Heckscher responded immediately, "Henry Reed has a mistaken pastoral ideal of parks and landscapes. He simply doesn't like to see things happen in the parks. But what good is a park if people are afraid to use it?" Litter is a problem, but Heckscher is happier worrying about garbage than violence and vandalism. "We've been lucky in the parks," he says. "We've been able to work great changes by simply calling upon the people, by saying 'Come on in, the weather's fine.' And the people have responded."
Scholar
Heckscher is a scholar and a historian. He came to the Lindsay Administration in March 1967 from the Twentieth Century Fund, a small research foundation, where for fifteen years he pursued a quiet, academic life as the Fund's director--and served from 1961-1963 as President Kennedy's Special Consultant on the Arts.
He responded enthusiastically to Lindsay's invitation to join the city government. "I found I could put my ideas to the test of action," he is fond of saying.
The fundamental principle of Heckscher's philosophy of parks is a deep commitment to the individual. "The great city would seem to be the very embodiment of the mass, the death of individualism in its most obvious and dramatic form," he explains. "Here are millions of men and women crowded together, lacking the space which gave to rural living a natural privacy and independence, dependent for their sustenance upon bread and circuses.
"But none of my discoveries of the past months has been more unexpected than the degree to which a city like New York is made up of cohesive neighborhoods and passionately concerned individuals. The image of the mass dissolves in an awareness of sharply defined communities."
Out of his emphasis on the individual--his fear of the tendencies of society to make men smooth and round, rather than angular -- has evolved Heckscher's program for neighborhood parks. "Parks have always been the gathering placed for the people, the point where the values of the community are celebrated, where the business of the community is done, where everything from courtship to conspiracy has its birth."
To deal with a park in terms of the facilities which surround it and to fully involve a community in the life of its park becomes essential. "Every park is the sea into which the rivers of the surroundings neighborhood run," says Heckscher.
Last summer, for example, the Parks Department opened a small "Check-a-Child" playground in Union Square Park, where busy housewives can leave their children while they shop. For 25c an hour the Parks Department gives the children professional supervision in a modern play area. The business leaders of the Union Square shopping district contributed the money for the playground.
The Harlem Cultural Festival, sponsored by the Parks Department, was a similar community development program. In a series of seven different shows, the Festival brought together entertainers who dramatized the cultural heritage of Harlem. An evenings of soul music, one of sports, another of clothes design and modeling -- to make the people of Harlem aware of their own sharp identity within this blurred and sprawling context of urban life.
Heckscher is encouraged by the involvement for communities in park planning. "People seem to have ideas about everything," he says, "very firm and often quite sophisticated ideas. Not to take them into account would invite the failure of any projected work. To create clear vistas stopped by identifiable objects; to shape places which are open and do not become overrun; to give to the public scene a legible character -- these are important to the maintenance of independent man."
Putting the neighborhood philosophy into practices is the job of Courtney Calender, director of the Parks Department's Office of Community Relations. Calender, a young Lindsay radical, explains Heckscher's philosophy in the context of city-wide decentralization. "It's simple," he says. "Pro-