AP PHOTOS: NYC parks have become 'people's everything'

NEW YORK (AP) — Oases in the best of times, New York City’s parks have served as essential refuges through the hard times of the pandemic — havens for the city’s millions who yearn to escape their locked-down apartments, to breathe fresh air and enjoy some elbow room.

Parks Department spokesperson Crystal Howard said that in the depths of the city’s near-death experience last spring, “the parks became people’s everything.”

They’ve gone to the parks for music, for art, to work out. Children roam the green spaces, individually and in classes. Bikes cruise the trails, basketballs find the hoops, skates glide across the rinks. In a city still crippled by the coronavirus, the parks are a throwback to better, busier days.

“We don’t track park users,” Howard said. “But anecdotally, we know that there was beyond a noticeable increase in trash” — which is a problem. The pandemic has blown a huge hole in the city’s budget, forcing it to slash $84 million from parks funding.

So the Parks Department launched an anti-litter campaign, posting signs urging New Yorkers to “Show Your Parks Some Love.” And it has enlisted volunteers to augment the cleanup effort.

The creation of the city’s parks system, now encompassing 14% of the city’s land and 1,700 green spaces, was part of a movement inspired by another contagion — cholera.

“The 19th century urban park was created largely as a public health measure,” said Thomas J. Campanella, a Brooklyn native who is the Parks Department’s historian-in-residence and an associate professor of urban landscape at Cornell University.

Campanella said that after major cholera outbreaks in the first half of the 1800s, the medical profession called for measures to “bring the country into the city, to...