The Big Apple

The city's Parks Department wants to limit gatherings on the Great Lawn in Central Park to 50,000 people, a move that would end an era in which hundreds of thousands of people turned to the park as a place to protest, or to see the pope, Pavarotti and Simon and Garfunkel, officials said yesterday. The proposal, which has not been widely disseminated and requires no other approval but the department's, would also cap the number of events on the Great Lawn to six each year, with four of those reserved for the annual performances of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Parks officials say those musical programs draw "passive" audiences who go easy on the lawn's Kentucky bluegrass. The other two events would have to be held during a four-week period in August and September. (...) A spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, which lost its fight with the city last August to hold a huge antiwar rally on the Great Lawn during the Republican National Convention, said the proposed rules were aimed squarely at preventing groups like his from holding large political demonstrations in the park. "This would set in stone their institutional attitude about protests," said the spokesman, Bill Dobbs. "In Manhattan, nearly every square foot is covered with buildings, so the park is the town common, where people have assembled for generations. Now the Bloomberg administration is seeking to maintain it as a lawn museum." (...) Mr. Dobbs said it was particularly unfair that so many of the large-scale events on the Great Lawn would be opera and Philharmonic performances. "To give the symphony and opera four of the six - the bulk of them - shows the class of people whose interests are being protected," he said. (...)

Keeping Great Crowds Off Central Park's Great Lawn
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
The New York Times
Published: April 27, 2005