From Botany to the Beatles at Park Conservancy

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At year's end, when Karen Putnam takes over as president of the Central Park Conservancy, she will inherit a park that is two-thirds of the way through a $100 million restoration and has become a model of public-private cooperation for parks from Atlanta to Louisville to San Francisco.

It was not always so. In the mid-1970's, before the conservancy was created, Central Park was by all accounts a disgrace. Fountains were never turned on, commercial events like food fairs ripped at the fabric of the Mall, hippie "be-ins" wreaked havoc. Things slipped so badly that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced legislation to give the park to the National Park Service.

Enter Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, painter, writer and volunteer for good causes, who founded the conservancy in 1980 and headed it for the next 16 years. "We started in an absolutely Pollyanna-ish way to save the park in the midst of a fiscal crisis," Ms. Rogers said. "We had nothing but a few guys with trash stabbers."

Having won many of the battles, Ms. Rogers announced her retirement last week and the appointment of Ms. Putnam, 46, as president of the conservancy, the private nonprofit group that has taken over much of the administration of the 843-acre park. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani also named Ms. Putnam to succeed Ms. Rogers as park administrator.

Ms. Putnam, now the conservancy's development director, promises to build on Ms. Rogers's accomplishments, chiefly the restoration of the park. And she offers new ideas, like mass aerobics classes in front of the band shell and dance performances on the Harlem Meer esplanade.

She has already picked a new garbage-can design, which she is keeping secret. "All our decisions are reached by consensus," she said.

Ms. Rogers, 59, whose resignation is effective Dec. 31, is leaving in part to head a venture she is founding called the Cityscape Institute, which she hopes will work with business improvement districts and neighborhood organizations to improve the appearance of city streets through projects like better lighting. She has received initial financing from the Fund for the City of New York.

Ms. Rogers was named the city's first park administrator in 1979 and founded the Central Park Conservancy the next year; since then, it has raised $120 million and is now in the final phases of restoring all the park's landscape using private donations and public funds.

"The idea of private charitable support for a public park really began with Betsy," said Henry J. Stern, the City Parks Commissioner, referring to Ms. Rogers. "It's almost like a new form of government."

Indeed, the arrangement has become a virtual necessity in a city in which public support to parks has eroded for two decades, halving the work force. Today, there are 50 conservancy employees in Central Park, twice the number of city workers there. More than two-thirds of the $12 million operating budget is now provided by private donors.

The partnership was forged on the understanding that the city would not cut its allocation for the park because of increasing private support. But Central Park still suffers from the same proportionate cutbacks as other city parks, about 30 percent in this decade alone. This puts pressure on the conservancy to make up the difference.

In her last days on the job, Ms. Rogers, who has served under three mayors, three conservancy chairmen and three parks commissioners (including Mr. Stern in two administrations), looks back with satisfaction at restorations of Bethesda Terrace and the Harlem Meer, at recoated bronze statues and at 6,000 refurbished benches.

She claims credit for two major shifts in how the park is perceived. First, she sought to give Frederick Law Olmsted's park a single overall definition: no one part, no one use, is more important than another. "Ours was like a little Orwellian chant," Ms. Rogers said. "The park is one."

Second, she sought to present the park as a cultural institution in the same manner as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The trees and the monuments and the gardens are our collection," she said.

Ms. Rogers and Ms. Putnam have similar outlooks. Both have bachelor's degrees from Wellesley College and graduate degrees from Yale University (Ms. Putnam's in American studies, with a dissertation on Walt Whitman).

Ms. Putnam, who moved often as a child, was active in fund-raising at Yale, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, where she taught literature. Before joining the conservancy in 1993, she headed the development arm of the Brooklyn Museum for four years, raising $31 million for a major expansion.

Her concerns about Central Park also begin with money. A worry within the conservancy is that in a few years, after the renovations are finished, the city will not spend enough for maintenance and donors will not give as enthusiastically for cleaning as for building. Maintaining the refurbished Great Lawn alone might add $500,000 to the park's budget, estimated at more than $14 million after restorations are complete, $2 million more than this year's budget.

It was partly to handle this coming cash shortage that the conservancy earlier this year pushed a plan to tax residents around the park for maintenance expenses, a plan killed by Mayor Giuliani. The conservancy is now trying to persuade the city to share concession revenue with it, as the city does with its zoos.

"We've absolutely got to do something about the financing," Ms. Putnam said. "It's hard to catch someone's attention by saying, 'It looks fine now, but it might not later.' "

The new administrator is leery of allowing big events on the restored Great Lawn, though she does not rule out some events -- for instance, if the surviving Beatles were to get together. "When it comes to the Beatles, you're talking about my generation," she said, laughing.

Gordon J. Davis, a former Parks Commissioner who in 1978 came up with the idea of having a Central Park administrator, said he spent two hours talking with Ms. Putnam to determine how she would carry the torch he helped ignite. At the end, he pointed to a tree and asked Ms. Putnam if she could identify it.

Ms. Putnam could not, though she praised the tree. "I was so relieved," Mr. Davis said. "Betsy would have given me an hour speech."