No More Running Scared in the Park

NEW YORK —  The sun is already long gone as solitary jogger Pat Stewart suddenly breaks stride on her nightly Central Park run, casting a catlike glance at the shadowy spot that once put many New Yorkers on edge.

“I know what happened here,” she says breathlessly. “Everybody does, especially women. It’s where they got the Central Park jogger.”

Eleven years ago, a 28-year-old investment banker on a similar evening run was raped by a gang of roaming youths just off this jogging path near Harlem. In what became known as the “wilding” attack, the teenagers crushed one of the woman’s eye sockets in a beating that left her unconscious for more than a month before she recovered.

But while Stewart remembers the terror of that summer, she now feels completely safe running here and just about anywhere else in Central Park.

“That was a different time and this is definitely now a different park,” says the 45-year-old fashion industry worker. “This place no longer scares me like it used to. Now I consider it my sanctuary.”

Like the rest of New York, Central Park is on an anti-crime comeback. Once shunned by both residents and tourists as the city’s most likely place to get mugged, the 840-acre park is being touted by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as the safest turf in New York.

Since 1993, crime in Central Park has plummeted 74%--a rate that tops even the city’s much-envied 63% crime drop, police say.

In the eight years since Giuliani took office, Central Park rapes, robberies and assaults have dropped at least 70%, prompting the mayor to list it among the safest urban parks in the nation, despite 20 million visitors a year.

Even the number of murders has fallen from two to none during the same time period, mirroring a citywide trend that has seen homicides drop from 2,245 in 1990 to 673 last year. “Central Park remains a haven” from crime, says Eric Monkkonen, a UCLA history professor and author of the new book “Murder in New York City.”

“For dumping bodies and cleaning up their mess, New Yorkers have always had several rivers at their disposal. They don’t need the park.”

But locals know they can never let their guard down in the 143-year-old swath of rolling green fields and woodland. One morning two weeks ago, a Manhattan woman narrowly escaped being sexually assaulted in one of the park’s busiest areas when a policeman on his lunch break heard her screams and arrested her attacker.

Despite a 1 a.m. curfew, brazen crimes sometimes seize the tabloid headlines--such as when a would-be robber grabbed a 6-year-old boy in 1998 and held a screwdriver to his neck as the youngster’s family watched in horror. Or the woman who fought off a 15-year-old attempted rapist as she walked her dog one spring morning in 1999.

Central Park also made news on a day in June 2000 when 56 women were drenched with water, grabbed, stripped or robbed by a roving mob.

“Hey, this is New York City, so bad things happen--even in Central Park,” says Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. “But when crimes occur today, people are genuinely surprised. Ten years ago they would have just shook their heads and said, ‘Well, what did you expect?’ ”

Experts attribute the park’s remarkable turnaround not only to increased police vigilance but also to sweeping renovations privately funded by the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy.

Since it formed in 1980, the conservancy has raised $300 million for a range of improvements, from planting trees and resodding public fields to replacing broken lamps and increasing unarmed security.

Nowadays, along with about 115 New York City police officers who patrol the park around the clock--waging both undercover and sting operations--there are 50 “urban park rangers” and 220 park enforcement patrol officers.

“Ten years ago, this place was like a dust bowl,” says Vinnie Kane, a 37-year-old New York City firefighter as he skates through the park one evening after work. “Much of it was trampled down and unmaintained. It was dangerous and threadbare, exhausted of nature. Now look at it.”

The park has evolved into a sports showcase that features countless joggers, bicyclists, bird watchers and rock climbers. It’s the site of 15,000 softball games each year and the setting for romantic movie shots of the sweeping New York skyline, which rises from all sides.

Central Park is now more Woody Allen’s New York than the mean streets of Martin Scorsese.

New Yorker Robert Garcia remembers when he would keep his head down to avoid making eye contact with the drug dealers and their unleashed pit bulls, the men drinking beer on park benches and the teens who raced their bikes in packs, whooping and screaming.

Now he considers his visits a true walk in the park.

“I no longer feel this impotent rage when I come here,” he says. “I’d see the lowlifes who had taken over and see that nobody was doing anything about it. I was in exile in my own city.”

In the new Central Park, workmen now scramble to replace broken lights and erase graffiti--often within hours.

“We call it the broken window theory of discouraging antisocial behavior,” says conservancy spokesman Rick Lepkowski. “If kids walk by a house with a broken window, they’re more likely to break more windows. So the more we keep the park clean, the more people respect it.”

Officials also encourage runners and cyclists to use the park to inspire a sense of community and discourage crime. Having more people in the park makes crooks think twice, they say.

New York law allows dogs to be unleashed after 9 p.m., so many residents will walk their pets in the park, encouraging families to continue picnics well after dark.

“On any day, Central Park is like one of those French impressionist paintings,” Magnet says, “a Democratic urban dream where people of every class pursue every conceivable avocation in a marvelous urban ballet.”

Central Park has always suffered from a bit of schizophrenia. Designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted as a rectangular refuge from the chaos, congestion and concrete of Manhattan, it has remained relatively safe by day but a dark, foreboding place after nightfall.

Olmsted once observed that after sunset he would “answer for no man’s safety in it from bullies, garroters or highway robbers.”

Even today, says the conservancy’s Lepkowski, “we don’t encourage people to go there at night alone with money jiggling around in their pockets.”

After spending a night camping in Central Park for a 1999 New Yorker magazine story, writer Bill Buford reached this conclusion: Only a fool goes there at night.

“Other parts of New York have this reassuring grid, but Central Park doesn’t have that,” he said. “It’s a confusing place of unsettling noises that come from the bushes.”

On a recent night, Adam Kaufman, the conservancy’s director of weekend and night operations, cruises slowly in his SUV. Along Harlem Meer, a lake at the park’s northern end, he beams with the wonder of a kid in a theme park.

“Do you see any trash, any graffiti?” he asks. “I mean, this is Harlem, and there’s no graffiti. There are families still here and people fishing. Amazing.”

Nearby, a couple rise from a blanket to cautiously approach Kaufman’s truck. “Is it safe here?” asks Heidi Vollmer, an organic chemist at New York’s Columbia University. “We don’t usually hang out in the park at night.”

Vollmer says that while she waited in the park for tickets to an outdoor theater performance recently, a body was found in the bushes nearby. “I gotta admit that gave me the creeps. But I just wrote it off as a typical New York experience.”

At the site of the Central Park jogger attack, police Officer Brian Winrow stands as a blue-uniformed legacy to one of the park’s more ominous chapters. “Ever since that attack, we’ve had a cop here 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says the 29-year-old officer.

Winrow finds his 3 p.m.-to-midnight shift dull.

“This is like working a small-town beat. It’s usually pretty quiet. I don’t get to make many arrests.”

So would he ever come to Central Park after dark?

“No way,” he says. “I don’t care how many lights they got in here.”