Activities Today
In recent years, as the economy of the northern Manhattan has lifted, the status of park has improved and is no longer a haven for petty crime and other unsavory activities. The New York Restoration Project (chaired by Bette Midler) has been working since 1999 to restore the park.
Around the start of the 21st century, the waterfront Speedway was rehabilitated and reopened as the Harlem River portion of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway.
According to city plans, by 2013 the High Bridge will be rehabilitated and reopened for pedestrians and bicyclists. The 1200–foot–long, 116-foot-tall High Bridge walkway was closed to regular public use around 1970.
May 19, 2007 saw the opening of New York City's first legal mountain bike trails and dirt jumps in Highbridge Park. New York City Mountain Bike Association in association with New York City Parks and the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) has been working together on the trails and the opening weekend featured a festival and cross country mountain bike.
As of late 2011, despite the efforts of both the New York Restoration Project and the City Parks Dept., the infrastructure of the park has decayed significantly and has not yet been fully restored.
Read more about this topic: Highbridge Park
Famous quotes containing the words activities and/or today:
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)
“We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)