Bryant Park - Bryant Park Corporation

Bryant Park Corporation

The Bryant Park Restoration Corporation (BPRC) – changed to Bryant Park Corporation (BPC) in 2006 – was co-founded in 1980 by Dan Biederman and Andrew Heiskell, Chairman of Time Inc. and the New York Public Library. Initially supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, BPC is now funded by assessments on property and businesses adjacent to the park, and by revenue generated from events held at the park. BPC is the largest U.S. effort to provide private management, with private funding, to a public park.

By the 1970s, Bryant Park had become a dangerous haven because of drug dealers and was widely seen as a symbol of New York City’s decline. BPRC immediately brought significant changes that made the park once again a place that people wanted to visit. Biederman, a proponent of the "Broken Windows Theory" expounded by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in a seminal 1982 article in Atlantic Monthly, instituted a rigorous program to clean the park, remove graffiti and repair the broken physical plant. BPRC also created a private security staff to confront unlawful behavior immediately.

After initial successes, BPRC closed the park in 1988 to undertake a four-year project to build new park entrances with increased visibility from the street, to enhance the formal French garden design – with a lush redesign by Lynden Miller – and to improve and repair paths and lighting. BPRC’s plan also included restoring of the park’s monuments, and renovating its long-closed restrooms, and building two restaurant pavilions and four concession kiosks.

Biederman worked with William H. Whyte, the American sociologist and distinguished observer of public space. Whyte’s influence led them to implement two decisions essential to making the park the successful public space that it is. First, they insisted on placing movable chairs in the park. Whyte had long believed that movable chairs give people a sense of empowerment, allowing them to sit wherever and in whatever orientation they desire. The second decision was to lower the park itself. Until 1988, Bryant Park had been elevated from the street and further isolated by tall hedges, a design conducive to illegal activity. The 1988 renovation lowered the park to nearly street level and tore out the hedges.

After a four-year effort, the park reopened in 1992 to widespread acclaim. Deemed "a triumph for many" by New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger, the renovation was lauded not only for its architectural excellence, but also for adhering to Whyte's vision. " understood that the problem of Bryant Park was its perception as an enclosure cut off from the city; he knew that, paradoxically, people feel safer when not cut off from the city, and that they feel safer in the kind of public space they think they have some control over." The renovation was lauded as "The Best Example of Urban Renewal" by the magazine New York, and was described by Time as a "small miracle". Many awards followed, including a Design Merit Award from Landscape Architecture Magazine, which noted that the park was "colorful and comfortable....and safe". In 1996, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) honored BPC with an Award for Excellence. ULI remarked that the renovation "turned a disaster into an asset, dramatically improved the neighborhood, and pushed up office rents and occupancy rates."

The park's restrooms have won lavish praise and provide New Yorkers with a rare commodity: luxurious public facilities open to everyone. A second renovation solidified their status as, in the words of New York City Parks commissioner Adrian Benepe, "the gold standard for park comfort stations."