Last month the Fugees reunited on the Great Lawn in Central Park, with Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Pras thrilling a select group of drenched fans. It was the culmination of a free concert that also featured megastars like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and BTS’s Jungkook.
But organizers hadn’t booked the most prominent guest on the schedule: tropical storm Ophelia. The storm threatened torrential rain, but Global Citizen, the non-profit hosting the event, announced that the festival would go on. As roughly 30,000 guests crowded on to the park grass in the downpour, what was supposed to be a celebration of the environment quickly turned into a disaster for one the world’s most famous public lands.
The 12-acre Great Lawn, whose main oval includes six softball fields, is arguably New York City’s best-known green space, treasured by picnickers, ballplayers, and tourists from around the globe. But the mix of rainwater, people, and heavy equipment has uprooted much of its carefully maintained grass, leaving a wasteland of thick sludge.
The Central Park Conservancy, the non-profit that manages the park, announced this week that the event had “fully destroyed” about a third of the Great Lawn. That means that the entire area will be closed for at least the next six months for repairs. While the lawn normally closes in the winter, the damage will shut it down nearly two months early, during some of the city’s most beautiful fall weather.
Yet it was an avoidable fiasco.
The conservancy revealed exclusively to the Guardian on Wednesday that before the concert, it warned the parks department that holding the concert in the storm would wreak havoc on the Great Lawn.
Global Citizen – which gives fans free tickets for downloading its app and doing things like sending tweets about the climate crisis – and city officials led by Mayor Eric Adams decided to go forward anyway.
Simon Moss, Global Citizen’s co-founder, says organizers followed all established protocols in proceeding with the event. “We’re really pleased that we had a safe, secure event for tens of thousands of New Yorkers, that we had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new commitments on food and hunger and gender equality,” Moss said. “This year, as we have every year over the last 11 years, we guarantee that we’ll pay for any damage that’s done to the parks as a direct result of the event.”
Meghan Lalor, a spokesperson for the city’s parks department, also defended the event. “While we share New Yorkers’ frustration, we have had a positive relationship with the Global Citizen Festival producers and are confident any damages will be remedied expeditiously,” she said.
But in a city where even millionaires live in tiny apartments, New Yorkers say money doesn’t make up for the extended loss of such a cherished public space. “I’m outraged,” the city councilmember Gale Brewer told the Guardian. “The festival says they’re going to pay for it, but the most important part is that people can use the park. This should have been canceled.”
So why did the city decide to risk one of its most important parklands for a one-day event in the rain?
More than a week after the concert, much of the Great Lawn remains a swampy meadow, still bearing oozy footprints and tire tracks from the heavy machinery used to disassemble the stage.
Mina, an 18-year-old student who went to the festival, recalls how her feet sank into thick mud as soon as she got past the bag check in the early afternoon. “You had to put in some effort to not slip or get a shoe stuck,” she said. She noticed the softball fields had flooded with at least an inch of water, and people were standing on fences to try to avoid it.
Experts say the outcome was completely predictable.
A former city official involved with producing large events, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, called it “astonishing” that the Global Citizen festival wasn’t called off. “Anybody who’s ever managed turf knows you don’t put a big crowd on a completely soaked lawn,” the former official said. “So you have to wonder, who thought it was okay to proceed with this?”
Global Citizen’s Moss said that the decision was made by Adams’ office and the city’s parks department, in consultation with the city’s emergency personnel and the Central Park Conservancy, at Global Citizen’s operations tent just before the show. “As you can imagine, we were very actively tracking the weather, any lightning, any wind, any safety risks,” Moss said. “And they gave the affirmative for the event to proceed, repeatedly throughout the day.”
But the conservancy didn’t have the authority to call off the event. Instead, it tried to warn the others that going ahead would ruin the grass. “Conservancy staff shared with the on-site, pre-event teams what the impact of the increased moisture and compacted soil would have on the landscape,” a spokesperson for the non-profit told the Guardian. “We made clear that it would result in damage to the Great Lawn.”
The parks department declined to explain why it signed off on the event in spite of the conservancy’s warning. But Councilmember Brewer and the former city official felt it was unlikely that the parks commissioner, Sue Donoghue, a veteran parks advocate, would have felt comfortable with the plan. “It’s hard to imagine the parks department, with all of its experience, thinking this was an OK idea,” said the former city official.
The mayor’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But Global Citizen confirmed that it paid a nearly $2m fee for the use of the park to New York City’s general fund. According to the contract, the city would have had to refund the money if the concert were canceled.
Now comes the task of repairing the grounds – and the work will be extensive.
Moss said Global Citizen had already put up a $100,000 bond for repairs, but expected to pay more once the parks department completed a damage assessment this month. Brewer’s office believes the repairs could run as high as $1m, citing discussions with the Central Park Conservancy.
If the conservancy wants to reopen the lawn by next April, its turf team must lay down new sod quickly, before it gets too cold for grass to grow. The roots have to be coaxed into reknitting with the soil underneath, and that can take a full season, if not longer.
The Great Lawn required a complete resodding in 1995, after it was badly damaged by crowds: 100,000 people who turned out for a screening of Disney’s Pochahontas and 120,000 people who attended a mass led by Pope John Paul II. The subsequent overhaul of the lawn cost $18m and kept visitors off the grass until 1997.
Brewer says there’s a simple solution for a large-scale event like the Global Citizen festival. On Monday, she sent a letter to the mayor urging that the event be relocated next year “in a venue other than Central Park, such as an arena or stadium”.
Brewer said Adams hadn’t contacted her after the letter. But at a press conference on Tuesday, he suggested that Global Citizen would be welcomed back to Central Park.
This article was amended on 6 October 2023 to clarify that the Central Park Conservancy warned the New York City parks department, not the festival organizers or the mayor’s office, about possible damage to the Great Lawn from torrential rain.
