May cooler heads prevail: New York needs to open as many beaches, pools and playgrounds as possible this summer

For more than 80 years, Memorial Day weekend in New York City has been synonymous with the start of summer, particularly with the opening of the city’s public beaches. The summer season is also by far the busiest time in the 30,000 acres of city parks (and more than 15,000 more acres of national and state parks). As the weather heats up, the city’s painstakingly-developed “outdoor cooling infrastructure”—mostly in its parks — is pressed into service to help millions of overheated New Yorkers cool down.

Not this year.

The parks infrastructure of which we speak is composed primarily of three elements: more than 1,000 playgrounds, containing at least 775 sprinklers (known as “spray showers” in Parks Department jargon), all of which are padlocked; 53 outdoor swimming pools (and 12 indoor pools, also currently closed), able to hold at least 80,000 bathers at one time, also all closed; and 14 miles of public city beaches, which are closed for the moment, with hopes of opening later in the summer.

These include Orchard Beach, the crescent of sand in the Bronx; the boardwalk-lined Coney Island, Brighton, and Manhattan Beaches in Brooklyn; seven miles of sand pounded by Atlantic Ocean waves in the Rockaways; and the bucolic beaches of Staten Island. (The National Park Service has an additional three miles of beach at Riis Park and Fort Tilden.)

We do not accept that all of those relief valves must remain off-limits to New Yorkers. We understand the good intentions to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus, but this widespread closure could well backfire.

Surely, some limitations and closures are necessary as temporary measures to protect public health. But many leading public health officials agree that parks and outdoor areas, including beaches and pools, are not only safer than indoors areas in terms of virus transmission, but are vital to maintaining physical and mental health as millions have been forced to stay inside, cut off from all traditional forms of social and physical recreation.

“Parks, beaches — as long as they’re not cheek-to-jowl, cycling, walking, this is good,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, the former city health commissioner and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Enjoy nature. It’s good for us, and it has very low risk of spreading the virus.”

Indeed, Gov. Cuomo conferred with the governors of Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware to coordinate simultaneous opening of state beaches. Nassau and Suffolk counties are opening county beaches, and towns on Long Island and in New Jersey are opening local beaches. Unfortunately NYC’s holdout means that nearby counties and towns will restrict access to local residents.

But for the millions of New Yorkers who don’t have weekend homes, or access to cars to travel to distant beaches, this summer could present huge challenges. This is especially true for families with children who have been cooped up for months and are in dire need of exercise, fresh air and Vitamin D-providing sunlight.

The cooling infrastructure of NYC’s parks was largely developed during the Great Depression, when then-Parks Commissioner Robert Moses used federal funding through the Works Progress Administration (that era’s equivalent of stimulus funds) to increase the number of playgrounds from 100 to 700, to take control of what were mostly private beaches and make them public, to build the 15 new outdoor pools, and to then hire and train the city’s first municipal lifeguard corps — all in order to keep city residents safe at the vast new systems of pools and beaches.

Over eight decades, that infrastructure has kept millions of New Yorkers cool and relatively happy.

What’s at risk is far more than discomfort. Prior to the construction of the pools and lifeguarded beaches, more than 500 New Yorkers — most of them young children from poor neighborhoods — drowned every year falling into or swimming in the city’s polluted, treacherous tidal rivers and mostly unguarded beaches.

When Moses opened the 11 vast new WPA pools in the summer of 1936 — which included the hottest weather (106 degrees) in recorded NYC history — the pools, mostly 3.5 feet deep, were largely intended to prevent drownings, and within five years drowning deaths in New York City waters had been cut by more than a third.

In recent years, fewer than 20 New Yorkers drown annually. With no safe places to cool off, NYC rivers and unguarded beaches could tempt thousands of youth to brave the riptides of the Rockaways or fierce tidal currents of the rivers — with tragic consequences.

The other favored method of keeping New Yorkers cools prior to the new infrastructure was opening fire hydrants — officially and unofficially. But open fire hydrants can lead to a drastic reduction in water pressure, making it difficult to fight fires. City Hall has suggested that all of that water power can be replaced with a few cooling misters at some of the newly created “Open Streets” — but it’s not clear how hundreds of parched New Yorkers under one shower head will be safer than a million-gallon swimming pool of chlorinated water, which makes it harder for the coronavirus to spread.

“Proper operation, maintenance, and disinfection (with chlorine or bromine) of swimming pools should kill the virus that causes COVID-19,” says the CDC.

Rather than keep pools, playgrounds and beaches completely off-limits to the New Yorkers in desperate need, cooler heads — including a number of elected officials and advocates for parks and green spaces — are asking the city to rise to the management challenge now and develop a careful approach that would allow people to safely get cool while minimizing the risk of virus transmission.

One, we should create a Beach Taskforce that includes the Parks, Health and Transportation Departments and other key agencies to quickly develop contingency plans for the summer, to provide updated recommendations and monitor the beach openings and the safe, ongoing operations of those and other facilities that can accommodate New Yorkers.

Two, rather than stick to the de Blasio administration’s limited Open Streets plans, we should reevaluate and expand them based on extensive data analysis by the Trust for Public Land (TPL) to target neighborhoods that lack access to parks — many of which are large playgrounds, currently closed — to open up areas for exercise and informal recreation in many neighborhoods.

TPL maps show that to alleviate park and open space needs in light of COVID-related closures, most of the Open Streets should go in Central Brooklyn, Eastern and Southern Queens, Eastern Bronx and Central Staten Island, specifically in underserved neighborhoods with a high need for more park space this summer.

These are: Unionport, Parkchester, Morris Park, Wakefield, Eastchester and Throggs Neck in the Bronx; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Flatbush/Kensington, Midwood, Bay Ridge, New Utrecht, Flatlands and East New York in Brooklyn; Astoria, Jackson Heights, Fresh Pond, Elmhurst, Corona, Flushing, Hollis, S. Ozone Park, Woodhaven, S. Richmond Hill, S. Ozone Park, Jamaica, and Far Rockaway in Queens; and North Shore/Mariner’s Harbor, Willowbrook, Great Kills and Tottenville in Staten Island.

Three, rather than accepting that our beaches can’t open because, unlike in the suburbs, they can’t throttle their capacity, we should develop new ways to control attendance through limiting entrance, perhaps by using an online lottery system for reservations, as suggested by city Controller Scott Stringer, and mandatory use of masks and/or social distancing. Monitoring could be provided by the civilian staff of city agencies who will need to be present through the summer to continue the existing ban on group activities at beaches, including volleyball and other team sports.

Four, explore the opening of the largest pools in the most crowded and underserved neighborhoods. Pools are by definition secure facilities, with just one entrance, so reducing capacity would be relatively simple management issue, similar to what New Yorkers are experiencing at grocery stores. More important, pools’ chlorinated water reduces the risk of transmission.

More complicated — but far from impossible — would be ensuring social distancing and further reducing the virus transmission risk by closing locker rooms and installing outdoor showers. This would also allow the longtime tradition of adult lap swimming by seniors and other adults offered in the early morning and evenings when the large crowds of mostly young bathers are not in the pools.

Five, consider the tactical opening of at least one playground in every neighborhood (while still keeping the play equipment off-limits) to allow the use of the largest sprinklers. That can keep hundreds of young kids cool all day long. Assign Parks Department workers to monitor social distancing.

Opening playgrounds would require the presence of well-trained playground associates — normally hired by the hundreds anyway to run summer programs for children. These seasonal hires — as well as those required to manage, clean and secure beaches and possibly pools — would help address the drastic unemployment rates in NYC, particularly in disadvantaged communities where thousands of summer youth jobs have already been cut in preliminary city budgets.

Six, build on existing structures, such as DEP’s HEAT program for the city’s time-honored tradition of giving out fire hydrant sprinkler caps (which use much less water than simply opening a hydrant) to community-based organizations to create alternative sprinklers in neighborhoods that lack any other cooling infrastructure, and work with those organizations to employ summer youth to monitor and encourage social distancing.

Seven, install shade awnings in neighborhood parks that lack large shade trees, to create outdoor cooling areas. This can also be extended to the many parks now on piers, where cooling winds from the open waters function as natural air conditioners.

Eight, open some of the city’s 14 public golf courses (currently all closed) in park-starved neighborhoods for strolling and running, even if just temporarily. San Francisco has shown great leadership in opening up golf courses to general public recreation and to aid in distancing.

With verve and imagination, careful planning and rigorous management, New York City can create opportunities for New Yorkers to have essential outlets for physical and mental health and recreation while maximizing public health outcomes and reducing the possibility of the cure being worse than the disease. Let this be the season for innovation.

Benepe is senior vice president and director of national programs for The Trust for Public Land, and former NYC commissioner of Parks and Recreation. Levine is a chair of the City Council’s Health Committee, and past chair of its Parks Committee. Strickland is New York state director for The Trust for Public Land and former commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.