On the Border
Morningside Park Is Caught in the Middle of a Debate about Safety
Casually strolling through Morningside Park, Brad Taylor is beaming. He is in his element. It’s unusually warm for November, but he is wrapped up in a thick red puffer jacket all the same. It’s the kind of jacket you would expect to see an outdoorsman wearing, as opposed to a retired architect who lives on the Upper West Side. But many years into his role as the President of Friends of Morningside Park, the park’s largest and oldest conservancy group, Taylor is used to spending a lot of time deep in the park’s meandering paths and wouldn’t be caught dead shivering from the cold.
He is in his 70s, but he is enthusiastic and rarely stops to take a breath as we walk the park’s steep paths together. His pale hair is rustled by a gentle breeze that carries the sound of car horns and the distinct whiff of diesel fumes into this natural oasis. The city is never far away.
Taylor grew up in India, the son of two Christian Missionaries who enthusiastically transferred the family roughly 8,000 miles around the world at the request of their church. He liked India and still visits sometimes. “I went to an American School whilst I was there, so it wasn’t like I was really experiencing India. That’s why I still go back fairly regularly,” he said. There was an expectation he would go to an American university, he told me, which is how he ended up at MIT studying architecture.
After university, he settled in Middletown, Connecticut, a city geographically in the middle of the state, and a city with a middle of nowhere personality. “When they built the railroads, they completely missed the city,” Taylor said and laughed. After a few years, in the mid-1990s, he moved down to New York City to live with his partner. She had a place on Morningside Drive, just off the park, on the Western, or Columbia, side.
We round a corner set with ash, pine, and oak trees, their leaves are an array of autumnal colors, red, brown, and yellow. Taylor gestures to a grand apartment building at the top of the steps leading out of the park. He points to some windows five floors up. It’s his old apartment. He and his wife have since moved twenty blocks downtown, but the flat is a reminder of his younger years. “My wife would warn me, ‘Don’t go into the park, it’s not safe,’” he said. She is a native New Yorker, having grown up in the area, but Taylor didn’t listen. He had taken a landscape architecture class at MIT where he’d learned about Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, the 19th-century designers of some of New York’s most famous parks, including the park he now lived beside. “I just wanted to know more,” Taylor said. He started exploring the park; eventually, in 2000, he joined the Friends of Morningside Park and became an active participant in the park’s day-to-day life.
Friends of Morningside Park are primarily focused on fundraising, community programs, and advocating for the park. Morningside Park has suffered from years of disinvestment as the Parks Department budget fell. It has also found itself tangled between its two historic and occasionally conflicting neighbors: Columbia University, to the West, and Central Harlem, to the East. For the most part, as Taylor knew, people from the Columbia University side were warned to avoid the park, especially after dark. The university has even gone so far as to set up a shuttle to ferry students to and from Columbia housing to the University Campus. But Morningside Park was beginning to make a comeback. The Friends were able to secure funding to revamp the playgrounds, held park sweeps to remove trash, and gathered a team of volunteers to completely replant the flower beds to make the park more visually appealing. More and more people on both sides of the park began to use it. The annual Father’s Day Basketball tournament even found money for trophies and uniforms for the participants. Things were improving, and the park began to shed its reputation as a dangerous and unwelcoming place. And then, one evening in December of 2019, a lot of the work that Taylor and the Friends had done was unraveled when three young boys encountered a Barnard first-year student, Tessa Majors, and tried to rob her of her phone and bag. When she refused, they stabbed her; she died at the top of the concrete steps on Morningside Drive.
In 1811, the city’s commissioner Gouverneur Morris laid out his plan for New York. It was an ambitious project that would see the entire city laid out along the grid pattern that we see today. In theory, this was simple, but in practice overcoming natural barriers hindered development. By 1867, the grid development had reached Harlem. Then-Central Park Commissioner Andrew Haswell Green proposed the site Morningside Park sits on today be excluded from the plan due to a great wall of bedrock on the West side 100 feet tall at its highest point. The area, Green said at the time, would be “very expensive to work, and when worked so steep as to be very inconvenient for use.” Faced with these facts, the Central Park Commission purchased the land for $1.3 million with the intent of turning the plot into a public park. A few years later, they brought in Olmsted and Vaux to design it.
Because of the massive wall of bedrock at the Western edge of the plot, Olmsted and Vaux had to be creative with their planning for Morningside. They envisioned a mixed terrain park, with a wide meadow in the Southeast and a gardenesque style in the Northeast. The West side of the park where the bedrock hindered traditional development would create snaking paths which Olmstead and Vaux described as alpine ground. From Morningside Drive, visitors would be able to enjoy views over the entire park. After an unusually protracted construction process, in 1890, the park opened to visitors for the first time.
The first sign that all wasn’t well came in 1935 when, after many years of deprivation caused by the Great Depression and rising crime rates throughout many of the city’s parks, students from nearby Columbia University and staff and patients from the nearby St. Luke’s Hospital were warned to avoid the park during the day and night-time. As the New York Times put it in an article from this period, referring to the large groups of sometimes unsavory characters who hung out in the park, “In any such miserable hoard there is always a certain number of ex-convicts, fugitives from justice and hoodlums who are ready to belabor any victim within their reach for loot however small.” Just a year earlier, the Police department had reintroduced “sparrow cops,” a force who worked exclusively in the city’s parks. They were named so as in their previous incarnation in the late 19th century they were deemed to be doing so little they spent their days policing the local sparrow population.
As the park deteriorated further throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Columbia University controversially tried to remedy the situation by building a gymnasium in the Southernmost meadow. They said it was to reinstate funds for the park and push back against the park’s dangerous reputation. The plan would have seen a two-story building constructed with a student-only gym on the upper level and a neighborhood community center taking up under a quarter of the building’s space on the lower level. Each section would have a separate entrance, one for Harlem, and another for students. To some, these separate entrances and unequal division of space were a symptom of racial bias and not nearly as altruistic as Columbia was making the project out to be. The university faced substantial backlash from the student body and the Harlem community, with a 2500-person protest taking place in April of 1968 being the final nail in the coffin for the gym.
As New York approached bankruptcy in the 1970s, funding for the Parks Department was almost nonexistent. Morningside Park ceased to be monitored altogether. With no investment and no custodians, the park fell into disarray. Ada Louise Huxtable, the famous architect and journalist, wrote in the New York Times: “Morningside Park may now be the city’s most crime-ridden, underutilized, and dangerous spot.”
The park was left virtually untouched until 1987 when a significant 10-year investment plan was proposed to redesign the park. The plan surprisingly faced a significant backlash. It turned out that locals liked the park. They pushed for restoration as opposed to renovation, maintaining the layout and aesthetics of the original park. In the end, the only significant alteration was the addition of a pond where the meadow was dug up by Columbia during the development stages of the gymnasium.
Morningside Park has seen steady investment into the 2000s. With almost every aspect of the site being touched by funding of some kind the park slowly began to shake its reputation. And in 2008 it was designated a New York City Landmark alongside many of Olmsted’s other parks.
Tessa Majors was just four months into her undergraduate degree at Barnard when on a chilly Wednesday evening in 2019, she entered the park at Morningside Drive and 116th Street. From this entrance, a series of concrete steps lead down from the 100-foot height into the main part of the park. At the bottom of the steps, the path splits into two and trees shroud the area, blocking out light from the surrounding street lamps. Three teenagers, one barely into the age bracket at just 13, approached Majors as she entered this darker part of the park and demanded she hand over her phone and bag. She refused and in self-defense bit down on one of the boy’s fingers, drawing blood. In retaliation one of the boys drew out a knife and stabbed Majors multiple times in the face, neck, and underarms. The boys then grabbed her bag and ran, leaving her phone on the ground. Majors, bleeding heavily from the stab wounds, managed to climb the steps towards Morningside Drive before collapsing at the top of them, where she was found by Ray Guzman, a Columbia University campus security guard who was on patrol.
“It was terrible. I heard it all play out over the radio,” Angelo Delacuesta, another campus security guard, told me of that night. The evening of the murder, he was sitting in one of the security booths a stone’s throw from where the incident took place. When asked if he had gone to help, he told me the guards are under strict instructions not to leave their posts and his supervisor had asked him to remain in his booth whilst Guzman and the supervisor rushed her to the nearby Mount Saini Hospital. “It was chaos,” he said.
In the aftermath of the murder, the university went on a hiring spree, bolstering the number of security guards placed around the park and adding two extra security booths, one at the top of the steps, where Majors was found, and another on Riverside Drive, at the edge of Riverside Park. Each one is now staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The NYPD also promised a swift response to the crime. Dermot Shea, the Police Commissioner at the time of the murder, said the force would increase deployment in and around Columbia University, and that it would add light towers to the park to flood the darker paths with bright white light. “It’s all hands on deck,” he said at a press conference shortly after the event. The police also added unmarked police cars to patrol the streets surrounding the park, one guard told me.
For Brad Taylor and the Friends of Morningside Park, the murder, as well as being a tragedy in its own right, was a big setback for their work. The killing of a White Barnard student by three Black Harlem youngsters was a blow to the park’s reputation. And press coverage of the murder only stoked fears. The New York Post’s headlines from the time read, “Spiraling Morningside Park Crime Stats Show a Neighborhood Gripped by Violence,” and “Barnard Campus on Edge After Grisly Slaying of Student in NYC Park.” Whilst walking along Morningside Drive, we passed the security booth where Guzman is stationed, just next to where Majors was found. Recently, the park has been plagued by a serial flasher, targeting women and even the security staff, Guzman said. This has prompted several Columbia campus alerts. Frustrated by the police’s inaction, Guzman told me the police would arrest the man and then immediately release him. According to the police, his acts did not constitute a crime, and therefore could not charge him. As we walked away, Taylor said that Guzman had been the one to find Tessa Majors on the night she was killed. “He had to take quite a lot of time off after that,” he said. “I think it was quite traumatic for him,” Taylor said.
A few moments later, as we walked past his old apartment, he pointed out a row of brown benches. Their wood was peppered with green moss from years of rain. Inscribed on a small metal plaque that sits on the front of one were the words “In Memory of Tessa Majors.” “It was so awful what happened to her,” Taylor said. “Can you believe, they asked us to pay the city $7500 to install this plaque? We just did it ourselves. They can hardly ask us to remove it, can they?”
It is well known how to improve park safety. Better lighting, reduced enclosed spaces, and a greater security presence all help to bring crime down. That doesn’t mean the improvements are always made. Adam Ganser, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, a non-profit park conservancy, says park safety is directly linked to funding. He believes the Parks Department needs at least 1%, or just over one billion dollars, of the city’s budget if the parks are to remain safe. “The parks department is essentially boots on the ground,” he told me in a recent phone interview. Think of staff as a moving deterrent. With less staff on the ground, safety is reduced. Due to budget cuts made at the end of November, the Parks Department canceled the Parks Opportunity Program, a seasonal workforce that bolstered the number of employees working in parks, including Morningside. And further cuts seem likely, too.
And crime has been rising. A report commissioned by Columbia University suggested crime had increased by 106% between 2020 and 2023. Michael King, a parks supervisor in Harlem thinks the lack of funding will soon become evident in Morningside. “Kids come along and burn these bins,” he tells me pointing to a large oil drum with a black trash liner sticking out of the top. And with less staff in the park, this kind of crime will become more and more frequent and will take longer and longer to fix,” he told me.
But not everyone thinks boosting the security presence makes the park a safer place. Daniel McGrath, an NYU student who passes the park every day, told me he does feel safer with a greater police presence in the area but also understands why many young Black men might not feel safer with more police in the streets.
Richard Miller is a lifelong Harlem resident and grew up just a few blocks away from the park. At sixty-nine, he still lives close by. He thinks the safety concerns are a result of changing demographics in the area, “I’m just saying, the neighborhood, you know, started to change when Columbia moved in. That’s when these problems started to happen.” And Central Harlem has changed. Hadil J.S. Ayoub, an environmental science expert who analyses census data, says the change can be seen best in terms of income and racial distribution. Where the average income in Morningside Heights is $56,000, the income in Harlem is just under $48,000. But as Columbia has expanded into Harlem, rents have crept up, displacing many Black families from the area according to NYU’s Furman Centre.
Miller says Columbia University’s security exaggerates the park’s safety concerns. “I’ve lived here all my life. Throughout the 60s and 70s, and I have never had a problem. I’ve had problems in Central Park but never Morningside.” He thinks if Columbia was really interested in improving the park, they could easily do so “We have events here, we put on barbecues and sports tournaments. What do they do? Nothing. I know they have enough money.” To Miller, the university is the bad guy who demonizes the park as it is the meeting point between two racially different neighborhoods. When I ask him if he thinks the warnings students receive about the park are justified, he says “You think maybe it’s just because the park is in Harlem? That’s probably what they really think.”
When you walk through Morningside Park on a brisk Monday morning you will be greeted by two sights. First, dogs. The sound of padded paws rushing through fallen leaves is everywhere. Dogs charge up and down the paths and chase each other around the run. The second is children. The park is inundated daily by children walking to the nearby public high school, Columbia High. Most mornings groups of students will take their opportunity to briefly use the playgrounds before dragging their feet to class. The park in the morning is in stark contrast to the park students are warned of. It is a place to relax and let out some energy before school. Or a place to set your dog free. Not a place to fear.
Down at the East side of the park, Taylor looks out over the children’s play sets admiringly. There are four play areas in a row stretching from 116th Street up to 123rd with a set of basketball courts nestled in the middle. They’re not all perfect, some are sparkling new, others a little worse for wear but certainly still usable. And today the park is full to the brim with dog walkers, runners, and children rushing past each other. In one of the play areas, Taylor points proudly at a tiny little waterfall that is built into the grey stone wall that surrounds the climbing frame. “We asked the builders to build that into the wall. It’s fed from the underground stream that runs underneath the park from the Hudson,” he said. He is grinning with pride at this tiny feature.
As we walk along the straight path that takes you from 116th to 123rd, Taylor takes the time to stop and point out each aspect big or small he takes pleasure in. He points to a large white Oak tree with angular branches that he says is his favorite, and the pine tree that gets dressed by volunteers every Christmas to make the community Christmas tree. He even tells me about the handball courts they plan on turning into pickleball courts. He doesn’t have a desire to play the sport himself, but he understands it’s popular and everyone other people might be more keen to play than him. This park, which to many is a place to avoid, is clearly, to Brad, a place to cherish. And for him, it’s the small things like a tiny waterfall that utilizes a quirk in the landscape that make it special and are signs that people genuinely care.
We stop in front of the rack of Citi bikes on the corner of Morningside Avenue and 123rd Street. Taylor grapples with the one electric bike in the rack that looks to be in good shape. Most of the others seem to be broken or are stuck in the racks. He’s hoping to find one to ride back down to his house further downtown. Just before he goes, he tells me, “every playground in this park has either been renovated or is brand new. It’s a big change.”
