Parks and Recreation

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Denise M. Mattes is a park designer with the Community Parks Initiative, a program of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. “Seeing the children in those spray showers on a summer day is one of the most wonderful things you can see,” she says.

Photography: 

John Emerson

In 2014, when Denise M. Mattes began her role as a park designer with the Community Parks Initiative, a program of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, she was back on familiar ground. Mattes CC’90 had worked in the department from 1994 to 2001 as a landscape architect and returned in 2012, when her three children were entering their teens. But as a result of the initiative, things had changed in Queens, the borough to which she was assigned before and after her kids were born.

“The mayor started it so that we would have more engagement with communities, to fulfill their needs as much as possible,” she says. “We’ve seen projects through, from start to finish, with a lot of input from the people who are actually using them. It’s been enormously rewarding.” 

The Community Parks Initiative, launched in October 2014 by New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, redesigns and refurbishes historically underfunded parks. Mattes and her colleagues, including a number of fellow graduates of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, convene with community members to decide which changes will best serve residents—a departure from traditional approaches to park upkeep, in which decisions are made without resident input. The program typically adds new play equipment, spray showers, basketball and handball courts, synthetic-turf fields, adult fitness equipment, fencing, benches and game tables, and pavement and plantings. The design—layout, color scheme, and materials—is unique to each site. Most of the parks have been a quarter acre to three acres in size. 

“Part of this process is to develop relationships with the community so that people will buy into taking responsibility for the park,” says Mattes, who lives in Closter, New Jersey, with her husband, Eric Mattes CC’90, a design director, in Brooklyn, with the parks department. The 134 parks that made the list are in areas undergoing rapid growth and have received less than $200,000 in investments in the last 20 years. In 2015, the initiative’s goal was to revamp the first 35 of the 134; to date, the city has committed an investment of $285 million through 2019 to reconstruct 67 parks in the Community Parks Initiative. “A lot of them are pretty sad,” says Mattes. “A few of them are nothing but big asphalt fields.”

The training that landed Mattes and alumni Gustavo Frindt CC’89 and Tara Valenta CC’07 jobs with the initiative has been crucial to making over parks that these communities can take pride in. “Rutgers fully prepared us,” she says. “We all had classes where we’d go out in New Jersey and look at communities, how they could be served through better landscape.” Mattes points out that Rutgers offers one of the few accredited landscape architecture programs in the region. And she’s keeping in touch. “Any time there’s a job posting at the parks department, I reach out to Rutgers because they’re my mentors, and I know they’ll send us great people.” 

Those future coworkers, she says, are bound to feel as gratified by the work of improving New York City’s parks as she is. “Seeing the children in those spray showers on a summer day is one of the most wonderful things you can see,” she says.