"Everyone stands on the lawn on West Park. Four thousand people, they stand on it. They just stand on it," Dougherty told me. "The next morning, it looks like there has been cattle that has stampeded through it. There's nothing left."
While she thinks the "very friendly" First Thursday concertgoers don't take quite that toll on the parks, she would prefer quieter music that would attract smaller crowds.
"This is getting too big," said Dougherty, a board member of the group that serves as the parks' defenders, Friends of Mount Vernon. "It's getting out of hand."
Thursday's concert was canceled for fear of a muddy, Woodstock-like mess. With all the rain in the days leading up to the concert, and the bare patches in the west park's grassy areas, it was not going to be a good time for a crowd to converge, a spokeswoman for the city's parks and recreation division said. Then there was some unresolved back-and-forth over why the bare patches hadn't been sodded or seeded or otherwise prepared for a concert that everyone knew was going to take place on the first Thursday of May.
But what seemed to really trigger outrage was the city's decision that future First Thursday concerts would be pushed off the grass entirely. The stage would be erected on the paving stones around the Washington Monument, and a fence would be put up around the grass.
Again with the fences!
The city has backed off a bit since then. When I talked Friday to the parks and rec spokeswoman (the aptly named Michele Speaks), she said the city would evaluate the conditions before each concert and determine on a case-by-case basis whether the grass needs to be fenced off from the blanket-sitting, maybe dancing-in-place-a-bit concertgoers.
It's a common dilemma for many cities: how to maintain a green space amid the concrete, how to let people enjoy it without killing it.
The National Mall in Washington, parts of which have been closed since the crush of the Obama inauguration, needs about $350 million in repairs, advocates say. In New York, where it's nothing for tens of thousands of people to tramp onto Central Park for concerts or a papal mass, the toll on the grassy expanse was so severe it took tens of millions of dollars to refurbish it. The city has gotten more selective about which mass gatherings it allows in Central Park - too selective, say critics who contend that the need to protect the grass comes at the expense of, say, the free speech of a political rally.
