After an era of restoration, the Central Park Conservancy considers how to protect the park

Betsy Smith made the transition from a long career in finance to government when she joined the Bloomberg Administration in 2002 to work for the Parks Department, first in a marketing role and later as an assistant commissioner. She also served on the Central Park Conservancy’s Board of Trustees before taking on the job of president and CEO of the nonprofit in 2018. Smith is now the steward of the most-visited urban park in the nation. 

That’s 40 million visitors a year, many of whom she runs into when she rides a golf cart through the park to stay familiar with its needs and those of its users. Under her leadership, the Conservancy recently completed the Davis Center, a state-of-the-art facility that replaces the Lasker Pool and Rink on the park’s northern end. Smith now has her sights on an overhaul of Wollman Rink on the park’s southern end. Last month, she and the Conservancy voiced support for a City Council bill that would ban horse carriages, a position that has drawn fierce criticism. 

City & State recently caught up with Smith to her leadership of the Conservancy, its accomplishments and why she and the nonprofit favor a ban on horse carriages. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What’s a typical day for you? How do you launch your work day?

I prefer to start my day in the park, and I often drive my little cart from the Upper East Side, where I live, down through the park and take a look at what's going on … People come up to me, ask me questions. … Then I'd say a typical day for me pretty much covers three or four main things: Philanthropy, working with donors, working on projects, raising money, making sure the structure of various agreements is right. The rest of it is making sure that I know what's going on in the park. What are the issues in the park? There's always something with 40 million people (visiting the park annually). There's always something that's coming up. Keeping an eye on the progress of our capital plan and our state of good repair work. How are our park operations, staff morale? What's going on with their relationship with the people in the park? … And the rest of it is administrative here in the office, with a lot of focus on philanthropy.

You became CEO in 2018 and two years later launched what was called, “A plan for stewardship of Central Park, 2020, through 2027,” which had six objectives, including assuring long term financial sustainability. How's progress on the plan?

So there's a very good story there. Let me just go back a little bit, to why we did that plan. When I got here, the longtime chief executive of the conservancy (Douglas Blonsky) had obviously decided to leave, and his astounding accomplishment really was the restoration of the park. What I realized very quickly after I got here was that we were really going into another era. The story of the Central Park Conservancy, the narrative around the Conservancy's work was no longer about restoration. It was about how do we care for this place? How do we protect our investment and care for this place? So with that being a completely new challenge, we all decided we needed to write a strategic plan. There had never been one before for the Conservancy… Five years in, we have finished almost all of the initiatives that we set out to do, and we're very close to raising the money that we set out to raise to support the plan.

Those six pillars each had very specific objectives. There were about 25 total objectives under those pillars, and we have addressed, codified, put into action and incorporated into our standard operating procedures almost all of those objectives. So the answer is good. It was a plan that we wrote in-house. We did not have a consultant. We just talked to the people who actually knew the park the best, i.e.our staff.

You unveiled the Davis Center in Harlem this summer, a new state of the art facility in the park's north end, replacing the former Lasker pool and rink. How vital was this for the surrounding community?

It was the last piece of Central Park that had not been restored. We set out to do that project to reconnect the Harlem communities that had been feeling very disconnected from Central Park for a number of reasons. The facility itself was very run down, and while it was beloved (this was an important recreational resource for Harlem), it really wasn't up to the standard of the rest of the park. We had actually invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the north end of the park. So it wasn't as if we had ignored that part of the park, but that facility was so large and so complicated, it wasn't really until around 2018 that we felt we had the capacity to take on a project that big. 

One of the advantages of being a public-private partnership or an independent organization, was that … we had a very long-term relationship with the communities around the park. We knew what they wanted.

Now let’s pivot to the opposite side of the park. Wollman Rink is due for an overhaul, and the city has issued a request for proposals. The Trump Organization, a previous operator of the rink, is back and has put in a bid for the RFP. However, you have an alternative proposal, right?

Well, first of all, let me just say, there's nothing more magical than skating at night at Wollman  Rink … It's really quite fantastic. We went to the city and said we've just finished this magnificent project (the Davis Center) in East Harlem, and it was not just replacing the facility, it was looking at the entire surrounding areas, the relationship of those areas to the water quality, to stormwater management, to the condition of the landscapes. What we want to do with Wollman Rink is actually very similar, which is to take a facility that is not an effective facility and only really a skating rink for four months of the year, and completely re-envision it. 

It is much more tourist-driven than obviously the Davis Center, and it is an eyesore. There's tremendous build up of silt and other landscape problems. We would like to address those landscape issues. We'd like to integrate a new facility into the landscape … What we had proposed to the city was a very big project. It isn't at all comparable to what you might solicit in an RFP from someone who would like to make some money off of the park. This is a much larger stewardship story, and our argument was based on the fact that the city does have this relationship with us. They have trust in our work, and we have the example of a massive project up in East Harlem. We’re hoping that it would compel the city to look at this in a different way … We think this is in the best interest of the city. There's no commercial operator who would … actually do what we want to do, because obviously they have different operating objectives. So we're still waiting and hoping that the city will come back to us.

We didn't bid on (the RFP) because we want to do something completely different than what they were soliciting. It just wouldn't have been comparable. We weren't willing just to fix up the rink and run it commercially.

You’ve projected spending $120 million to do the work. How would the rink be repurposed for year-round use? 

This is not that complicated a project. It is putting in a new skating rink in some form and making sure, very importantly, that the facility accommodates the other eight months of the year. What we thought of was an exciting plan to create sort of a cultural center for other institutions around the city, to be able to come into Central Park and use that area to promote their own activities and have a lot going on around that part of the park, because there are so many tourists … It would have a bigger restaurant that would be open to the public and more public bathrooms.

How would you raise the money?

The city does make an investment. It's their property … If this project moved ahead, we would look to the city for probably $30 to $40 million of capital. We would raise the rest of it privately.

Last month, the Conservancy announced it was in favor of a City Council bill banning horse carriages following the death of Lady, a 15-year-old mare. Your stand was cited as an example of a nonprofit getting political, and drew criticism from the union that represents carriage owners. Are there no compromises here?

We haven't rushed into anything on this issue. But quite frankly, it's long overdue. Every major city in the world has stopped having horse carriages available, and this park, in particular, is so massively used. It's not safe for people. 

There were repeated sanitary violations. The horses were not cleaning up after themselves. There was a lot of manure in the park and that has a huge impact on the other people who are using the drives. The drives are our most heavily used resource. Millions of people use the drives …The city just finished a major project, and the horses are already starting to degrade that, because their hooves are steel and they make marks in the new asphalt. The striping is already being eroded.

So the deterioration of that was another reason why it was just time. But the real reason is our interest in creating a safe environment for these millions of people, and we felt it was neither safe nor sanitary, nor appropriate for the horses to be in the park anymore. It doesn't have anything to do with animal welfare. That we've said many times. That's not our purview. Our purview is managing the park so that the most people can have the best time. The impact of the horses was just too great. I think obviously recent events, plus the death of a horse, brought it all back to the fore.