.

Correction:A previous version of this story said the new acting board chair was Jason Sadrian, not Justin Sadrian. The Observer regrets the error.

Little help? (agent j loves nyc/Flickr)

The problems of Pier 40 are well documented by now. Once the golden goose of Hudson River Park, the pier is now so deteriorated, it costs more to maintain than it earns for the libertarian park. In two years, the pier might have to be shut down all together. With hopes of MLS soccer headed to Queens instead and a housing proposal on the rocks, what's a park to do?

Well, it looks like Douglas Durst to the rescue.

Acting as "a private individual with knowledge of residential development" rather than chair of the Friends of Hudson River Park, which supports a housing plan, Mr. Dust said he did not think this would work, according to the Post’s Steve Cuozzo. Instead, he wants to rejigger the parking to one level instead of three, freeing up room for additional profit generating development.

It would have the same number of parking spaces, currently 1,700, by converting it from a self-parking facility to one with attendants who would move cars into a three-level “stack,” which would fit into the existing ground floor with 20-foot ceilings.

Freeing up the second floor and roof would make room for 500,000 square feet of commercial space, Durst said. But he wouldn’t build or operate it himself; rather, the Trust would solicit proposals from other developers.

Given the area's booming tech sector, he seems to think this good be a good spot for a technology campus of some sort, or, pitching to the neighborhood's other historic strength, galleries and shops.

Mr. Durst argues this plan is preferable because office space is less contentious than residential development, and it might have an easier time getting approved in Albany, which must approve any changes to the pier's financial structure. If done right, it might not even need Albany's approval at all. Wouldn't that make life easier?

Abandon pier! (ThisIsCosmosCountry.com)

What was once the life preserver of Hudson River Park is now dragging the waterfront park under. Pier 40, the popular athletics venue and parking lot might, after years of attempting to rehabilitate it, be shutting down, according to The Tribeca Trib.

Almost a decade ago, the Legislature signed the Hudson River Park Act, an act aimed to transform NYC’s west side into a pulsating parkland aimed to promote wellbeing, but instead the pier has become more of a health hazard than a health benefit.

Fast forward to 2012 and there are still no developers in sight to come and whisk the property off its feet and recreate it.  Therefore, the Hudson River Park Trust, which has been waiting for the developer-in-shining armor, has begun talking about a possible segmented shutdown of the pier.

“If it was my decision right now, I would completely cut [Pier 40] off and say ‘Not one more dime goes into that pier, period,’” HRPT Board Chair Diana Taylor said at a Trust board meeting last week. “And we just close it down as we have to.”

The re-ignited debate of whether or not to shut down the dilapidating peer follows a major push by the Trust to spread the word about the severe financial state of Pier 40, which with repairs it faces in 2013 would cause the pier to operate at a loss.  The trust pushed for legislative changes that would allow new commercial developments along the piers to bring in revenue and activity to the area.  According to the Trust President, Madelyn Wills, with repair cost-estimations reaching $30 million, “by 2015, those repairs could deplete the Trust’s reserve fund entirely.”

The board is expected to discuss the fate of the pier again in September and will factor in the affect the closing would have on the public.

Should New Yorkers fear for their safety out on the pier, that would only make things worse, driving down revenues further. Talk about a sinking ship.

What price paradise? (Wired New York)

Much work to be done. (WSJ)

Parks funding is something of an obsession around these parts, particularly those open spaces The Observer has deemed libertarian parks, spaces ranging from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the High Line, which are either built or maintained with outside funds. On the one hand, these parks might never have been created without private investment.

On the other, it shows a troubling lack of respect and appreciation for the public trust—where would the city be if the same we-just-can't-afford-'em attitude of today persisted in the past? Central Park, Prospect Park, Pelham Bay Park, even the controversial work of Robert Moses, would any of it have happened if  it had been undertaken by private interests?

Hudson River Park, first proposed in the 1980s, launched a decade later and by all accounts the first libertarian park, has been facing funding shortfalls for years now, hindering the ability of parks officials to finish construction of many of the piers and maintaining the ones it has already redeveloped.

A year ago, they floated the idea of selling off board seats and naming rights to generate funds. That effort has failed to generate the necessary moneys, many hundreds of millions of dollar, and so the park is now digging into its original charter, hoping to alter what can be built, how and seeking the ability to release bonds to raise funds. According to The Journal, Hudson River Parks' efforts are receiving a mixed reaction in Albany.

Trust officials said the 1998 Hudson River Park Act signed by Gov. George Pataki puts too many restrictions on lucrative commercial development that would give it a revenue stream to pay for maintaining the park. In addition to the power to issue government-back bonds, the trust wants greater freedom to do mixed-use development and to offer leases longer than the current maximum of 30 years.

"Nobody knew at that time what it would cost to maintain a park in the water because they were never built before," said Madelyn Wils, president and chief executive of the Hudson River Park Trust. "We are completely hamstrung."

A task force has been convened by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in whose district parts of the park lies, to figure out what can be done for the park. "It's pretty clear that the park needs new financial resources," Assemblyman Richard Gottfried told The Journal. He is a member of the task force and one of the original champions of the park plan.

As anyone who has enjoyed the growing park in recent years can attest, it has been a boon for the west side of Manhattan. So here is a novel idea: why not fund it from the general fund? Then again, that would rob money from some other cash-strapped part of the state or the city. Where did all the money go? Not to parks, that's for sure.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Naming rights available. (via flickr)

We here at The Observer have been fretting since the fall about what seems to be the growing privatization or semi-privatization of the city's parks. It's not that they are not open to the public, but that the park is not necessarily a public project. There are two sides to this.

On the one hand, if we can get others to build and/or maintain our parks, it means more parks for less money and more money for other things, like mass transit or affordable housing or, hell, tax cuts. On the other hand, isn't this why we have government, to operate on behalf of the public good?

As we most recently reported, this problem has been most apparent on the High Line, where the Friends of the High Line are still trying to figure out how to pay for the park's continued maintenance while park advocates fret that it will set a precedent for fancy parks only in the wealthier neighborhoods with backers to fund them. Would we really build a High Line in East New York?

Well, it looks like the precedent has indeed been set, as neighboring Hudson River Park, struggling to find funding, may begin to follow in the path of its neighbor, according to The Times. The once-ragtag band that ran Friends of Hudson River Park is prepared to sell out if it means more funds for there waterfront walk.

Using [the High Line] approach as a model of sorts, Friends of Hudson River Park has essentially decided to abandon its activist roots and redirect its energy toward raising money for the park, possibly in exchange for having sections named after donors. Most of the group’s leading figures are yielding their positions with Friends of Hudson River Park to people who will contribute at least $25,000 a year to the park.

The new funds will help the park to continue to grow, so at a time when firehouses are closing and teachers are getting pink slips, it could be worse. Still, what would Frederick Law Olmstead do?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

It is, indeed, the season of parks: Earlier this spring, the long-planned Brooklyn Bridge Park opened its first section, a large pier; and the year-old High Line elevated park that runs through Chelsea is laying materials for its second phase, to open next year.

There's just one little nagging detail with these expanding parks: There's not enough money to fund their upkeep, and, for the most part, no one quite knows where it will come from.

All three parks were held up as gems of an economic development agenda in New York, as, theoretically, they were to be self-sustaining or close to it, with the private sector to pay for the ongoing operations. Yet the situation is one of classic overreach, as the administrations of Mayor Bloomberg and three governors put their faith in the panacea concept of the public-private partnership, pledging a win-win for all involved. The logic ran like this: New parks would be built; creative planning would open the floodgates to money from the private sector to fund maintenance year after year; and public balance sheets would be spared. The reality is far less heartwarming. The city and state are now grasping to find ways to make the parks work in the long term and are finding no answers that pass muster with the local communities and elected officials whose sign-off is needed. With this question mark hanging overhead, the fact that the groundbreakings continue-money continues to go into expansion-looks to be something of a reckless move, as officials are betting that some unspecified solution will indeed materialize at some future date.

THE PREDICAMENT IS best embodied by Hudson River Park, the sliver of a waterfront sward that runs from downtown to Hell's Kitchen. When the park was first authorized in 1998, it was expected that the state and city would pay the upfront construction costs, and the park would pay for its own operations and maintenance, totaling $15 million annually, with rent from a few private developments within its borders, including Chelsea Piers.

But the largest development site in the park, the 15-acre Pier 40 by West Houston Street-which was to bring in the bulk of the revenue-has proved a headache for all involved. Two proposed private developments that would pay the needed money have fallen flat. The latest failed proposal, an entertainment-focused project, courtesy of the Related Companies, fell flat when the local community loathed the thought of what is now a parking garage and sports field being turned into a tourist trap. No other viable options have presented themselves, and now revenue is decreasing as the crumbling roof is increasingly cutting down on the amount of parking at the pier.

The pier is also on its way to falling into the Hudson, as the piles are in great need of repair. Connie Fishman, president of the Hudson River Park Trust, estimates a cost of $55 million to repair the pier's supports and its roof.

This year, the park's operating budget is showing a deficit of more than $1 million, a gap that will likely continue or grow in future years, as a small reserve fund dwindles.

"We are exploring any option that anybody with a reasonable amount of intelligence can help us with," Ms. Fishman said of Pier 40. "We're at that stage where we have to do anything we can to figure out where we go to get some money to deal with, at the very least, the parking, which is a big revenue generator."

A BLOCK AND a half to the east and 30 feet above ground, a similar funding gap looms.

The widely embraced and tremendously popular onetime rail trestle that is the High Line needs some $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually to operate and maintain, just over a million of which comes from the city, per an agreement between the Bloomberg administration and nonprofit operator Friends of the High Line.

Private fund-raising is not easy to come by; retail and concessions on the line would fill only a portion of that gap; and a proposal last summer by the Friends group to tax local businesses was met with strong distaste by many, and so the proposal was dropped. 

And on the East River next to Dumbo, the Bloomberg administration is plodding away at construction on the $350 million Brooklyn Bridge Park, the new waterfront parkland rising on former warehousing piers. Like Hudson River Park, the city and state agreed to pay for the construction but not long-term operations, which were to be funded by new development along the piers.

But none of that development has started yet, and the bulk of the revenue-some $7.6 million a year from planned housing-is up in the air, as the local state senator, Dan Squadron, has long opposed its development and would have to sign off on its construction. (The Bloomberg administration has said it would not proceed with building out the rest of the park until this issue is resolved, leaving the Brooklyn park on more stable fiscal footing than the other two.)

The Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation's president, Regina Myer, estimates there are three to four years of reserves available before the park must begin receiving money from new developments. As for the timing on the development of the nonhousing uses (retail and hotel), Ms. Myer did not set a specific time, suggesting the market was still too weak to allow a new development now.

"Over the next several years, we will pursue those development sites," she said.

"The financial model is viable, but it's work," Ms. Myer said of the park, "and working over various economic cycles is the challenge."

ebrown@observer.com

The Observer's Eliot Brown had a story in this week's paper about similar shadowy concerns over floating walkways, heliports and such associated with planned city parks like the Hudson River Park and the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Some people say the walkways over water won't hurt the marine life below. The state Department of Environmental Conservation thinks otherwise.

This year, the expenditure garnered some discussion at the trust's May 24 board meeting, according to participants and observers.

“I thought it was inappropriate for the trust to spend $10,000 on a table when there is not enough money to finish the construction of the Segment 3 section in Tribeca,” Julie Nadel, a board member, recalled. “There is specific language in the trust act that says basically that the purpose of the trust is to build and maintain a Hudson River Park, not to spend $10,000 to buy a table at a dinner for a group, no matter what it does.”

The $10,000 is the going cost of a 10-seat table at this year’s gala, to take place June 14 in the offices of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in the Starrett-Lehigh Building. This week, however, the friends agreed to give the trust the table at cost, which works out to $1,750, according to Matthew Washington, deputy director of the friends group. In previous years, however, Mr. Washington said that the issue had not come up and that the trust paid full price.

“It was fair of them to ask for it at cost,” said Mr. Washington. “For us, it is important to have their presence at an event like that.”

Christopher Martin, a spokesman for the trust, said that while the board did not take a vote, members did express support for taking the table. “They felt it was important for us to attend,” he said. "They," that is, except for Ms. Nadel.