5-minute overview of work to 1975 - 2014

Tom Fox has designed and implemented numerous waterfront, waterway and public park projects and programs in the non-profit, public and private sectors over the past 45 years.

Starting his career as one of the first “urban” rangers in the National Park Service at Gateway NRA, Tom was a founding members of the Green Guerrillas in the mid-1970’s converting vacant lots into community parks and gardens in the South Bronx, Lower East side, Harlem and Central Brooklyn.  In 1981, he was the founder of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition bringing together 110 organizations, from the New York Road Runners and NYC Audobon Society to the Municipal Art Society and Amateur Women’s Soccer League to advocate for the preservation, restoration and expansion of the City’s public open spaces . His 1985 book “The Struggle for Space” documented the scale and impact of the City’s community garden movement, he was a catalyst in the public/private Task Force that resulted in New York City’s first open space policy and spearheaded the creation of the award winning 40-mile Brooklyn Queens Greenway.

Tom was the founding co-Chair of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition, a citizen action group that catalyzed the creation of the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the founding president of the Hudson River Park Conservancy, a public benefit corporation established to assemble, design, build, program and maintain a $1.3 billion, 550-acre Park along 4.5 miles of Manhattan’s West side waterfront.

As a founder of New York Water Taxi, Tom introduced small-scale intra-city waterborne transportation to the New York Harbor carrying 1.5 million passengers a year and connecting the City’s waterfront parks, neighborhoods and cultural institutions and built three “beaches” in vacant waterfront lots for public recreation and entertainment. The service was the precursor of the NYC Ferry Service.

He consults on select urban park and waterborne transportation projects , was recently elected to the Hudson River Park Advisory Council and is writing a first-person history of the Hudson River Park for Rutgers University Press.

 

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