Working at NYRP Since 1998

When Catherine Hall began working at New York Restoration Project in 1998, she envisioned a six-month contract. Twenty-seven years later, she is retiring from NYRP as a transformative Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President.

Under Catherine’s leadership, NYRP has restored five Northern Manhattan parks (roughly 312 acres of parkland), saved over 50 citywide community gardens from development, established a one-of-a-kind Urban Agriculture program, and partnered with the City to complete the successful MillionTreesNYC campaign. We have removed more than six million pounds of trash (roughly ten Statues of Liberty), planted more than 200,000 trees (four-times the number of tees in Manhattan), engaged over 145,000 volunteers (about seven sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden), and built and restored more than 300 community green spaces during her tenure.

Catherine has helped build NYRP from the ground up, and her colleagues describe her as both the organization’s “rock” and “North Star.” She’s known for collaborative leadership, wisdom, “unflagging commitment to process,” and tireless dedication to the “heart of NYRP.” In their own words, Catherine “is not only a ‘boss,’ but also a friend. She is family and she will be missed greatly.”

Below, Catherine looks back on her experience of helping lead NYRP for almost three decades.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How did you get involved with New York Restoration Project?

Catherine Hall: I had been working in the film industry in the mid-90s. A friend of mine told me that there was a non-profit founded by Bette Midler that was getting up and running and needed some organizational help. I started in March of 1998 with the intention of working for NYRP for six months. Of course, I didn’t end up leaving after six months, because the work became absolutely fascinating to me.

What fascinated you about the work?

CH: The fact that it was a confluence of protecting open space, working with low-income communities, and taking immediate action. What I absolutely loved about NYRP was that when we came up with an idea, we went out there and got it done. That was very much Bette’s vision for the organization: if there’s a park out there that’s dirty, why don’t we go clean it up?

What was NYRP like in the early days?

CH: Back then, most everyone in the organization, except for a handful of full-time staff, were AmeriCorps members doing 11 months of service. Working for NYRP was their first job ever. We had a ton of young people out there with ropes and in waders hauling garbage out of the Harlem River, Fort Tryon Park, and Fort Washington Park. We eventually started hauling trash out of Highbridge Park and Sherman Creek Park, which was an illegal dumping site at the time. We were all about cleaning up Northern Manhattan Parks back then.

How did NYRP get involved with community gardens?

CH: In the late 1990s, the City decided to put 114 “open lots” up for auction. These were generally places where the building owner had abandoned the property and the building had been demolished. Over time, many communities started using these open spaces, and a lot of the time for gardening. By the time the City decided to put these lots up for auction, a lot of people who had tended these spaces got angry. The community members were essentially saying that they’d been gardening in these spaces for sometimes up to ten or twenty years, and the City can’t just take that away without due process.

The protests to save the gardens really hit home for our founder, Bette Midler. She has always believed that green space is essential to peace of mind and quality of life. When she read about these gardens being under threat, she decided to team up with the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and raise money because she understood that, as a celebrity, she has that capacity to attract money to an issue.

When we partnered with TPL initially, we were just trying to save the properties. We hadn’t really developed a plan that we were going to end up owning some of them, but that’s what ended up happening. Because Trust for Public Land had a reputation and history of maintaining green spaces, they got the spots that were already being used as gardens. NYRP mostly got sites with broken sidewalks, no fencing, and cars parked on them. As a result, NYRP spent a lot of that first year securing the properties, fixing the sidewalks, and removing trash.

What was it like for NYRP to go from only working in Northern Manhattan to being a citywide operation in just a few months?

CH: Logistically, that was extraordinarily complicated. In addition to physically owning properties that we had never laid eyes on, we didn’t know the neighbors, and the neighbors didn’t know us. We realized that we needed to show communities that we could be just as effective in these gardens as we had been in Northern Manhattan parks. This meant showing up on a routine basis and being willing to help and to listen to the people who cared for these spaces.

Speak more about NYRP’s approach.

CH: We were very intentional about hiring a diverse group of AmeriCorps members to work in these spaces. We would always reserve a third of the slots that we had available for kids who lived in the community where we were working so that they could then take on a leadership role within their own neighborhood.

What’s always been very important to the culture of NYRP, and what we’ve always trained everyone to do as they come in, is to listen where you are in the neighborhood and understand what people want; NYRP must respect this. We also need to be very consistent and transparent in what we can do when we show up in an area. Strong community relationships can understandably take years of showing up on a routine basis, being reliable, being dependable, and addressing issues as they arise.

NYRP has always been about supporting a change and then having the wisdom to step back and let others pick up that momentum and carry it forward however they choose. I think that is the most powerful way of making a change, and I know for a fact that NYRP has done that day after day, year after year—and, amazingly, we’re still incredibly passionate about it.

How did NYRP’s Gardens for the City Program come to be?

CH: When our team was racing around the city and taking care of our gardens, people would come up to us and say: “Could you help me with my space over here?” One thing about our very capable operations team is that if they can help out, they will. So in their spare time, when they weren’t working on projects at the gardens that we owned, our team was helping out at other nearby gardens in the neighborhood.

We realized we had the bandwidth with our current personnel to make this into an official program where we renovated and/or built new gardens in open spaces throughout the city. The first official Gardens for the City (GFTC) project was done at P.S. 123 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We had kids draw the garden they wanted to see, and we built it at the school. After that, the program program took off like a house on fire.

When and how did NYRP partner with the City for the MillionTreesNYC initiative?

CH: The way the news came to me was that Mike Bloomberg, who was the Mayor at the time, and Bette Midler were having a chat at NYRP’s Spring Picnic gala. Their conversation turned into the MillionTreesNYC initiative, which started in 2007 and finished in 2015.

At the beginning, I remember being told that we were going to plant a million trees in with the city as their non-profit partner. We were going to be responsible for 250,000 trees, and we were going to need to do it over a ten-year period. We also needed to write a business plan for the endeavor, too. There were only six months between that initial meeting until the official MillionTreesNYC kick-off!

Today, I can walk into neighborhoods where we originally planted the street trees fifteen years ago and they’re huge and beautiful. They’re creating gorgeous shade and that’s happening around the city. NYRP did that. How great is that?

What are you most proud of from your time at NYRP?

CH: You know, I’ve known a lot of our field staff for their entire adult working career. It has been incredible to see these young, fabulous, bright people find their confidence, find their skills, and find their place in life. And they are so clear about why they do what they do. There’s just a beauty to the clarity of how they hold themselves to a high standard because they want to do the right thing; I have so much pride for these people.

I’m also proud of NYRP’s legacy. I am proud of the fact that a celebrity decided to put her capacity to draw attention to something that she felt was unfair. I am proud that we’ve never pulled back from our belief that everyone deserves equal access to high-quality green space; that motivation has been our true north since the beginning.

What have you enjoyed most about being NYRP’s Chief Operating Officer over 27 years?

CH: One thing I wanted to make really clear is I’ve had the best job in the world. Where on Earth is there a better job than the role that I’ve had at New York Restoration Project?

I’ve had exposure to incredibly inspired, highly motivated, passionate young people, just starting off in their career in life, full of optimism and big ideas and enthusiasm. I’ve had exposure to very generous donors of all persuasions and city residents who are really committed to what we do. There’s this fascinating intersection of all types of people who are convening around one central belief, which is how important it is to have clean green open space, no matter who you are or where you live.