“There is ice skating, pingpong, juggling lessons, yoga lessons…all for free.
Two attendants clean the bathrooms 30 times a day, and the bathrooms are furnished with flowers and paintings. Speakers play classical music.
This is a huge difference from 37 years ago, when Bryant Park was filled with vagrants and trash. It was then that urban redeveloper Dan Biederman managed to persuade city politicians to let him try to run the park.
He got money from local businesses and tried innovative things, like playing music in the bathrooms.
“It’s just another element, along with flowers, recessed lighting, and artwork, that makes people think they’re going to be safe,” says Biederman in my new video.
Safety is important because crime is up.
But there’s little crime in Bryant Park because crime thrives in dark corners, and this park is filled with people.
Plus little businesses like Joe Coffee Co. and Le Pain Quotidien. They pay for the park. Some people object to that.
“A park isn’t supposed to be about business!” they say.
Biederman responds, “In the current state of things you can’t have ‘passive spaces.’ Too many people are circulating who are violent or emotionally disturbed.”
To discourage such people, he fills his park businesses and activities—like the juggling lessons. When lots of people are in a park, he says, vagrancy is less of a problem.
Still, he sometimes must deal with troubled people. The worst, he says, are people who take the drug K2 and suddenly get so hot that they take their clothes off.
Our guards “guide them out of the park,” says Biederman.
It all works. Twelve million people visit Bryant Park every year, and none of it costs taxpayers a penny. Actually, the city makes money, says Biederman, because “the increased real estate taxes paid by the surrounding buildings—it’s $33 million a year.””