“We’re Doing It Ourselves”

Abstract

While the privatization of parks has been controversial since the 1980s, the origins of public–private parks in New York City were complex. During the 1970s fiscal crisis, the Parks and Recreation Department suffered severe budget cuts and was forced to reduce services drastically. Faced with parks that were falling apart, thousands of volunteers in block associations and community groups began to maintain parks on their own. They pioneered radical forms of “do-it-yourself” urbanism with guerrilla horticulture, community gardens, children-fashioned adventure playgrounds, tree-planting drives, makeshift ambulances, and volunteer patrols. By the early 1980s, these “self-help” efforts coalesced into new public–private parks. The history of public–private parks is thus one of privatizations in the plural and points to an array of antistatist impulses that emerged on both the left and right in the 1970s.