Senior Vice President and Director of City Park Development Adrian Benepe reflects on his almost four decades working in and around New York City's parks, and the rebirth and improvements documented in movies.
The city's parks have gone from graffiti-strewn, menacing and dark backdrops to glamorous ambassadors for the city and its now record levels of tourism, and eventually the movies reflected those changes.
Central Park has reportedly been in more movies than any other, with more than 350 as of 2011. Movie shoots promote both the park and the city, and help New York create tens of thousands of jobs. According to the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater & Broadcasting, film production in the city is a $7 billion-dollar-per-year business, employing more than 130,000 people.
Hair, filmed almost exclusively in Central Park in 1979, could never be shot on the Sheep Meadow again, as the strict rules protecting it now would not allow the kinds of equipment or crowds that were part of the shoot 36 years ago.
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