New York

Residents of Sullivan County, New York, love their broad views of the Catskill Mountains, lush forests, rolling farmland, and the Delaware River, rich with trout. The only problem? Most people can’t actually get to any of it—most of the land is privately owned.

The Trust for Public Land saved 219 acres in New York along the Appalachian Trail and prevented this spectacular vista from becoming developed.

In December 2011, The Trust for Public Land added 261 acres to the Cranberry Mountain Wildlife Management Area, expanding the park by more than a third.

East River Park is the Lower East Side and East Village's largest open space at 57 acres and more than a mile of waterfront. It hosts an array of activities, including baseball, soccer, tennis, playgrounds, and fitness equipment, as well as gardening and composting, and educational facilities. An important link on the East River Esplanade, East River Park also acts as the first line of defense against storm surges and rising tides for residents of the Lower East Side.

TPL worked with the New York town of Greenburg, Westchester County, and the Open Space Institute to protect Glenville Woods as a nature preserve that is part of a 580-acre strip of unbroken forest enhancing access to existing trails including the North County Trailway and the Tarrytown Lakes Trail.

The Trust for Public Land partnered with NYC Audubon on two conservation visions, The Harbor Herons Report (1990) and An Islanded Nature (2001), highlighting unprotected wetlands and other natural areas in northwest Staten Island. These reports helped catalyze the transfer of hundreds of acres of land to NYC Parks, as well as the acquisition of eight properties (totaling 131 acres) by The Trust for Public Land, for protection by the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with the Port Authority and NYC Parks, helped turn Staten Island's former Blissenbach Marina into the City's first post-Hurricane Sandy resilient waterfront park.

The Trust for Public Land worked with partners including New York City Audubon to conserve an acre of Jamaica Bay Shoreline in Queens with funding authorized by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for their Hudson-Raritan Estuary Resources Program, creating public access to the waterfront and space that will serve more than 2,400 community members and provide opportunities for fishing, picnicking, and paddling.

What if you could travel to work, the grocery store, or even Montauk Lighthouse without getting in your car?

In 2017, Governor Cuomo announced the Empire State Trail, a continuous 750-mile route slated to become the longest multi-use trail in the country. It will span the state from Plattsburgh and Buffalo to New York City. But it ends in Manhattan—leaving out the 7.8 million New Yorkers who live east of the city. The Trust for Public Land has a plan to change that by creating a historic trail that will connect the residents of Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens) to the Empire State Trail.

Marlborough, New York lacked public access to the Hudson River until TPL helped the town acquire Milton Riverfront Park, a former industrial property in the neighboring hamlet of Milton that had been used for petroleum storage, renovate the site for use as a park adjacent to the town's Milton-on-Hudson Train Station Park with the help of the town, Scenic Hudson, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation (OPRHP), New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Land Trust Alliance.

Only an hour outside of New York City, the New Jersey Highlands encompass nearly one million rugged acres of forests, lakes, and clear running streams. Stretching diagonally across northwestern New Jersey and forming a greenbelt of farmlands and forests along the burgeoning Pennsylvania- New York - New Jersey - Connecticut corridor, the Highlands are one of the region's most significant resources.

The Trust for Public Land is working to plan and implement green infrastructure improvements along vulnerable New York Harbor waterfront areas to address future threats and inform waterfront planning.

Since 1978, The Trust for Public Land has helped create, expand, protect, and steward more than 290 parks, playgrounds, community gardens, and natural areas in New York City.

Brooklyn’s P.S. 164 was designed by and for the students and community through The Trust for Public Land’s participatory design process.

Beginning in 2010, The Trust for Public Land, in partnership with Green Shores NYC, developed a green vision for the East River shoreline in Astoria and Long Island, Queens.

TPL worked with New York state and the Town of Parma, to add property along Salmon Creek to the Braddock Bay Wildlife Management Area, conserving marshes that prevent pollution from entering the creek and Lake Ontario, and making the land available for public fishing, hiking, birding, hunting, and cross country skiing.

In New York, The Trust for Public Land is helping develop nine acres of Roosevelt Island in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, which was once known as Welfare Island and a former site for hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums, creating Southpoint Park which includes architect James Renwick's Smallpox Hospital, the city's only landmarked ruin.

TPL helped conserve Torne Mountain in Harriman State Park, New York, land that includes Ramapo River basin, which provides drinking water for two million people in Rockland County and northern New Jersey, and is the site where according to legend, legend, General George Washington lost his watch on while spying on British troops during the American Revolution.

In light of the chronically deep disparities in health and wellness in Central Brooklyn compared with other New York regions, Governor Andrew Cuomo's Vital Brooklyn Initiative aims to bring a new holistic model of community development to these areas, together addressing jobs, health, housing, crime, poverty and lack of open space.