NEWS: Adrian Benepe Named Managing Director and Chief Development Office of Fort Tryon Park Conservancy

Adrian Benepe was once responsible for all 1,700 parks in New York City. Now he is responsible for one, Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan. He calls it “one of the greatest parks in New York City.”

“It may be the most beautiful,” said Benepe, who has just signed on as the managing director and chief development officer of the Fort Tryon Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that works with the Department of Parks and Recreation to look after the 67-acre park. “Certainly the most magical and mysterious.” Looks aside, it is “unique in the ecosystem of New York City parks” because it is essentially the same as when it was laid out just over 90 years ago, he said. “Nothing significant added, nothing significant taken away.”

That sets it apart from Central Park and Prospect Park, to which features like playing fields, amphitheaters, swimming pools and skating rinks have been added. But it needs work, he said. Benepe has a past with this park. He got an introduction in the 1990s, when he was the Manhattan borough commissioner of the Parks Department, the job he had before he became commissioner of the entire agency in 2002. His secretary said, “There’s a woman who says she’s Dr. Ruth on the phone for you.” Benepe thought it was a prank. But the distinct voice on the line was unmistakably that of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the star of call-in shows about sex and relationships. She had lived in the neighborhood for years and said the park wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. “We walked around the park, and she was right — it was falling down,” Benepe said.

He offered to help set up a nonprofit similar to the Central Park Conservancy, which has raised more than $1 billion to maintain and improve that park. Benepe’s arrival is the next step for Fort Tryon Park. The group’s board decided to add a full-time leader to work with the park’s part-time director and hired Benepe, who had left the Brooklyn Botanic Garden after five years as president and chief executive.

“During the last 20 years the park has made a remarkable recovery,” Jeff Bauml, the conservancy’s board chairman, said. But he added, “There is an incredible amount of infrastructure that needs revitalization to bring it back.” Fort Tryon Park is different from, say, Central Park: It was created in the 1930s from a Gilded Age estate that had belonged to C.K.G. Billings, a mogul from the Midwest. Then someone even wealthier came along — John D. Rockefeller Jr., who bought the estate with an eye to turning it into a park. Some accounts say that Billings decamped to another estate he owned, on Long Island. Others say he leased a 27- room apartment on Fifth Avenue for $25,000 a year (about $716,000 a year in today’s dollars).

Benepe said that Rockefeller’s motivation was concern about development, with apartment buildings marching up Fort Washington Avenue and Cabrini Boulevard. Rockefeller reached an agreement with the city: If he built the park, the city would take it over. He hired Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architecture firm started by the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who with Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park and Prospect Park. One corner of the old estate became the Cloisters, the medieval-art outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was underwritten by Rockefeller. The Olmsted design for Fort Tryon Park provided for terraces with breathtaking views up and down the Hudson River.

Benepe wants to develop a restoration and management plan for the woodlands in the park, which he said had been neglected. “The garden areas have been well restored since the 1990s, but the woodlands have become overgrown as nature took its course, as there was almost no maintenance for decades,” he said. “It has to be done in a sensitive way. It’s become a good habitat for birds, especially. We want to maintain that habitat but restore it and then manage it. It’s a challenge.”

Photo by Brittainy Newman