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Keep on the grass: Makeshift paths are harming NYC parks
By
Sophia Chang
Published Mar 26, 2023
Modified Mar 27, 2023
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Scott Heins for Gothamist
By
Sophia Chang
Published Mar 26, 2023
Modified Mar 27, 2023
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The city’s green spaces and woodlands became more popular than ever during the pandemic, but now some park officials are worried New Yorkers might be loving their parks to death.
Officials at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx said there’s been a noticeable increase in new trails – known as “desire paths.” The makeshift dirt trails are carved by people wandering off marked paths and into forested areas, raising concerns about erosion and destruction of woodland habitats for plants and animals.
On a recent visit to the woods near Prospect Park’s Ravine, Leila Mougoui Bakhtiari pointed out two dirt paths flanking a staircase on a hill. She’s the director of landscape management with the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit organization that jointly manages the park with the city.
Leila Mougoui Bakhtiari, director of landscape management with the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit organization that jointly manages Prospect Park with the city.
Scott Heins for Gothamist
“They're not needed,” Bahktiari said of the desire paths, since they are leading to the same place as the stairs. “But people create them, and this causes a lot of erosion. It compacts our soil. After any big rain event or any major extreme weather event, we get a lot of runoff.”
"Desire paths," forged alongside designated walking paths in Prospect Park. “They're not needed,” Bahktiari says, since they are leading to the same place as the stairs.
Scott Heins for Gothamist
The city’s 30,000 acres of parkland, playgrounds and open space became a refuge for New Yorkers in the early days of the pandemic as one of the few permissible places to escape their apartments while social distancing. The forests in many of the city parks beckoned to people seeking even more space and fresh air.
“I definitely think we saw a significant uptick in visitors to our woodlands. During the pandemic, people were really interested in both spreading out more and kind of escaping from more crowded areas,” said Deborah Kirschner, the Prospect Park Alliance's vice president of communications and external relations. “I think people also were looking for the mental health benefits of being in nature.”
In Van Cortlandt Park, the city installed trail blazes in 2020 to steer hikers onto existing paths in the park’s sprawling 600 acres of woods.
Yet during the pandemic, “we saw people using trails where we never saw visitors. But we have a trail crew that is working really, really hard and maintaining the trails very actively,” said Stephanie Ehrlich, the executive director of the nonprofit Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, which manages the park along with the city.
There are about 300 miles of known trails in the city’s 12,000 acres of public parkland, said Jennifer Greenfeld, deputy commissioner for environment and planning with the city's parks department.
While the parks department says it’s impossible to track the number of visitors to the park system, officials at Van Cortlandt and Prospect parks say they’ve seen a noticeable increase in visitors in the past three years as interest in outdoor recreation surged.
The Brooklyn Bird Club, which meets often in Prospect Park’s 250 acres of woodland, said its membership tripled in nine months during the pandemic.
But the increased traffic in the parks mean more wear and tear on the environment.
Sergio Valcarcel of Yonkers, who was recently strolling through Van Cortlandt Park, says he seeks out secluded off-trail areas like the woods near the Riverdale Stables.
“I like to have my own privacy when I'm walking around in the woods, even in the pandemic,” he said. He’s spotted deer and a coyote while venturing off-path. “It is very peaceful here. I think it’s great, because people get to just relax, you know, and just kind of get away from society.”
A parkgoer walks along a "desire path," in Prospect Park.
Scott Heins for Gothamist
Prospect Park in particular is “deeply loved by a diverse group of park stakeholders,” the parks department said.
The park is constantly filled with schoolkids, including children attending forest schools or clubs that are focused on learning from the natural setting.
“They should have spaces where you can go off roads into the woods, where you're allowed to go and it's OK,” said Serena Krombach, who runs the Sideways School forest playgroup in Prospect Park. “You have to be sort of creative in finding those and then realize that all of a sudden you can't go where you wanted to anymore, because it's blocked off.”
Kirschner says the sheer number of people of New York City is the reason why the park policies are in place, even for something as simple as children exploring.
“It's like the most idyllic imagery of childhood, climbing a tree. And if you have one tree in your own backyard, and you have one child climbing it, that's fine. But when you get 10 million visits a year, with like thousands of kids climbing thousands of trees, the impact can just be really significant,” she said.
And the park’s popularity with kids, dogs and hikers present ongoing threats to the bird habitats there, said Dennis Hrehowsik, president of the Brooklyn Bird Club.
“We have to rely on the best behavior of parkgoers and their good intentions for maintaining our natural heritage – and in this case, it's our migratory birds,” Hrehowsik said.
Ultimately, parks advocates say they hope New Yorkers will learn to recognize proper trails and not forge their own.
“We try to tell people to stay on pavement and stay on chipped paths. So if an area is not a chipped trail, if it doesn't have a clear signage that it's a path and there is pavement right in front of it, then we try to focus people on walking on them,” Bakhtiari said.
“People are sort of desperate to find places of solitude and peace in the city,” Greenfeld said. “What we really want is to find ways for people to enjoy it without changing or messing up the very thing that they're coming to see.”
Correction: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Jennifer Greenfeld's name.
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Sophia Chang
Sophia Chang is a former WNYC and Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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