The spot became so notorious that it also drew attention from police: In some years, officers patrolling the park, in Upper Manhattan, would issue public-sex summonses about once a week.
But last year, not a single public-sex summons was handed out.
A similar pattern holds true across New York City. Officers wrote 432 tickets in 2007 for what is referred to as “sex in park,” according to Police Department data. Last year, through late December, they wrote six.
Not only are summonses down, but fewer New Yorkers are calling 311 to lodge complaints about lewd acts in public. In 2013, there were 483 complaints of lewd acts; last year, there were 283, according to the city.
The decline has been so precipitous that it raises obvious questions: Are police telling frisky parkgoers simply to move along, or have New Yorkers lost some of their lust? Is it the Police Department that has changed, or is it us?
The answer may be a combination of both: City parks are more crowded, with visitors traipsing through even some out-of-the-way spaces, and police officers are also increasingly looking to solve neighborhood problems without resorting to handcuffs or tickets.
Police still target the most active locations and make arrests, yet those related to sex in public have also been on the downswing. The department recorded slightly more than 470 misdemeanor public lewdness arrests last year, down from nearly 700 in 2010. (Reported rapes have increased, but those in parks are rare.)
Phil Walzak, the Police Department’s top spokesman, cited a number of factors to explain the decline, including better coordination with the Parks Department, new policing philosophies and the decline in complaints, which he said was “probably driven by fewer overall occurrences.”
The five areas with the most “sex in park” tickets handed out over the last 10 years were Inwood and Washington Heights; Central Park; Morningside Heights; central Queens around Forest Park; and an area of Flushing that contains Kissena Park and other parks.
The areas with zero park-sex tickets recorded over 10 years were some with little to no park space to speak of — Midtown Manhattan; Jackson Heights in Queens; Canarsie in Brooklyn — and others like the central Bronx neighborhoods of East Tremont and Belmont, where there are parks but, apparently, no sex seen by officers.
The act — considered a violation of park rules that currently carries a $100 fine — has to be witnessed by an officer for any action to be taken.
“You walk through the park and see a guy leaning against a tree: What crime is being committed there?” said officer Bryan Polster, whose assignment includes Fort Tryon Park. “Just to be meeting someone in the park is not a crime. And I think that’s why the complaints are nonexistent.”
His precinct once topped all others for criminal tickets for park sex, with 81 tickets in 2007. The area contains several large parks, including Fort Tryon’s bucolic green space with sweeping Hudson River views and several wooded areas that have long been known as cruising spots, particularly for gay men.
In Fort Tryon, city officials met with residents in 2015 about the public-sex displays, and came up with a preventive strategy: A chain-link fence was installed to block access to the popular hidden spot; nearby, overgrown plantings cover another area that had drawn complaints.
In Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, residents in a towering condominium across the street on Fifth Avenue have long complained about their view of “the mountain” — a rocky rise of New York schist about 70 feet high where people meet for sex or to use drugs.
Some moved away because of the sordid sights, said Syderia Asberry-Chresfield, a longtime resident and advocate in the gentrifying neighborhood around the park. “They said that things have gotten significantly better but that it still goes on,” she said of others who remained.
A nine-year resident of the building, known as Fifth on the Park, said as recently as last year he had seen displays of public sex across the street from his 13th-floor window.
A police spokesman said that a complaint about sex in Marcus Garvey Park in 2018 did result in several arrests. But the trend is toward fewer illicit incidents — possibly aided by ongoing construction at the top of the mountain.
“It’s not the hub of sexual activity that it once was,” said Connie Lee, president of Marcus Garvey Park Alliance.
Other former hot spots have also seen less activity.
For decades, a secluded wooded area of Central Park known as the Ramble, and another one in Prospect Park referred to as the Vale of Cashmere, were prime spots for cruising. (Clashes between birders and cruisers in the Ramble were frequent over decades, and, in 2012, had severe consequences.)
A spokeswoman from the Central Park Conservancy said investments in the park, including the Ramble, created “an inviting urban oasis that improves the quality of life for our visitors. As a result, more people visit, making the park more secure.”
That is not to say that public sex is no longer appealing for some. An informal survey of online forums yielded many examples of those talking up the virtues of illicit dalliances — often in gleeful words not suitable for print.
“I don’t see any evidence that public sex has been reduced; it certainly has not gone away,” said Duncan Osborne, an associate editor at Gay City News who has written on the policing of gay sex in city parks. “The police may have changed their behavior. But I don’t think guys have changed their behavior. Look, some guys like it.”
He added that even with the progress made on gay rights, some people may prefer the anonymity of cruising. “They may see it, in sort of a strange way, as more private,” he said. “You’re not going to bump into your cousin or your girlfriend. Your family is not going to come wandering by.”
Even in winter, a recent visit to Marcus Garvey Park turned up evidence of public sex such as condoms on the ground and in bushes. A secluded path in Fort Tryon Park along a rock face near the park entrance yielded similar scenes.
Like many areas of the city, crime of all types in Fort Tryon Park was far more common in the 1980s and 1990s than it is today. Back then, police struggled to contain the prostitution and drug dealing that could commonly be found in the parking areas in a northern section around the Cloisters museum.
“People were having sex in cars — in the whole area in the back of the museum,” said Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who represents the neighborhood and has lived there since 1983. “That’s what the city was.”
Rodriguez said the park had undergone a transformation in the intervening years thanks to efforts by the surrounding community and police. Now, the museum, which houses medieval art, draws steady streams of tourists to the park.
“We’re not getting calls from the community for people having sex in the park,” said a police inspector, Raymundo Mundo, who leads the 34th Precinct in Upper Manhattan. “It’s not that we’re choosing to ignore or look the other way. It’s just not happening. And we do patrol on a daily basis.”
But some people still go looking for partners in the park, according to park visitors and nearby residents.
Daniel Lindenberger was walking from his home in Inwood to his job at a restaurant in Fort Tryon park one Sunday morning in October when he came upon a man, standing in his path, aggressively exposing himself.
Even though he knew that some paths had long been meetup spots for casual sex, the encounter startled Lindenberger, 31, and left him shaken.
“The only thing I could manage to say was ‘Put that thing away,’ ” he recalled. The man eventually did.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.