The Prospect Park Alliance has received a $10 million endowment to support its forest and natural areas.
Photo courtesy of Prospect Park Alliance
Prospect Park, home to Brooklyn’s last remaining forest and only lake, is an oasis for New Yorkers.
It’s also very expensive to maintain, especially after budget cuts to the city’s parks department.
This week, lifelong Brooklynite Shelby White gifted the Prospect Park Alliance a $10 million endowment through the Leon Levy Foundation, which she founded in 2004.
“Brooklyn’s tree canopy is our modern cathedral, reconnecting city dwellers to nature even in the heart of the busiest city in the United States,,” said Morgan Monaco, president of the Prospect Park Alliance. “It is vital for climate resilience, public health, and sustaining biodiversity, and today we celebrate a gift that will secure this legacy for the future.”
Morgan Monaco, president of the Prospect Park Alliance (left) with Shelby White, who gifted the Alliance with a $10 million endowment this week. Photo courtesy of Prospect Park Alliance
In the short-term, the endowment will allow the park to hire four new ecological zone gardeners, Monaco explained. Prospect Park has a range of diverse ecological areas and currently employs a team of seven“ecological zone gardeners” who tend to the specific needs of each section.
Four new zone gardeners will be hired thanks to the endowment, Monaco said. They will work in two areas of the park — the Ravine, which last year was ravaged by a brush fire, and Lakeside, in the southeast corner of the park. The Ravine has since been stabilized and partially reseeded, and is well on its way to recovery. In the coming weeks, volunteers will plant more than 3,000 native plants and shrubs in the Ravine.
“We’ll make sure each zone has the right staffing structure to fully maintain a complex and diverse ecosystem,” she said. “It will provide funding for the staff positions as well as tools, materials and vehicles that are required to help ensure that those staff members are successful.”
A brush fire severely damaged the Ravine last November. File photo courtesy of Michelle Paggi, Ph.D./via REUTERS
The park’s annual operating budget is about $17 million, Monaco said, not counting roughly $5 million from the city’s parks department.
“Unfortunately, the parks department budget has really declined over the past several decades,” she said. “Part of our mission is to help make sure that we’re growing our resources, to be able to make sure the ball doesn’t get dropped and that New Yorkers get to experience the clean, safe, resilient park they deserve.”
White said she grew up exploring the park, rowing in the lake with her father and birding along its leafy trails on a school trip.
“It was when I first learned about the BBC,” she said. “Not the one people know about, but the Brooklyn Birding Club. The real BBC.”
White said the park has always felt like a “wonderland.”Photo by Kirstyn Brendlen
As a child, Prospect Park seemed like a “wonderland,” White said. Decades later, it still does, and she was delighted to provide funding to support its future.
“It’s really a privilege to be able to do it,” she said. “I never, growing up, dreamed I would be in such a position. I am thrilled to be able to give back.”
Malcolm Gore, the Alliance’s arborist, is the primary caretaker for the park’s 30,000 trees. He spends his days pruning, planting, watering, cleaning up debris, and keeping track of how the trees are faring. His work overlaps significantly with the work of the zone gardeners, he said.
“They are like the first eyes on the ground for me,” he said. “They’ll tell me if something has come down, or if something looks bad or problematic, and then we’ll collaborate to do cleanup as well and to do removal of invasive species together.”
Nearly a year after the fire, the Ravine is being reseeded and replanted. Photo courtesy of Prospect Park Alliance
Caring for so many trees can be “overwhelming,” he said, and the $10 million endowment is a comfort. Four new permanent gardeners can make his job — and his life — a little easier.
“This is Brooklyn’s only old-growth forest, that’s really important,” Gore said. “Not just to me, but to all the birds and the insects and everyone who’s coming through here. Having old, large trees is really special in this day and age, most of them were clear-cut, so the fact that we’re getting this endowment to protect those trees is really meaningful.”
The funding comes nearly a year after a brush fire ravaged two acres of the park’s Ravine, destroying layers of plant life and several mature trees.