Orion Magazine - March-April 2008

group, however, seem disgruntled: Bob, who’s been told that the park rangers will not allow anyone to go down into the reservoir, and the Queens woman, who has realized that her former swimming hole is now >lled with brush, saplings, and trees.

“I can’t believe this,” she keeps saying, in the tone of a Puritan minister arriving on the set of Gossip Girl. It’s understandable.

The scrubby trees and undergrowth beyond the fence lack both the grandeur of an established wilderness and the picturesque order of a garden. The young forest looks like what it is: something unattended, gone to seed.

She and Bob both perk up, however, when the rangers partially relent and pull aside a piece of chain-link fence so the group can squeeze through onto the platform of the reservoir’s decrepit pump house. From there, we look south across the middle basin, the only one that still holds water. Its edges are choked with phragmites. In the sky beyond, a 767 lumbers up from John F. Kennedy International Airport. And there, centered on the shallow pond, are two coots and a wood duck, ?oating serenely in parti-colored glory.

swimming pool. Rob Jett, a birder–attendee with a blog called Save Ridgewood Reservoir, noted that the community seemed to realize something the Parks Department didn’t. “The Department of Parks and Recreation wants to create a world class destination in Ridgewood,” he wrote in his blog; “what they don’t realize is that it already exists.”

“I can’t believe this,” she says, in the tone of a Puritan minister on the set of Gossip Girl. It’s understandable. The young forest looks like what it is: something unattended, gone to seed.

IN 2004, when the Parks Department announced plans to make the former reservoir into a park, there was celebration. But three years later, as they launched the design process, something surprising happened. At community meetings, the city’s $46 million plan to upgrade the reservoir with a running track, a cricket pitch, and athletic >elds was met with attitudes ranging from lukewarm to hostile.

“We totally reject the idea that the Ridgewood Reservoir should be turned into a conventional park,” Paul Kerzner, president of the Ridgewood Property Owners and Civic Association told the New York Daily News. “Migratory birds have been using the site for at least thirty years. This is their Holiday Inn. Why take it away from them?”

In June 2007, the Department of Parks and Recreation hosted a “community listening session” on the future of the reservoir. Attendees were divided into teams and given templates of the area, along with cardboard cutouts of recreational facilities: baseball diamonds, tennis courts, running tracks, cricket pitches, and more. Each team was to place the facilities they wanted on the reservoir space.

To the surprise of many attendees, the teams showed little interest in the recreational facilities. One team refused to place any. Another suggested a nature center instead. A third team insisted nothing ought to be decided without environmental studies, and a fourth suggested leaving two basins untouched and adding only a skateboard park to the third. The only recreational facility that got any enthusiasm from the >nal team was an indoor

IN NEW YORK CITY, there have traditionally been two competing schools of thought about parks, each the legacy of a powerful man. There’s the Frederick Law Olmsted legacy, which holds that parks are relief from urban life, landscapes designed to soothe the city-dweller’s spirit and inspire the higher emotions evoked by nature. And there’s the Robert Moses legacy, which sees parks as recreational outlets, places where the poor and middle class can let o= steam and engage in wholesome activities like sports and swimming. To Olmsted, the urban dweller required temples to the spirit; to Moses, the masses needed to get o= their—couches, let’s say. Neither of these points of view is about ecological value. Neither considers other creatures who might use urban greenery: birds, amphibians, small mammals. And neither attributes value to simply coexisting with an untamed place. Even Olmsted, who saw landscape as spiritually vital, felt that only a certain kind of landscape could perform the work of urban amelioration and social reform: the rolling >elds, stately trees, and sweeping prospects of the English pastoral. This carefully de>ned aesthetic would inspire the moral sentiments and genteel behavior he wanted to instill in the public. His parks re?ect this taste beautifully: plop a manor house down at the end of Central Park’s mall and it would look right at home.

At their listening session, the Parks Department was getting push-back on their essentially Moses-school vision for the Ridgewood Reservoir. But that push-back wasn’t coming from the Olmsted school. It was coming from a completely new school, one that saw unmanaged nature itself as a “world class destination.” Less concerned with utility than ecology, this community seemed to value nature just for itself—even, surprisingly, when they were technically barred from it.