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All over the city, parks have been proliferating, offering New Yorkers everything from popular waterfront destinations to quiet neighborhood oases. It is a tide of green that is improving the quality of life and air, as well as boosting property values - and in the process, burnishing the reputations, as well as revenues, of a platoon of the city's leading landscape architects and design firms.
In the past decade, several big, transformative projects and a host of smaller ones have blossomed. Among the major ones are the 550-acre Hudson River Park, based on a master plan by Quennell Rothschild & Partners; the first two phases of the High Line Park, designed by James Comer Field Operations; and the Hunters Point South project on the Long Island City, Queens, waterfront, deigned by Thomas Balsley Associates and Weiss/Manfredi.
"It's been a real renaissance," said Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York. "A competitive city needs to be a livable city, and the quality of the public realm is on top of the list."
All told, the city has spent about $1.5 billion on 2,019 park improvement projects - including new parks - since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002. New York currently has 167 park projects with a total cost of more than $626
million underway, and has budgeted $279 million for design work on 253 more, according to the city's Department of Parks & Recreation.
A recent study on the impact of five Manhattan parks by real estate services firm CBRE found that asking rents in adjacent office towers were nearly 44% higher on average than in buildings a block away. The biggest premium was on the periphery of the rejuvenated Bryant Park. There, asking rents are 63% higher than they are a block away, not to mention 46% above the midtown average.
James Corner Field Operations moved to Manhattan from Philadelphia in 2003, the year after the fledgling firm won the competition to design the 2,200-acre Freshkills Park on Staten Island. Since then, the staff has ballooned to 40, an eightfold increase.
Freshkills, a 30-year, $650 million project to transform what was once the world's largest landfill, is New York's biggest park development in...