Dolphin Park Nears Reopening

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is responsible for five airports, six bridges and tunnels, the largest container port on the East Coast — and one small playground on Cabrini Boulevard.

That playground, Dolphin Park, has been closed for around seven years. Children walking by can see decently maintained play equipment, tantalizingly close and totally off-limits. A New York Times headline last summer described it as “The Manhattan Park That Keeps Children Locked Out.”

For a long time, the Port Authority has searched for a nonprofit partner to help them operate the park. But a Port Authority official, Christopher Lee, told me this week that the agency is finally ready to unlock the gates, with or without a community partner to run it. The goal, he said, is "to open by Memorial Day."

The Origin Story 

Dolphin Park opened in 1994, on a strip of Port Authority land next to the George Washington Bridge. Its official name is the George Washington Bridge Park, but everyone calls it Dolphin Park because of a handsome dolphin statue that doubles as a water feature.

The New York Times ran an article in 1994 about the soon-to-be-opened park, reporting that neighborhood volunteers had spent years lobbying to turn the lot into a community space.

The dynamo behind the effort was a woman named Jeanlee Poggi. “If you’re living in the city, life is tough,” Poggi told the Times. “The choice is either to ignore it or get out and work to make it better.”

The Port Authority spent around $400,000 to build the playground, and Poggi and a nonprofit she led, the West 181st Street Beautification Project, did a lot of the work to operate it. Unlike a typical city park, the playground was staffed and open for limited hours, mostly in the summer and on weekends.

The Port Authority continued to invest in the park. Then, around 2018, Dolphin Park closed to make way for construction on the George Washington Bridge. In 2021, Poggi died.

In 2023, the nearby construction ended. But with Poggi gone, and without another community partner to pick up operations, the Port Authority kept the park closed. 

Nadov Cohen, who owns Break Away Cafe across the street and has lived nearby for years, described the park as an important part of the community. “The kids don’t need to cross big roads,” he said. “They come in by themselves.”

Now he watches as workers come to maintain the space, then lock the gate behind them.

“The Port Authority Does Not Run Tiny Playgrounds”

The Times story from last year inspired some local residents to lobby for reopening. Myles Miller and David Pratt, both neighborhood dads, started a WhatsApp group called Friends of Dolphin Park. They circulated flyers calling for volunteers. Miller also reached out to Elizabeth Lorris Ritter, a former chair of Community Board 12’s parks committee. A neighbor who knows Port Authority chief Kathryn Garcia buttonholed her about the issue.

This past January, the Community Board voted unanimously to ask the Port Authority to reopen the park, saying the lack of progress had been “frustrating families and community advocates.”

Lee, the Port Authority official, told me that getting the park open is harder than it looks. “I was thinking it would be very easy,” he said during a conversation in late March. “But it’s not.” The Port Authority has to think about security, access, and insurance. And operating a playground seems to fall outside the comfort zone of the $9.4 billion agency. “The Port Authority does not run tiny playgrounds, anywhere,” Lee said. “We run humongous bridges and airports.”  

Lorris Ritter said she doesn't think this is a case of an inflexible bureaucracy refusing to budge. "I just think they're all being super-careful and trying to figure out, what are we doing here?" she said. "How do we do it in a way that makes sense for us, and how do we do it in a way that doesn't form some kind of weird precedent that then gets us on the hook to be in the park and playground business?"

Open by Summer

When we spoke at the end of March, Lee told me the Port Authority was looking for “an organization to work with us that’s hyperlocal, that’s really involved in the community.” 

“We want someone like we had before,” he added. 

So far, they haven’t had much luck in finding that partner. The Port Authority was hoping for a community organization that could handle both staffing and insurance coverage for the site. But the requests were just too much for at least some of the potential partners they spoke with.

When I spoke with Lee earlier this week, he acknowledged that the partner might not come through. “Having local people invested in any way was special. We’d love to recreate it,” he said. “But we also see the likelihood that maybe doesn’t happen, and we don’t want to keep it closed if that doesn’t happen.”

After I spoke with Lee, Port Authority spokesperson Seth Stein sent over a statement saying the agency plans to run the playground directly, rather than relying on a community nonprofit. The Port Authority, according to the statement, "will continue to collaborate with local community groups on programming and events like we have done in the past."

He offered a slightly vaguer timeline than “by Memorial Day,” saying only that they “look forward to reopening the playground this Spring.”

In a WhatsApp message, Pratt, one of the neighborhood dads, told me he’s feeling optimistic and excited about the potential opening: “The timing would be perfect for our little ones to have a safe place to play and cool off this summer.”