The Bolts were late for their game. Again.
Traveling from the West Village — by foot, by subway, and then by foot again — the tweens weren’t as late as they’d been the week before, after their bus had gotten stuck in traffic.
Still, the young athletes, wearing royal blue jerseys with red and blue belts to represent their middle school, 75 Morton, had to dispense with warming up. It was time to start the game.
“Playing the game is easy,” Ty Smith, one of Morton’s coaches, said. “Getting there is the hard part.”
His flag football team is not the only youth sports group crisscrossing Manhattan. Many schools in the borough, where real estate is at a premium, lack outdoor sports facilities and rely on the city’s parks for fields so their teams can practice and compete.
But those fields are more in demand than ever.
Manhattan has fewer fields than Queens and Brooklyn, for example, despite being far more densely populated. And with parents signing up their children for team sports in record numbers, the demand for fields far outstrips supply.
“At the end of the day, there’s just not enough space,” said Randy Williams, president of the Downtown Little League, which serves an increasingly residential Lower Manhattan. The league had nearly 1,200 kids on its 86 teams this year, and it still maintained a waiting list.
As more families decide to raise children in Lower Manhattan and along its West Side, and developers continue to turn every last parcel of land into a stylish mall or high-concept playground, open fields — where New Yorkers of all ages can toss Frisbees or kick soccer balls — have taken on a new value in and of themselves.
The conflict, simply put, is this: Some people want fanciful parks. Others, particularly those with children, prefer ball fields.
This has resulted in a sort of power land grab — with citywide repercussions — among schools and nonprofits. Competition for permits to play on public fields has never been more fierce. In Manhattan, for example, there are 224 fields under the jurisdiction of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, including 74 for soccer. Last year the department approved 1,219 permit requests for those fields and denied 556; this year it approved 1,158 and denied 725.
This land squeeze came to the fore over plans for Gansevoort Peninsula in Hudson River Park, the long and narrow system of repurposed piers along the Hudson River in Midtown and Downtown Manhattan.
Earlier this year, talks over what to do about Gansevoort, an enticingly large swath of open space along the river, located just a few blocks from 75 Morton, the middle school with the chronically late flag football team, came to a head.
The Hudson River Park Trust, the public corporation that develops and runs the park, hired the landscape architecture firm James Corner Field Operations, the lead designer of the nearby High Line, to come up with a plan for the peninsula. It was to include a monumental sculpture by David Hammons, to be erected through an arrangement with the Whitney Museum of American Art, directly across West Street.
But when directors of youth sports leagues and after-school programs became aware of Gansevoort’s available acreage, they took action. They circulated petitions and packed community board meetings, urging Hudson River Park officials to include a large ball field in the $60 million project.
“We’ll use every inch,” said Leyna Madison, operations director of Manhattan Youth, a nonprofit that runs free after-school programs, including athletics, speaking at a meeting about the peninsula.
For Madelyn Wils, who since 2011 has been the president and chief executive of Hudson River Park Trust, being on the receiving end of community pressure is nothing new.
The park Wils oversees extends from just north of Chambers Street to West 59th Street, a 550-acre stretch bordering multiple neighborhoods and three community boards. Most everyone has an opinion about what they think should be in what they regard as their “front yard,” she said.
And as the West Side of Manhattan has filled in with residential developments in recent years — spurred, to a great extent, by the dramatic transformation of the once-dilapidated waterfront — there are far more families living near the park, now three-quarters complete, then there were when the park came into existence in 1998.
And their needs lent urgency to the question of how Gansevoort would be divvied up.
“It was a little tense,” said Wils on a recent tour of the park.
Most piers, because they are narrow, don’t lend themselves to full-size sports fields. But as they have been developed over the past 15 or so years, they have provided much needed green space.
The first part of the park to open, in 2003, was Pier 45, better known as the Christopher Street Pier, which in summer draws sunbathers by day and salsa dancers by night.
Pier 25, off TriBeCa, is packed with sand volleyball courts, a playground, mini golf, an artificial turf lawn and an array of lounge chairs facing the river.
Pier 57, at West 15th Street, was developed privately and leased space to Google and City Winery.
Meanwhile, the entertainment mogul Barry Diller is financing a new park and performing arts venue where the old Pier 54 once stood. Resting on Champagne-coupe-shaped concrete forms that were conceived by Thomas Heatherwick, who designed the Vessel in Hudson Yards, Pier 55, also known as Diller Island, is slated to open in 2021.
All these areas are connected by a popular Greenway, which draws serious cyclists and commuters on Citi Bikes and scooters.
The trust has earmarked $64 million to add greenery and help stitch disparate elements together into a unified park.
But completing the park has proved to be challenging.
There is still no consensus about what to do with the hulking, deteriorating Pier 40, at West Houston Street. The former cruise ship terminal contains four playing fields used by teams of all ages, and its parking lots currently generate $7.5 million of the park’s $30 million annual budget. Redeveloping the site to secure funding for annual expenses has been part of the park’s plans from the beginning. New fields, Wils said, would be included in any redevelopment scenario.
But work is already underway at TriBeCa’s Pier 26, which will have a cantilevered boardwalk and an estuarine habitat below, and plans have been approved for West 59th Street’s Pier 97, which will feature steel-and-aluminum shade canopies and a playing field for small children.
And then there’s Gansevoort, which is far wider than most of the piers, as it’s the remnant of a landfill expansion that was part of short-lived Thirteenth Avenue.
The David Hammons sculpture is currently being installed there, and a sandy area is also planned, fulfilling the trust’s longtime dream of a beach in the park.
Still, given Gansevoort’s size — and Manhattan’s field deficit — the question of how much space to set aside for competitive sports has dominated discussions.
“The issue is whether it’s for the community or tourists,” said Graeme Birchall, president of the Downtown Boathouse, a nonprofit based at Pier 26.
He cited the High Line, which has become a major tourist draw. “Pier 55 is going to be a tourist pier, Pier 57 is a Google pier,” he added. “For the community, the question is, Which pier is for us?”
When it comes to getting playing time on the existing fields in Manhattan, new schools are at a disadvantage. For example, 75 Morton, home of the Thunderbolts, opened just two years ago in response to the demand from families in the area.
A widespread practice of grandfathering — both in Hudson River Park and in spaces run by the city’s parks department — means teams that have held permits for a given field in the past are likely to get them again.
Josh Heim, a Morton gym teacher, said that when he tried to secure permits to nearby fields, he found his options were limited.
The system affects high school teams, too.
On a recent afternoon in De Witt Clinton Park, on the western edge of Midtown, three high schools — Beacon, the High School for Environmental Studies and the Martin Luther King Jr. Educational Complex — shared one soccer field.
“Sometimes we have five, six teams here, with everyone in a different corner,” said Martin Jacobson, the longtime boys soccer coach at MLK.
Jacobson was the one who actually had the permit for the field that day. He has become adept at applying for them.
The MLK soccer team has won the Public School Athletic League championship 18 times. Many of its players are offered college scholarships.
Heim said that some of 75 Morton’s eighth-grade athletes are eyeing high schools with competitive sports teams to help put them on a college-scholarship track.
Without a permit to a nearby field, Smith’s flag football teams don’t get much practice. When they do, it’s in the school gym, which is too small for a full scrimmage.
Public school leagues got fewer field permits from the parks department this year than they did last.
Aimee Boden, the president of the Randalls Island Parks Alliance, which oversees 62 constantly booked fields on an island in the East River, said that the proliferation of pay-to-play leagues, which include travel teams, has helped drive up the competition.
“They keep expanding, almost irresponsibly,” she said. “And then it becomes the parks department’s problem to find them fields.”
After the community meetings about Gansevoort, the trust and its landscape architects decided on one field for the peninsula. It will accommodate middle school games but will not be large enough for regulation high school competition.
Construction is slated to start next fall and wrap up in 2022.
The sports contingent, while generally pleased with the size of the field, had ideas about how to get the most out of it.
At the final meeting with the trust, Mark DeLaBarre, a parent of a student athlete at Morton as well as a baseball coach, posed a very specific question: “Will there be 24-hour access?”
This article originally appeared in
.