Parklands Chief Retires
Comet Who Never Flamed Out

By MEREDITH KOLODNER

In the early 1970s, when Parks Department employee Jane Cleaver was working on an open-space plan in Staten Island, a Teacher gave her piece of advice she never forgot.

Parks Department photo A PLACE TO REMEMBER HER BY: Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe announced that a trail in Blue Heron Park in Staten Island has been named after long-time Parkland Chief Jane Cleaver (holding photo of the trail) in honor of the thousands of acres of parkland - including that park - she acquired for the agency.

"She told me the way to success in city government is to keep a list of what you have to do," said Ms. Cleaver. "Just keep going back to your list, because eventually you will outlast everybody else. I kept a list, and she was right."

Built a Green Empire

During Ms. Cleaver's 20-year tenure as Director and then Chief of Parklands, she orchestrated the addition of 3,115 acres and 444 parks and park appendages throughout the five boroughs. She began her career as a trainee in the old Right-of-Way Division and retired last month after 38 years in the department.

As she climbed the ladder within the agency, Ms. Cleaver's job was to acquire and maintain open space in the city. Through painstakingly detailed work, and with the assistance of meticulous mapping and a photographic memory, she would assemble a site piece by piece.

ADRIAN BENEPE: 'Once-in-a-lifetime employee.'

She was often unable to obtain all the sections of land at once, but her task was to pursue the goal of an entire connected site in a process that was mired in red tape and could stretch out over a decade.

Her work helped to create Reed's Basket Willow Swamp, Udalls Cove Wildlife Preserve, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Sanctuaries, numerous gardens on the Lower East Side, and several playgrounds in the South Bronx.

"She's sort of like a Haley's Comet of a public servant, one who comes only once or twice in a lifetime," said Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe. "She wears down her opposition through gentle but extremely forceful persistence, and she pretty much always gets her way."

Knew the Fine-Print

Ms. Cleaver served under 11 of the city's 13 Parks Commissioners during her tenure, and her patience and command of arcane city rules and regulations was legendary throughout the department.

"Mayors would come and Mayors would go and Jane was still there, still working on assembling her site," said Jack Linn, who is an Assistant Commissioner and Senior Counselor at the Parks Department.

Ms. Cleaver became acutely aware of the need to understand and negotiate the decision-making hierarchy.

"It can be very complicated and entail a lot of babysitting of paper," she said. "You really have to know who has the power and what you can do to get those people to hand you the power."

She said the hardest blow came in 1991 under Mayor David Dinkins when she lost half of her staff due to budget cuts. "It took [former Parks Commissioner] Henry Stern to come and give us the ability to refill the positions" during the Giuliani administration.

City's Property King

The Parks Department is often at the center of what is arguably the city's most treacherous quagmire. It is the largest real-estate owner in the city - 14 percent of city land is under Parks' development - and at times, defending the parkland can be as crucial as acquiring it.

"Real estate to New York is what oil is to Houston. Everyone wants what you have," said Mr. Linn. "To hear her describe to people in high office the impossibility of alienating a piece of parkland was to watch a true master. By the time you finished listening to Jane, you would go away from the table convinced that there was no way you could remove the piece of property from the Parks Department."

Parks are not the only open spaces under the department's jurisdiction, and Ms. Cleaver says she took requests from communities for local gardens and playgrounds just as seriously as efforts to protect wetlands.

"I feel like my job was that of a dream-catcher," she said. "People would give us their dreams and they would ask us to make them come true, and we would hold onto those dreams for three years, five years, even 10 years sometimes, and work on them."

Brightening a School

She keeps a photo album of the "before" and "after" shots of the abandoned lots, strewn with rubble and surrounded by dilapidated chain-link fences, that were transformed into community spaces. She attended all their openings, and remembered in particular a school in the South Bronx that had stood for 75 years with no playground. The children used the basement cafeteria as a gym when lunch wasn't being served.

Using grants from local elected officials, Ms. Cleaver acquired three lots from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and three from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and created a playground for the school.

"Every child that goes to that school now will have a decent place to play," she said. "When I know I can make life better and give kids a place to be a kid, I felt it was a privilege to do what I did."

Ms. Cleaver has been honored with numerous community service awards, including the one considered to be the most prestigious for city civil servants, the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Exceptional Public Service.

She says that her patience and tenacity were apparent to her family from a young age.

"When I was a kid, my father's nickname for me was Bulldog," she said. "It's the bulldog that puts its teeth into the mailman's leg and leaves with the mailman."

Inspired by Grandfather

But she said it was her grandfather, who came to live with the family when she was seven, who inspired her to go into public service. He was a Methodist lay minister who took a horse and buggy, and later a Model-T Ford, 25 miles into the rural farming communities outside of Baltimore to serve communities that couldn't afford their own pastors.

"He had the most marvelous sense of peace, and I thought I'd like to be like that," she said. She sees her work at Parks as a sort of ministry.

In 1990 Ms. Cleaver enrolled in night classes at Union Theological Seminary, and 10 years later she got a divinity degree. She is a member of the Bible faculty there and the minister of adult education in her own congregation, the Central Presbyterian Church.

"Working at Parks was never just a job," she said. "It was a place where I got to live my faith. I was living what I believe."

Ms. Cleaver retired to take care of her 92-year-old father, who recently underwent a serious operation but is as sharp and quick-witted as ever.

"Most of us don't have the opportunity to leave a physical legacy of our life's work," said Mr. Linn. "That's exactly what she did, and she left it for everyone to enjoy."