Central Park’s Great Lawn will be closed till April 2024 after sustaining heavy damage from the Global Citizen Festival.
Courtesy of Central Park Conservancy
The Great Lawn at Central Park will be closed until at least April 2024, following heavy damage to the greenspace caused by last month’s Global Citizen Festival.
The decision was made by the Central Park Conservancy following the free music festival last month, which is put on by the nonprofit Global Citizen each September on the Great Lawn, and this year featured headliners Lauryn Hill and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The festival, which drew tens of thousands of attendees, went on as scheduled despite heavy rain; the combination of foot stomping and machinery presence on the muddy ground caused considerable damage to the Lawn, and “fully destroyed” a third of it. The damage necessitates the need for re-seeding of the Lawn.
The closure was first reported Tuesday by the West Side Rag and confirmed by a spokesperson for the Central Park Conservancy.
“The Central Park Conservancy is very disappointed that the iconic Great Lawn is now closed and unavailable for New Yorkers to enjoy this fall,” the Conservancy spokesperson said. “The use of heavy equipment and intense foot traffic in the saturated conditions from the Sept. 23 concert damaged a large portion of the lawn and fully destroyed a third of it. Our team is now working to restore the lawn, hopefully in time to reopen this spring.”
Global Citizen describes itself as “the world’s largest movement of action takers and impact makers dedicated to ending extreme poverty.” The group claims to have “deployed $43.6 billion in commitments to alleviate poverty over the past decade, “impacting 1.3 billion lives.”
The group has put on the festival — which is free, but requires participants to “take action” fighting poverty to secure tickets — since 2012, drawing some of music’s biggest names as headliners, like Beyoncé,…
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