The High Bridge as seen from Highbridge Park in Manhattan. (Photo by Gianna Palmer)

Visitors to the High Bridge can look, but they can’t enter. Heavy metal doors framed by barbed wire and chained together with a padlock block anyone from setting foot on New York City’s oldest bridge.  The bridge, which spans the Harlem River between 173rd Street in Manhattan and 170th Street in the Bronx, has been closed since the early 1970s.

But now, the High Bridge is getting a makeover. In February, the Parks Department began designing its $62 million project to reopen the bridge to pedestrians – probably in October 2013, said Ellen Macnow, the project coordinator.

“The goal of the project is two-fold,” said Macnow. “First, to restore and reopen the bridge so that the public can enjoy it, and secondly, to have people use the bridge to get to the city’s parks.”

Access denied: the Washington Heights entrance to the High Bridge. (Photo by Gianna Palmer)

The parks bordering the High Bridge, both named Highbridge Park, are far from equivalent. The Manhattan park boasts about 119 acres of playgrounds, ball fields and a recreation center, said Macnow, while the Bronx park consists of a single acre with a seating area. The reopened High Bridge will give Bronx residents easy access to the amenities across the river.

The restored site will also bring the 162-year-old bridge up to modern building code and will include a safety fence and ramps for wheelchair and bike access, Macnow said.

Exactly how the restored bridge will look remains to be seen. Macnow said planners are taking its historic character very seriously in their proposed design. The bridge is a designated city landmark and, as part of the Old Croton Aqueduct, the city’s first water supply system, it is also a National Historic Landmark. Six consultants, from engineers to historic preservation specialists, are working on bridge designs, Macnow said; the plans are only 10 percent completed.

For design inspiration, Macnow and her team need look no further than the latest exhibit at the Center for Architecture in Greenwhich Village. Called “High Bridge: Bronx, Building Cutural Infrastructure (HB:BX),” it features 58 original designs for a restored High Bridge, all part of the Emerging New York Architects Committee’s latest international architecture ideas competition.  The exhibition, which opened last week, will continue through March 27, 2011.

But will the exhibition winners’ designs be used? Not likely.

“From what I saw at the Center for Architecture, a lot of them are food for thought, they’re not actually intended to be built,” Macnow said. The city’s plans so far are “very nuts and bolts,”she said, while the competition encouraged eye-opening designs, “something that really looked beyond a simple repair.”

Keith VanDerSys, one of the designers behind the winning entry, “Ripple Effect,” said that an ideas competition offers a way to experiment and start a dialogue about a design. “The freedom of that is actually really important in that it gives us the room to test out ideas,” VanDerSys said.

Visitors browse High Bridge design ideas on display at the Center for Architecture. (Photo by Gianna Palmer)

But Elizabeth Lorris Ritter,* a Washington Heights resident and chair of Community Board 12’s Parks and Cultural Affairs Committee, said she hoped the winning designs could be presented before her committee, which represents the Manhattan neighborhood bordering the High Bridge.

“I’m just dying to know how we can leverage some of this stuff to maybe make some of it happen, “ Lorris Ritter said, adding that community members in Washington Heights have wanted to restore the High Bridge for over a decade.

In October, the Parks Department and the Department of Design and Construction presented preliminary renovation plans to Lorris Ritter’s committee and about 30 community members. The plans were well received, Lorris Ritter said, except for one thing: the proposed heavy gauge safety fence, which “really looked like prison fencing.” Besides marring the landscape, Lorris Ritter said, the fence, “just failed to have any aesthetic consideration whatsoever.”

Despite initial concerns over the fencing— which she says has been modified in subsequent designs, though she still finds it “ugly”— Lorris Ritter is still thrilled about what the restoration will mean for Washington Heights and the Bronx. “Instead of having a river that divides us, we can have a bridge that unites us,” she said. “Aside from it being a nice metaphor, it’s also a nice reality.”

Besides the bridge restoration, Manhattan’s Highbridge Park is also undergoing improvements. (The Highbridge park in the Bronx underwent renovations in 2005 and 2007.)  Macnow said that a ball field and the City Parks Foundation and Quisqueya playgrounds are being renovated, and will be completed in spring and summer of 2011.  A skate park is “a couple of years away,” and several path and landscape restoration projects are also in the works.

Earlier this month, architect Wendy Klein presented her designs to restore the park’s historic John T. Brush staircase to Lorris Ritter’s committee. Brush owned the New York Giants baseball team in the early 1900s and the stairs once led to the Giants’ stadium.  Committee and community members at the meeting liked Klein’s proposal, which several pro teams including the Mets, Yankees, Jets and San Francisco Giants have helped finance.

She found the project interesting to work on, Klein said, but its historical significance was not unusual for a Parks Department project.

“We have a lot of treasures that we restore,” she said.

* Chinchilla is not the co-chair of the committee, as previously reported.

* This story initially misstated Lorris Ritter’s surname as Ritter.

Just south of where the Cross Bronx Expressway enters Manhattan, large rocks sprawl over Highbridge Park – similar to the rocks jutting from the ground in many parts of Central Park. While the Central Park boulders frequently draw climbing children and resting couples, though, the Highbridge outcroppings stay empty.

Broken glass lies scattered across them; their crevices are wedged with food wrappers and empty cans. Weeds sprout between rocks. A thin mattress covered with couch cushions has been abandoned on the adjacent cracked concrete, along with half a green and white umbrella.

Trash is strewn widely in Highbridge Park, said Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates. Though Highbridge has lots of green spaces, “a lot of that green is being severely neglected,” he said.

Some northern Manhattan parks are in good condition but others, like Highbridge, endure rundown playground equipment, uncontrolled weeds and bushes, crumbling staircases, broken and bent fences or uncollected trash. Overall, parks and playgrounds uptown are less likely to be in good condition than their downtown counterparts, city surveys show. Improvements, like new fields and greenery, have come to some, but with public resources spread thin and private resources concentrated downtown, the long-uneven playing field can be hard to level.

Inspections by the Department of Parks and Recreation indicate the discrepancy between parks in lower and upper Manhattan. Only 76 percent of small parks and playgrounds in Community District 12, where Highbridge Park is located, are in acceptable condition, according to the 2009 Mayor’s Management Report. That’s the second lowest percentage in Manhattan. The lowest? Adjacent District 10 in central Harlem with 74.4 percent. West Harlem – District 9 – fares only slightly better with 77.4 percent of its parks in acceptable condition and District 11, East Harlem, tops the list with 84.2 percent.

By contrast, six districts downtown have over 90 percent of their parks in acceptable condition; two received perfect scores.

“Parks has the same goals for all parks in its charge and applies the same standards and management strategies to every park regardless of location or condition,” Department of Parks and Recreation spokesperson Cristina Deluca said in an email statement. The department declined multiple requests for an interview for this article.

But Jose Arboleba, a guardian of Marcus Garvey Park who has had success revitalizing the space, said that resources frequently find their way south. “The good stuff goes downtown,” he said.

Croft called the discrepancy “racist” because the parks kept in the best condition are in mostly white neighborhoods, despite the legal requirement that the city provide equal services to all citizens. “It’s illegal,” he said. “It’s been going on for a long, long time.”

The Mayor’s Management Report didn’t surprise Brad Taylor, chair of the Parks and Recreation Committee for Community Board 9. “District 9 parks have, in the past anyway, not gotten the attention they deserve,” he said. Though the parks department listens to the neighborhood’s concerns, he said, “the dollars and the resources just aren’t there.”

Frances Mastrota, a self-described “environmental community activist,” has seen improvements, like a new track, come to Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem, where she walks every morning. Still, she said, the upkeep for such a heavily trafficked area is a costly task. Though the department does the best it can, “I sincerely wish that parks were better funded,” she said.

Croft believes that parks are a low city priority, he said. The Department of Parks and Recreation is allotted 0.42 percent of the city’s overall budget but controls 14 percent of its land, according to city budget reports and the parks department website. “You see the absurdity in that,” he said. “The parks department is a victim.”

The department’s budget has actually grown over the last four years but will face a large loss next year. The city is cutting over $20 million from the department for fiscal year 2010 and the total decline, including state money, will be over $35 million. To offset the loss, the budget plans call for carving out money from virtually every area, including forestry and horticulture, recreation, and maintenance and operations, according to city budget reports.

The department already trims costs wherever it can. When Lisa Yoffie, a Washington Heights resident, repeatedly complained about an empty sandbox in J. Hood Wright Park’s tot lot, now little more than a concrete pit, she says the parks department told her it wasn’t responsible for putting sand in the sandbox.

The department maintained that citywide, parents and the communities had to refill the box each year, Yoffie said.

A group of parents has banded together to raise the money, said Jo Flattery, a member of Friends of J. Hood Wright Park. Confident that they will succeed, it doesn’t bother her that the responsibility falls to them. “Having the community participate in raising a couple hundred dollars for sand is not such a hardship,” she said.

But when it comes to outside money – from community donations, private funds and conservancies – affluent communities tend to reap more benefits than poorer ones. And it’s where outside money flows in that “you see parks doing the best,” Taylor said

Private funds and conservancies aren’t equally distributed; they’re more likely to exist in wealthy neighborhoods. Not only are those residents better able to reach into their own pockets to support neighborhood parks, but they also have more connections to corporate and other funding sources, Croft said.

“It’s very hard to get someone to partner with a community that is impoverished,” Mastrota added.

For instance, District 9 doesn’t benefit from private conservancies. But Central Park, neighbor to some of the “wealthiest people in the world,” is maintained through the Central Park Conservancy, Croft said. “Poor neighborhoods are never going to be able to compete with that,” he argued. “And they shouldn’t have to.”

But Scott Johnson, communications director for the Central Park Conservancy, argued that private donations benefit all parks. The conservancy raises 85 percent of its own annual budget, which “frees up money for other parks,” Johnson said. If the city had to pick up the tab, smaller parks would suffer, he added.

Parks department spokesperson Deluca echoed that idea. “Park improvements have been buoyed by significant public-private partnerships,” she said, noting that only a few receive significant private charity.

Deluca also emphasized that the revitalization of Central Park and Bryant Park, also heavily reliant on a private fund, “creates a blueprint for turning problem parks into community assets.”

Central Park was neglected for 20 years, Johnson pointed out, until several small advocacy groups united in 1980 to form the conservancy and transform the park.

But should revitalized parks depend on private money? Croft believes the city should turn parks around. He noted that his group sees this as a civil rights issue because the government is not providing equally for all citizens, instead ceding the job to a private entity. “You have an amazing discrepancy between these services that are supposed to be done by the city,” he said.

With more money comes better maintenance. Central Park has a gardener for every 10 acres – a luxury no District 9 park can afford, Taylor said.

Each year, Community Board 9 asks the city for more park workers, Taylor said. In August, his committee developed a needs statement that included four requests for additional maintenance workers and patrol officers.

“There’s one district-wide crew that handles all of the medium-sized parks,” Taylor said. “So they get stretched thin. If there is a problem up in Broadway Malls, Morningside might not get cleaned that day.”

It’s not only maintenance that suffers. The parks department has only seven full-time workers inspectors for the city’s hundreds of parks, Croft charged, calling the inspections a “sham.”

“You can see how little they inspect,” he said, arguing that some areas of Highbridge Park aren’t looked at twice a year as the department says.

With its budget being scaled back, the parks department will be unable to add more staffers, though. Full-time positions in the department have been declining since 2007 from 7,914 slots to a budgeted 6,763 in 2010, according to the city’s budget function analysis.

Some uptown residents don’t see problems with their neighborhood parks. “I think on a whole, they’re good,” said Charles Campbell, sitting on a bench in St. Nicholas Park with a newspaper. “They’ve improved a lot of parks”

Arboleba, for one, has made notable progress in Marcus Garvey since he began working there a year ago, planting flowers and reclaiming an area once covered with trash, now home to two cherry trees. So far, his manager has granted all his requests for new greenery. “Maybe I’m lucky,” he said.

And in some cases, uptown parks are starting to benefit from private interest. In the newly opened West Harlem Piers Park, Columbia University has pledged $500,000 a year for patrol officers and maintenance workers, Tayor said.

“There’s some good stuff happening,” Taylor said. “I just think we’re a little behind. We just need to keep up the effort.”