Battery Conservancy Chief Reflects on Challenges and Opportunities After Nearly a Year at the Helm
“I was already in love with the Battery,” reflects Tribeca resident Paula Recart, who last November took over as president of the Battery Conservancy from founder Warrie Price. “But I didn’t know this job would be so much fun. There is joy every day, both in the challenges and the opportunities.” The Conservancy is the non-profit organization that manages the Battery (the historic 25-acre park at the southern tip of Manhattan), and funds all of its operations. “We have much more work to do in this area,” Ms. Recart says, “which is a huge opportunity. We are expanding our board, and have started a new advisory panel, which will include artists and other creative personalities. People come here and fall in love, and go away as ambassadors for the park. They feel like they have found a hidden treasure – but we want it to be less hidden.”
Originally from Chile, Ms. Recart moved to America two decades ago, settling in Lower Manhattan in 2018. Along the way, she has served as chief impact officer at McCourt Global, a private family company with investments in real estate, infrastructure, sports, technology, and media. She also held leadership positions at the Shed (an arts center in Hudson Yards), and Ashoka, a nonprofit organization that promotes social entrepreneurship. She began volunteering at the Battery about a year before taking over as chief of the Conservancy. “Even today,” she notes, “I still do a lot of weeding.”
“Much of my experience has been about coordinating visions and bringing people together,” she says. “Another recurring theme in my career has been audience engagement and culture change, using branding and social media to educate a range of constituencies. I am now employing that ability to convene and build consensus to shape the future of the Battery. It comes down to coordinating visions. We have to inspire all of our stakeholders to agree on compromises that lead to a better future.”
“I don’t approach this job as solving problems or managing risk, because that is too reactive,” Ms. Recart notes. “Nor is this about managing a park. I see it as proactive advocacy. Our job is to imagine what it takes to bring a vision forward for what public space can be, today and in the future. It is also a laboratory of democracy, because so many jurisdictions converge here.” Multiple agencies and stakeholders operate at the Battery, including the City Parks Department, the City’s Department of Transportation (which manages the underpass that connects the FDR Drive to the West Side Highway), NYC Transit (which operates multiple subway tunnels beneath the Battery), the National Park Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Staten Island Ferry, ferries to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island operated by Statue City Cruises, the various agencies coordinating resiliency projects for Lower Manhattan, and the Battery Park City Authority (because that agency’s resiliency work extends along the Battery’s northern edge, to Bowling Green).
“This tangle of agendas can be conundrum,” she admits, “but that is how we organize ourselves as a society. It is fascinating to watch democracy come alive in this way. I did not anticipate that running the Conservancy would be so interesting in this specific way.”
But consensus sometimes emerges from the tension of competing goals. For example, Ms. Recart has led the push to remove fences around the security screening tent for the Statue of Liberty ferry that are widely viewed as unnecessarily restrictive. “For now,” she explains, “we have one section of the waterfront that opened after we demanded access, and a third of the barricade’s length was taken down. This created an area where people can approach the water’s edge, and visitors naturally gravitate toward that newly created space. But the Conservancy still believes that the fence, even in its current form, does not need to be so tall or so long. It is so high that you cannot take a selfie with the Statue of Liberty in the background – but this is something people are reasonably entitled to.”
“The real prospect for improvement,” she adds, “is to move ferry operations to Pier A, where we can accommodate security needs in a way that doesn’t take away the waterfront experience as it does today, in my view. But this goal is still several years away from being realized.”
Another battle has been to limit the presence at the Battery of vendors, who sometimes prey upon unsuspecting tourists by falsely claiming to sell tickets to the Statue of Liberty. “This is our biggest single problem,” she says. “Every single day, we have 80 vendors at the Battery. Some are legal in the sense that they have a license, while others do not. But our main concern is a bigger question than licensing. We are worried about practices like intimidation, misinformation, and harassment. Members of our staff are verbally abused each day, especially when they try to help tourists. We had to tell our team not to intervene, to avoid physical danger.”
An additional focus of intense discussion and collaboration is a proposal for the “Southern Tie-In,” the planned nexus between the FiDi-Seaport Resilience project and two adjacent resilience plans: those for the Battery and for Battery Park City. Current plans call for installing five flood gates, reducing by half the size of the Oval Lawn, cutting down between 60 and 90 trees, and creating a 15-foot tall “gently sloping landform” that will cover the flood protection structures.
“These resiliency plans will transform the Battery,” she says. “However, we need to be thinking not only about how to defend our shoreline from water, but also about how we integrate water and build solutions that incorporate nature. We need not just walls, but plantings that soften the shoreline and absorb water. This project still needs billions of dollars in funding, so it is not coming in near future. But we need to think in ways that are broad and holistic. The goal of making communities more resilient involves a cultural solution, as well as an engineering solution.”
Looking to the future. Ms. Recart notes, “our fundraising goal for this year is $4 million, which we are nearing now. But we also need to think about other sources, such as building an endowment. We have already raised almost $12 million for what we call a ‘quasi-endowment,’ which will be managed by the board to generate income while saving the principal. We are calling this project ‘30 By 30,’ because we hope to raise $30 million in honor of Warrie Price’s 30 years of service to the Conservancy. We also believe the Battery should be getting public funds, which we currently do not. Most people don’t realize that we operate entirely on privately raised money.”
Asked what pieces of the Battery jigsaw puzzle plans are missing, she says, “Castle Clinton. We are now inviting people to talk about what we can do with this treasure. It should not be an elaborate physical space, because of flood danger. But this can absolutely be leveraged to a better use than selling tickets to the Statue of Liberty.”
Ms. Recart says her favorite part of the job is “the eclectic mix of characters and interactions that our public space makes happen. We serve three overlapping communities at the same time – people who live or work nearby, visitors from around the five boroughs, and visitors from around the world. There are very few places in New York where these three cohorts mix on a daily basis.”
A related fascination for Ms. Recart is that “we inhabit the park alongside many different species – hundreds of different kinds of bees, butterflies, and birds, a wild turkey named Astoria, and several falcons and hawks. This allows us to see humanity as part of something bigger.”
“Our constant focus on place means nothing about this job is abstract or theoretical,” she observes. “Everything we do is tangible. The goal is to make the Battery a leader and role model for what public space can be in the 21st century. Because of where we are located, what we do here can have impacts worldwide.”