Annual Report 2024: Restoring Parkland

The following blog post is an excerpt from our 2024 annual report.

Since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the NYC Parks Department has received less than one percent of the entire city budget. These severely inadequate operating funds have restricted Parks operations for decades, while also incentivizing nonprofit groups like New York Restoration Project to help fill the resource gap.

NYRP has partnered with NYC Parks since 1995 when our founder, Bette Midler, began picking up trash in Northern Manhattan. We have since initiated and overseen the transformation of dozens of acres of parkland in Washington Heights and Inwood including the Harlem River Greenway, Sherman Creek Park, and the northern section of Highbridge Park for almost three decades.

One of our most dynamic restoration projects is on the Harlem River shoreline at Sherman Creek Park. In response to years of erosion, NYRP collaborated with NYC Parks in 2020 to successfully install a living shoreline: a 500-foot artificial oyster reef with expanded marsh grass plantings. This project helps protect the park from sea level rise and wave action, provides habitat for wildlife, and is an example of nature-based climate adaptation along a densely populated New York City waterfront.

The experiment continues to thrive: the new marsh stabilizes sediment and has matched the existing marsh in its capacity to remove a variety of pollutants. “For a newly restored marsh to have this level of function is genuinely surprising,” observes Jason Smith, NYRP’s Director of Northern Manhattan Parks.

Another cutting-edge restoration project continued to bear fruit this past year in nearby Highbridge Park. Since 2017, NYRP has overseen the largest urban trial to help restore the functionally extinct American chestnut to its historic range. Before a catastrophic blight hit North America in the early twentieth century, scientists estimate there were 4.2 billion chestnut trees in the Eastern United States, making the tree a critical part of native forest ecosystems.

Working in partnership with NYC Parks and The American Chestnut Foundation, NYRP has planted and monitored over 300 blight-resistant American chestnut tree hybrids, which began producing nuts in 2023. This past year marked the first when NYRP could begin propagating the Highbridge-grown chestnuts for future tree planting in the park.

“Seeing the trees starting to reproduce on their own is a great sign of their health,” explains Chris McArdle, NYRP’s Deputy Director of Northern Manhattan Parks. “The nuts also show that the trees have sufficient blight resistance in this highly disturbed urban environment,” adds Jason. “It’s a critical conservation threshold.

An aerial view of NYRP’s Sherman Creek and Highbridge Parks. Credit: Ben Hider

Another major 2024 restoration milestone in northern Highbridge was nearly completing the planting of one of the steepest and rockiest sections of the park. The daunting site near the park’s Amsterdam Avenue entrance has been a large gap in the native forest canopy until this past year when NYRP staff and volunteers planted hundreds of trees, sometimes needing support from ropes.

“It’s amazing to put this planting work the context of our long-term restoration that began in the mid-1990s,” reflects Jason. “The big ecological picture is that NYRP is succeeding in creating intact native canopy on a large scale in Manhattan, which feels like a heroic achievement considering how severely neglected and barren this park once was.”