Friends of Vannie celebrates 25 years at park

Posted

A cleaner park. Well-maintained hiking trails. Improved water quality. Those were some the projects the nonprofit Friends of Van Cortlandt Park worked on over the past 25 years.

As banners were hung along the Broadway side of Van Cortlandt Park, the community-based nonprofit marked a quarter century of conserving and maintaining the 1,146-acre nature refuge.

It all started in 1992 when Felicity Nitz read in The New York Times that Van Cortlandt Park — already falling into disrepair — could face budget cuts and get even worse. With no wealthy benefactors to help fill in the financial gaps, Nitz took matters in her own hands, forming what would become Friends of Van Cortlandt Park.

“I thought it would be nice to do something where we would do something for kids,” said Nitz, who’s now a board member of the group. “We decided to collaborate with Riverdale Neighborhood House. We raised money for one summer, and we put teens to work in the park.”

Today, some of the Friends’ activities include providing educational programming, maintaining hiking trails, and even hosting a summer green market.

Friends also have had an impact on its immediate environment, monitoring the water quality at Tibbetts Brook with Manhattan College. The waterway runs from Yonkers to Van Cortlandt Park’s lake.

“For an urban waterway, it’s not bad, but it’s not great,” said Friends executive director Christina Taylor. She’s been with the organization since 2000, leading the nonprofit since 2007. With runoff from places like the highway and golf course, there’s been longstanding concern about the lake’s water quality.

It didn’t help to learn some homeowners in Yonkers were illegally dumping sewage waste into the water.

“Yonkers did a study, and it turned out it was some of those old leaky pipes, and they fixed that,” Taylor said. “Then they found people were actually hooking up to what was supposed to be a storm sewer and putting household waste into it.”

But the Friends’ work is more than just conservation. It’s also preservation, like it’s work with the Van Cortlandt House Museum. Friends volunteer to help the museum, especially during its Philharmonic concert last year, said Laura Carpenter, the museum’s director.

Volunteers develop a sense of ownership of the park, said Margot Perron, president of the Van Cortlandt Park Conversancy. It’s a public/private partnership with the city’s parks department.

Teenage interns from Friends of Van Cortlandt Park work with interns from her own office to maintain trails and remove invasive floating plants from the park’s lake.

In fact, each year, the Friends rack up 5,000 hours from 1,500 volunteers, equating to about $50,000 in labor to assist the park, according to the organization’s most-recent financial statement.

“Without the volunteers and without the improvement, it could be back to where it was in the ‘90s,” Taylor said, “or it would not be in as good of a shape.

Unfortunately, the park’s resources are not there where they can maintain them themselves.

“The work that our volunteers do is extremely important.”

Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, Van Cortlandt House Museum, Van Cortlandt Park Conversancy, Laura Carpenter, Felicity Nitz, Margot Perron, Christina Taylor, Lisa Herndon

Comments