Press Releases

In all five boroughs, NYC Parks made critical investments in our shared greenspaces, promoting resiliency, building community, and helping New Yorkers stay healthy and safe

With 2024 coming to an end, NYC Parks is looking back on a year of caring for our city’s living infrastructure: the parks, playgrounds, natural areas, pools, and recreation centers that help New Yorkers connect with their neighbors, have safe fun, and enjoy all the mental and physical health benefits of time outdoors.

This year, we released our Vital Parks for All plan, an initial investment of over $3.2 billion across ten strategic initiatives that will expand greenspace access, promote public safety, and engage New Yorkers in the stewardship of their local parks. Vital Parks is NYC Parks’ framework for addressing the many challenges that New York City faces: increased usage of parks after the COVID pandemic; the loneliness crisis; the threats of climate change and extreme heat; declining life expectancy; and the current state of our aging park infrastructure. The ambitious initiatives under the Vital Parks for All include expanding bathroom access, upgrading our citywide network of public pools, expanding our tree canopy, growing our greenways, promoting public safety, empowering grassroots action, and expanding recreation center access.

“From day one, our administration has focused on creating a safer, more affordable New York City. In 2024, we continued to deliver on that vision and ‘Get Stuff Done’ for working-class New Yorkers,” said New York City Mayor Eric Adams. “Thanks to our extraordinary public servants, America’s safest big city got even safer this year, with overall crime down and thousands of illegal guns, mopeds, and ghost cars taken off city streets. We passed historic legislation to turn New York into a ‘City of Yes,’ shattered affordable housing records once again, and put billions of dollars back into New Yorkers’ pockets. We broke records for the most jobs and small businesses in city history and moved millions of trash bags off our sidewalks and into containers. But we know that there is even more we can do to continue to uplift working-class families. As we look to the future, our administration remains committed to keeping New Yorkers safe and making our city more affordable for the millions of New Yorkers who call our city home.”

“The greatest city in the world deserves the best parks — not as a luxury, but as a vital public resource. Over the past year, we have worked nonstop to maintain and upgrade our network of playgrounds, recreation centers, pools, and greenspaces, ensuring all New Yorkers and visitors have safe, accessible, and beautiful spaces to play, relax, and connect,” said NYC Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue. “From planting a record number of trees along our city streets to launching the biggest investment in our public pools in decades, 2024 has been a milestone year for our city’s living infrastructure. I’m so grateful to all of the Parks employees, volunteers, and partners across the administration who have helped make our city greener, safer, and more livable in the past year, and I can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish in 2025.”

A Vital Parks system is one that is clean and safe, green and resilient, and supported by a community of engaged and empowered New Yorkers. Here are some of the ways NYC Parks invested in our greenspaces in 2024:

Clean and Safe:

Our parks are places for both recreation and relaxation, and we're committed to keeping them clean and safe so that New Yorkers can enjoy all that they have to offer. Despite a persistent lifeguard shortage that has affected municipalities across the country, we were able to safely welcome more than 8 million visitors to our beaches and pools this summer, thanks to the administration’s efforts to increase lifeguard recruitment. In addition to an extensive recruitment campaign, the City reached a new agreement for lifeguards with DC37, enabling closer collaboration and improvements to our lifeguard recruitment and training processes. To expand New Yorkers’ access to swim safety skills and vital relief from the heat, we also launched “Let’s Swim NYC” with Mayor Adams, a more than $1 billion capital investment in building, improving, and protecting New York City’s public pools over the course of five years. This funding marks the city’s highest period of investment in swimming infrastructure since the 1970s and includes two brand-new pools.

We also went the extra mile to keep our parks and playgrounds free of debris. Thanks to funding from Mayor Adams, in 2024 we were able to deploy additional “second shift” maintenance services to approximately 100 hot spots throughout the five boroughs, giving extra attention to the sites that most needed it. We also unveiled special trash receptacles designed specifically for pizza boxes, a creative solution to an “only in New York” problem, giving New Yorkers a place to dispose of their bulky boxes while limiting the food available to rodents.

In 2024, Parks upgraded playgrounds and parks throughout the five boroughs to create engaging, welcoming spaces for all New Yorkers to enjoy. This includes some first-of-their-kind amenities, like the innovative smart basketball hoop we unveiled in Tompkins Square Park. Speaking of basketball, we continued our partnership with the Brooklyn Nets, champion NY Liberty, and Social Justice Fund to upgrade basketball courts in Brooklyn neighborhoods with acute levels of gun violence. As part of the $1.8 million initiative by Social Justice Fund, Parks completely renovated courts at Breukelen Ballfields in East New York, a crucial investment that gives young Brooklynites a shared space to have some safe fun and build community. Nearby, Parks was proud to announce with Mayor Adams a full reconstruction of the Brownsville Recreation Center, a $160 million investment. Parks also helped break ground this year on the $92 million Mary Cali Dalton Recreation Center on Staten Island, which will be completed in late 2025 thanks to an innovative design-build approach. Beyond expanding recreation access for New Yorkers, these two projects represent a major investment in public safety, providing safe and affordable spaces and strengthening community bonds.

We also helped New Yorkers enjoy our greenspaces more comfortably with investments in our public amenities, making sure no one has to cut their time in a park short just because nature is calling. This year, we installed new baby changing tables in over 1,200 restrooms citywide, providing a vital amenity for parents looking to keep their little ones happy and healthy. And it’s not just kids and parents who are getting relief. Together with Mayor Adams and our partners across the administration, we launched the Ur in Luck campaign, an ambitious initiative to build 46 new restrooms and renovate 36 existing restrooms throughout the five boroughs. In March, we gave Staten Islanders a preview of what’s to come by opening a new modular bathroom at Lopez Playground, an early example of how this initiative will help us provide public restrooms faster and more efficiently.

Green and Resilient:

As stewards of our city’s natural resources, we work year-round to keep the five boroughs’ diverse ecosystems healthy and thriving, from our wild areas and forests to the urban tree canopy along our city streets. In the face of extreme heat, the environmental benefits of tree cover have never been so evident. In 2024, we celebrated another banner year for planting new trees on city blocks. With nearly 18,000 new trees, we achieved the highest tree planting total in the past six fiscal years, with a special focus on neighborhoods impacted by high heat vulnerability. But we’re not stopping there: last month, we unveiled a new tree planting strategy that will help us plant even more trees and further expand our focus on equity by prioritizing the most vulnerable neighborhoods. This new block-planting strategy will enable us to consistently plant up to 18,000 new trees per year and will ensure that every single community board gets new trees in at least one neighborhood every three years.

Trees aren’t our city’s only defense against the challenges presented by climate change, and we’ve been proud to work with our partners across the administration to promote resiliency. Together with the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC), we cut the ribbon on the upgraded Murphy Brothers Playground, completing the first half of East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project ahead of time and under budget. This is an ambitious initiative to form a continuous line of coastal protection along the East River in Lower Manhattan, and will protect 110,000 Lower East Side residents, including 28,000 in public housing, from future storms and high tides. Also with DDC, we broke ground on a $41 million project to renovate Tide Gate Bridge in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in May. In addition to prolonging the bridge's lifespan, this project will preserve the ecology of this waterway, including a new wetland environment along the northwest shore of the creek and restoration of the flora in the nearby natural areas.

Engaged and Empowered New Yorkers:

This year, we celebrated getting over 400,000 New Yorkers involved in their local parks through our new Let’s Green NYC initiative, an ambitious effort to engage New Yorkers in the stewardship of our shared greenspaces, which included an inventive online directory

to help New Yorkers find the volunteer opportunities that best align with their interests. This record number of volunteers was nearly double the number of annual volunteers we estimated in the previous year. Expanded volunteer engagement isn’t the only way that Parks is helping New Yorkers get involved. In June, we unveiled our new Vital Parks Explorer tool, a digital map that empowers New Yorkers with information about their neighborhood’s needs and resources. With the tool, New Yorkers can see how their neighborhood compares to the citywide average on critical components of a vital park system, including dog runs, greenways, volunteer groups, Parks Enforcement Patrol visitation, and more. We’ve put our data in the hands of all New Yorkers, helping them celebrate what they have and advocate for what they need.