Peopling the Parks

"You're the invention of the year!" exclaimed a West Side Manhattan housewife as she spotted New York City's parks committee lunching at one of his own best new inventions: the tent-topped, three-week-old Fountain Cafe in Central Park. Suddenly her friend was at her side. Why couldn't ther be deck chairs for hire? "People steal them," said the commissioner. Then how about miniature golf near Riverside Drive? "Hmm," said Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving, and in ten seconds he was sketching miniature-golf courses on a scrap of paper. "Sure," he said gaily. "It could work."

And it probably will. For at 35, Tom Hoving (rhymes with roving) has proved to be the brightest star on Republican Mayor John Lindsay's new team, and in the administration's first eight months has proved himself a spitfire of crackling energy with an astonishing record for cutting red tape and getting things done. So rapid-fire are his ideas and projects that one day last week he rated headlines in New York's two morning dailies, for entirely different stories.

The Daily News fancied his idea of installing a dating computer in Manhattan's Bryant Park, wryly quoted his statement: "The Parks Commission will take absolutely no responsibility for what happens next." The New York Times was all agog over his ideas for turning Flushing Meadows, the site of two world's fairs, into a future Olympic park. A three-decker golf driving range is already in the planning stage, Moving announced, and Japan's famed architect, Kenzo Tange, responsible for the main Tokyo Olympic buildings, has been asked to advise on a new Sports Palace.

Dogs & Fashions. Nor did the headlines end there. Whizzing back and forth across his five New York boroughs with their 35,859 acres of parks and 11,000 employees backed by an annual capital budget of $28.2 million, Hoving has managed to announce free dog schools in Central Park (40 dogs and owners showed up opening day), officiate at a kite-flying contest, and make sure that there were 500 old car tires ready for the upcoming tire-rolling contest.

New York's new master of games also showed up on Central Park's Mall to introduce Batman and Robin and dutifully wore his Bat tie. "It unfolds and becomes a cape," he told the awed gaggle of youngsters. He was also on hand for the Beatles at Shea Stadium, stopped off to buy a new Honda Hawkeye for faster mobility through traffic, and was ad-libbing at an outdoor park fashion show, backed by the blasting rock 'n' roll of a Yale combo known as the Five-Card Stud, when he got a call from the mayor. A bit petulantly, Lindsay told Hoving that he'd like a little advance notice; Lindsay himself would like to make the scene.

Out of Line. Hoving was one of Lindsay's first appointments when the new mayor took over the crisis-laden city and announced that he would make over New York into "Fun City." A mixture of madcap aristocrat, merry medievalist and serious scholar, Hoving gave up his job as curator at the Metropolitan Museum's Rockefeller-endowed Cloisters, even though it may have put him out of the line of succession for the post of director of the Met.

The blueblood son of Tiffany Board Chairman Walter Hoving, and descendant of Washington's second postmaster-general, he grew up in Central Park, meanwhile being bounced from the Buckley School (Lindsay's alma mater). He was later thrown out of Phillips Exeter for punching his Latin teacher, finally made Princeton via Hotchkiss, where his temper cooled and his intellect sharpened, and he graduated summa cum laude. After a hitch in the Marine Corps, he got a Ph.D. in art history and was snapped up by the Met, only to find himself in the last mayoralty campaign drafting position papers on park usage for Lindsay.

Hardtop v. Greensward. "Our parks," Hoving found, "have remained lifelessly suspended in time like the Pyramid of Cheops." Says Hoving: " 'Parks are for people' is the most leaden statement, but it's true." And people need recreation. "Recreational facilities should have a flair," Hoving believes. "They should be spontaneous, offbeat, with a slight tinge of potlatch--letting everything go." Under Hoving, the Parks Department sponsored a Happening in which everyone painted anything on yards and yards of white canvas. When he found that a hill left during construction was the favorite area for boys in one park, he ordered it left there; the boys dubbed it Hoving's Hill. Empty lots challenge the commissioner, and Hoving set out to turn them into "vest-pocket parks," now has 15 being created. Finding that he could issue job orders of up to $2,500 by executive decree, he has given playground after playground the cushioned safety pavement for which park mothers have been pleading for years.

"People live in the city," Hoving states. "Are they supposed, like the ailanthus, to struggle for survival by thrusting themselves through cracks in the hardtop? I don't think so." To make sure that New Yorkers will have greensward to play on and open spaces in which to breathe is Hoving's aim. He is working on everything from a "green belt" park for Staten Island to far-out projects for concrete piers with swimming pools in the Hudson. "Wherever there is a conflict of interests," says New York's most popular parks commissioner, "it must be resolved--on the side of human beings."

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