Good morning. It's Tuesday. We'll meet the new president of the Prospect Park Alliance. We'll also find out about the latest salvo from the city in the battle against trash and rats. |
 | | Jordan Macy for The New York Times |
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Morgan Monaco's longtime boyfriend suggested a walk in Prospect Park on an October day 11 years ago. He proposed in front of the Colonial Revival-style Picnic House. |
In a few weeks, Monaco will become the official responsible for the spot where she said yes — and for the rest of the 526-acre park. |
Monaco, 38, will become the president of the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit group that runs the park with the city. She will also hold the title of administrator of Prospect Park under the Department of Parks and Recreation. She will succeed Sue Donoghue, who held the two jobs until Mayor Eric Adams named her parks commissioner in February. |
Donoghue called Monaco "a great choice for this moment, coming out of the pandemic, when people are realizing how much they relied on parks" when there were few other places to go. |
"She realizes the importance of open space for all, equitable access to open space for all and the importance of having Prospect Park be a welcoming place for all," Donoghue said in an interview. |
But Prospect Park has also been a source of turbulence in the famously progressive neighborhoods nearby in the months since a man attacked a golden retriever mix and his owner with a stick near the same Picnic House where Monaco's boyfriend had proposed. The dog died. The man with the stick is Black and probably homeless. The dog owner is white. The confrontation raised issues of justice and safety. |
"As I understand it," Monaco said in an interview, "crime in the park is at relatively low levels. Safety is something the alliance and the city are focused on, but the rates are low. In this particular case, it shines light on the need for outreach services for people suffering from mental illnesses and emotionally disturbed persons who could benefit from social services rather than the criminal justice system." She said the role of the alliance was "to work hand in hand with both areas to support the safety of all parkgoers." |
Monaco will be the first Black leader of the alliance, which was formed 35 years ago to restore Prospect Park after a long slide that Donoghue said had left boarded-up buildings and "graffiti everywhere." The alliance's operating budget now provides more than $13 million a year to care for the park, and its endowment totals more than $25 million. The alliance has also arranged for more than $130 million in public funding to go to capital improvements in the park. |
"She's a real live actual thing-making happenator, if that's a word," said Richard Buery Jr., a former deputy mayor who is the chief executive officer of Robin Hood, an anti-poverty group that makes grants to organizations like the Red Hook Initiative, a community development nonprofit. Monaco has been its executive director since September 2020. |
Buery encountered Monaco at City Hall, where she worked in the Mayor's Office of Operations when Bill de Blasio was mayor and oversaw a team that focused on interagency projects intended to improve city services. She and her team "were the anchors and the planners that made many of the important things that we worked on come together," Buery said in an interview, including, he said, ThriveNYC, de Blasio's mental health care initiative. |
Her new job will bring Monaco back to the world of parks. In high school and college, she worked as an intern for Adrian Benepe, then the Manhattan borough commissioner for the parks department. After college, she worked for the department twice, once as the director of the campaign to plant a million trees. |
"To hit the big number" in the million-tree campaign, Benepe said, "we couldn't just do it by planting tree by tree on the sidewalk — we were going to max out" without coming close to the goal. He said Monaco worked on setting up events to draw volunteers to places like parks where reforestation was needed. The millionth tree was planted in 2015. |
Her move to the Red Hook Initiative "was not an easy lift," Benepe said, "because she was taking on a nonprofit that does not have a powerful board or a major endowment — a scrappy nonprofit doing important work in a neighborhood that needs it." |
For her new job, Monaco will not have a long commute to Prospect Park. "I live across the street," she said, "in Windsor Terrace." |
Enjoy a mostly sunny day near the high 50s. The evening is mostly clear, with temps around the low 40s. |
Suspended today (Simhat Torah). |
 | | Genesis Chirino saw no future in Venezuela, where expenses were soaring and political freedoms were curtailed.Desiree Rios/The New York Times |
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Put the trash out later, the mayor says |
 | | Emon Hassan for The New York Times |
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New York City, where four hours can seem like an eternity, is shortening one important interval by exactly that much. |
The change may mean a revised work schedule for whoever carries garbage to the curb — homeowners, porters or, in smaller buildings, the supers. And it may not go over well with rats looking for a meal, but it's not supposed to. They are the target. |
Mayor Eric Adams proposed on Monday that no residential or commercial trash go on the curb before 8 p.m. Until now, trash could be taken out and piled up as early as 4 p.m. The midnight cutoff, after which trash is not supposed to be left for collection by the Sanitation Department, will remain the same, though the city is offering larger apartment buildings the option of putting out the trash at 4 a.m. for a 7 a.m. pickup. |
Jessica Tisch, the sanitation commissioner, said trash bags "serve as an all-you-can-eat buffet for rats." It's a buffet she and Adams want to shut down. |
My colleague Jeffery C. Mays says the change is part of an overall strategy by Adams and the City Council to address increasing concerns about the cleanliness of city streets. The Mayor's Management Report, which covered the first six months of Adams's term, reported a 4 percent drop in the number of streets rated acceptably clean compared with the same period a year earlier. Calls to 311 about rodent sightings and trash on sidewalks have also increased. |
Tisch, acknowledging the increases in dirty streets and rat sightings, blamed cuts to the city's sanitation budget during the pandemic. Adams and the City Council have allocated $22 million in the budget to empty litter baskets more often and have restored street-sweeper cleaning to prepandemic levels. |
The Sanitation Department said the 4 p.m. start time was earlier than in several other cities, including San Francisco, St. Louis and Toronto. New York is also one of the few major cities in the country that does not require trash at the curb to be in containers, something the city is studying. |
"We're the only major city in the country that manages our residential trash in the way that we do," said Sandy Nurse, a City Council member from Brooklyn who is the chairwoman of the sanitation committee. "We have bags filled with food that sit out all night and well into the morning that are ripped open by rats. It doesn't make any sense." |
Years ago, when I was in my mid-20s, I got a job as a nurse in New York City and moved into a modest fifth-floor walk-up apartment on East 87th Street between Second and Third Avenues. |
One weekend, returning from a visit to my parents outside the city, I took a train to Grand Central, where I then stood in line with quite a few other people waiting for a taxi. |
When it was my turn, I got into the back seat with my luggage and gave the driver my address. As we zigzagged through traffic and got closer to my neighborhood, I suggested to the driver that to save a little time he could take a left that was coming up. |
Approaching the intersection, he assessed the situation and drove through without turning. |
"We got choices in life," he said. "We don't gotta turn left." |
Good to be back. Thanks to Sarah Maslin Nir for being here last week when I was on vacation. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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