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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we will end today's show with a look at new developments in our city's most iconic park as temperatures rise and spring flowers settle in and burst out. Surely many of you are looking forward to a stroll in Central Park this weekend if you're anywhere around that area. If you usually enter the park, say, south of 96th street, the Central Park Conservancy has a new attraction opening on Friday tomorrow that you'll want to head uptown for.

Of course, a lot of you live in that uptown area. Joining me now to introduce you to the brand new Davis Center at the Harlem Meer and maybe to discuss some other new initiatives in the pipeline, if we have time, in Central Park is Betsy Smith, president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy. Betsy, thanks so much for coming on. Welcome to WNYC today.

Betsy Smith: Thank you very much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, in addition to whatever you want to say or ask about the Harlem Meer part of the park, we'll throw it open in this segment for your underrated activities or spots in Central Park. Share them with other people. Don't keep them to yourselves. Do you have a secret birding spot or a place that stays cool even on the hottest of days, whatever, as well as your questions and stories for our guest? 212-443-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Betsy, tell us about the Davis Center.

Betsy Smith: It's very, very exciting, Brian. I would say that this is one of the most exciting projects that we've seen in Central Park in really many years. The Central Park Conservancy has been around since 1980. We were formed to, in effect, rescue the park that had been abandoned by the city during its bankruptcy. In that time, we have invested a tremendous amount of time and expertise in bringing the park back.

Our capstone project is the Davis Center at the Harlem Meer. It's a magnificent project, one of our largest projects, our largest project, in fact, and it is replacing an aging facility. Many of you may remember the Lasker Pool and Rink, which had a number of problems which we can discuss. The new Davis Center is a magnificent pool. It's a skating rink in the shoulder seasons. It's going to be a turf field. It is a gift to Harlem, to New York, and to the city, just in its imagination, and how beautiful it is.

Brian Lehrer: In this context, I think it's important to say Central Park has a rocky racial history, beginning with its very founding, it sits on the land in which Seneca Village used to be. In more recent history, it's central to the president's smear of five Black and Latino teenagers wrongfully convicted of a brutal rape in April of 1989, now known as the Exonerated Five, formerly the Central Park Five. It dawns on me that the Davis Center is opening in April as well. Can you talk about the significance of this project happening in Harlem? Is this project an act of racial justice, in your view?

I think part of the idea coming from you at the Central Park Conservancy is that that area, which is in the southern part of Harlem, has been historically neglected compared to other parts of the park.

Betsy Smith: Actually, Brian, that doesn't-- Actually, that's not really true. We have been invested since the conservancy was founded. Some of our earliest projects have been up in Harlem. A good third of the amount of money that we've raised to restore the park has really been up in the northern part of the park. In fact, the original restoration of the Harlem Meer itself was in the late '80s. We have been investing in the northern part of the park for many, many years. I should say that in any restoration project that the Central Park Conservancy takes on, we are very closely aligned with the community.

We really run the park for the communities that surround it. The Harlem Meer Center is really a perfect example of that. We have been working with them since 2017 on what they really wanted to see. The Lasker facility was very run-down, and it had engineering challenges. It really was not cutting it for the Harlem community, but they wanted to have a recreational facility there. We met with community groups, with the community boards, community leaders, to really find out what they wanted, and they were very invested in having something new and beautiful there.

Really, to address your question about their somewhat problematic relationship with Central Park, we really wanted to reconnect Harlem to the rest of the park, because one of the things about the old Lasker center is that it served as a block between the Harlem communities and the rest of Central Park, just because of the configuration of the landscapes up there. One of the things we really did when we thought about the Davis Center was how could we create a facility that encouraged the exploration of the rest of the park by the Harlem communities by opening up the watercourse and opening up the pathways so that people felt more welcome in the park.

I'll also add that in our many community conversations, Brian, with Harlem as we were envisioning this, we did, of course, confront the history of the Central Park Five. One of the things that came out of that was a real desire by the Harlem community to commemorate the Central Park Five, now called the Exonerated Five. You may know that there was a gate opening into the park right near Lenox Avenue, Malcolm X, and 110 Street, which we renamed the Gate of the Exonerated. It was a tremendously healing moment for the community, a tremendous turnout. There hasn't been a new named gate in Central Park in 100 years. It was a way for us to help the community feel more connected to Central Park.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. There's a glowing review that I'm sure you've seen by the critic Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times now on what you're reopening and opening, it says a stunning new pool in Central Park helps heal old wounds. He says this northern stretch of the park was shamefully neglected when the city was at its nadir. In fairness, I think that's before the Central Park Conservancy, as private organization helping to fund Central Park was created. He writes, so Davis also comes as an act of civic reparation, and he cites the Central Park Five. Jeff in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jeff.

Jeff: Hi, Brian. Hi, good morning. Just wanted to say that myself and between 30 and 40 of my fellow cyclists were in the park this morning at about 5:36 AM, and we certainly enjoyed the fresh tarmac on the lower half of the park. We certainly enjoyed watching the fencing come down on what I guess we would call the last words ascent by the old pool. I guess that said, my question is, I know there's a plan for next season to repave the northern half of Central Park, but given all the construction that happened by old Lasker, now Davis area, is there any effort to maybe put some new tarmac down, at least on that stretch? Because with all the construction and everything, it's gotten to be very hectic, or very choppy.

The other thing I would point out is that while the fresh tarmac is great, we're anxiously waiting for the repaint and the redesign, because when you have just Black open spaces, people tend to be everywhere, and it's unsafe for everyone, whether it's cyclists, runners, or pedestrians. Then I'll just take a minute to suggest that I don't know where the Central Park Conservatory has in this argument, but is there any discussion about finally removing the horses from the southern end of Central Park? For all the talk about public safety and getting the trash off the streets, having Central Park routinely covered in horse manure is both just generally unpleasant, disgusting, and both a safety concern, and frankly a public health--

Brian Lehrer: I guess you don't like it as a cyclist. Jeff, thank you very much. There's a lot of questions in there. Take one or two of your choice, Betsy.

Betsy Smith: Listen, the drives of Central Park are the most heavily used resource in Central Park. We did a full study with a tremendous amount of community input on how we should rethink the way the drives work. Ever since we took the cars out of the park in 2018, there's been an increasing chaos of use on the park between the runners, the bikers, the cyclists, the horse carriages, the e-bikes. It got to be a little out of control. We have done a two-year study.

The result of that, actually, is repaving the drive, which you're right, the lower part of the drive, of the loop, has been done from about 96th street down to 59th street and then back up to 90th street. We did that lower loop because of the construction in the upper part of the park, and we didn't want to repave the drives. That's coming soon. We'll soon have the entire loop repaved, and the striping is coming soon. We did a lot of work on how we could designate certain lanes on the drive in a consistent way to the different users.

Right now, there's nothing. You can tell what chaos that would be if we didn't come back with some intelligent striping plan. I think the materials, the colors, the directions that will be on the drives will be intuitive. It's going to make the crosswalk safer. We're changing the lights. We're doing a lot to make the drives better for cyclists like you and all the people who are trying to cross the drive and use it in different ways.

Brian Lehrer: We have a pushback text on something that the caller said, and then on something about the drive around the park. Listener writes, "I cycle regularly in Central Park and love the horses." Our caller from Queens, there's a counterpoint to that. To you, Betsy, listener writes, "I used to contribute to the conservancy until the park started allowing e-bikes, which at the very least makes crossing all park streets unpleasant. Sometimes they're even on the pedestrian paths." What about e-bikes as opposed to manual bikes?

Betsy Smith: We're trying to make the drive as safe as possible. We've got 40 million people using the park every year. It's very, very important that we try to give direction. We can't forbid e-bikes. That's a city law. We don't create those laws. The city has allowed e-bikes, and they've allowed them in the parks. What we're trying to do is try to direct them in a way that makes it safe for other people. It's one of the most frequent complaints we get. People do not feel safe with e-bikes speeding by.

Other than trying to direct them on the drive and have people around that remind people of what the rules are within the park, which is our new Central Park Ranger corps. I think we can keep our fingers crossed, but hope that the directions on the drive themselves will make things safer. I'd add one thing, Brian, which I think will be a very interesting experiment. We're working with the Department of Transportation to create a bike lane on the transverse roads, which, as you know, are the sunken transverses through the park.

I think getting a lot of the commercial bike traffic, the delivery people, the people who are commuting, who want just simply to go through the park without using the drives, I think that will reduce the number of e-bikes in the park as well.

Brian Lehrer: Like a bike lane crossing at 86th street and 79th street, those kinds of things.

Betsy Smith: Yes, exactly, both ways. I think that will help the chaos.

Brian Lehrer: Anthony in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Anthony.

Anthony: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I just want to state that I am Harlemite, born and raised. I currently live in the Bronx, but I've known for many decades that the northern section of the Bronx over by Huntington Street from 8th Avenue to--

Brian Lehrer: Oh, the park.

Anthony: Yes, park, I'm sorry, has been neglected for decades. Now that it's gentrified, that's when you want to do the work there. For all of these years, you never did anything over there. I used to swim in that pool on the corner over there on Central Park. Used to visit the lake over there that had fish in it during the day. For many, many years, you took care of the southern, the Central Park, the central part of the park, and the southern part. You neglected the northern part for all of these decades. Now that it's gentrified, you're going to start doing the work. The people can't even enjoy it anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Anthony, thank you very much. While you hear his cynicism, quite the opposite of "This is an act of reparations" that Michael Kimmelman wrote in the Times today. What's your response?

Betsy Smith: What I'd say is that, look, I can't really address the whole history of the park from before 1980, when the conservancy was founded. The Central Park was really created as a place for every person, and it has been-- It is a monumental-sized park. It's very, very complicated to take care of. We knew when we started our work that we did need to take care of the entire park. We have now restored large parts of the North Woods, the Great Hill, now the Harlem Meer, the Conservatory Garden.

There really has been a tremendous amount of investment in that part of the park. I will say, though, you're not wrong about the old Lasker Pool. It was a facility that had been very run down. It was decrepit, it was unattractive. It was a block. We, the conservancy, really didn't have the capacity until recently, both professionally and financially, to take on a project of that size. Once we really-- the city came to us in 2017 and said, "It's something we really want to try to fix." We said, We would love to fix it, too. Give us some time to figure it out." We came back with this magnificent plan.

Brian Lehrer: We just have 15 seconds left. If people want to celebrate this reopening on Friday, tomorrow, the day of, or maybe this weekend, what should they do? What can they do? We have 15 seconds.

Betsy Smith: Okay, 15 seconds to tell you that the Davis Center opens on Saturday at noon.

Brian Lehrer: Saturday.

Betsy Smith: There's going to be a tremendous amount of activity, so it's going to be a lot of fun with food and drink and performances and tours. I really encourage everyone to come look at this magnificent new facility. It's a gift to Harlem. It's a gift to the city and a gift to the park.

Brian Lehrer: Betsy Smith, president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy, thank you so much for joining us, and congratulations on this.

Betsy Smith: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Stay tuned for All Of It.

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