Word: heckscher
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...administration's philosophy has not been without opposition. Last summer Henry Hope Reed, Curator of Central Park, attacked Heckscher, his boss, for "Commercialization" of the park...
...Heckscher responded immediately, "Henry Reed has a mistaken pastoral ideal of parks and landscapes. He simply doesn't like to see things happen in the parks. But what good is a park if people are afraid to use it?" Litter is a problem, but Heckscher is happier worrying about garbage than violence and vandalism. "We've been lucky in the parks," he says. "We've been able to work great changes by simply calling upon the people, by saying 'Come on in, the weather's fine.' And the people have responded...
...Heckscher is a scholar and a historian. He came to the Lindsay Administration in March 1967 from the Twentieth Century Fund, a small research foundation, where for fifteen years he pursued a quiet, academic life as the Fund's director--and served from 1961-1963 as President Kennedy's Special Consultant on the Arts...
...fundamental principle of Heckscher's philosophy of parks is a deep commitment to the individual. "The great city would seem to be the very embodiment of the mass, the death of individualism in its most obvious and dramatic form," he explains. "Here are millions of men and women crowded together, lacking the space which gave to rural living a natural privacy and independence, dependent for their sustenance upon bread and circuses...
...emphasis on the individual--his fear of the tendencies of society to make men smooth and round, rather than angular -- has evolved Heckscher's program for neighborhood parks. "Parks have always been the gathering placed for the people, the point where the values of the community are celebrated, where the business of the community is done, where everything from courtship to conspiracy has its birth...