Mayor Zohran Mamdani: Good morning, everyone. I want to say thank you to everyone for being here today, and thank you also to Council Member Althea Stevens, as well as Assemblymember Landon Dais. In a city where almost everything costs something, our parks are not only a sanctuary from the hustle and bustle, they are also the rare corner of our city that are truly accessible and affordable to each and every person who calls the city home.
As Frederick Law Olmsted once said, "Parks are the only places where vast numbers of persons are brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, each individual adding [by his] mere presence to the presence of others." These are not just places of rest and relaxation, of leisure and recreation. They are centers of creativity, places of community where all of the people, so many people, go hand in hand in the beating heart of our city where New Yorkers make art, where they make music, where they make time for the people in their lives and those that they love.
After all, as the great MC Shan once rhymed, "Hip-hop was set out in the dark, they used to do it out in the park." And yet we know that for too long, our parks have been neglected and underfunded, the first victims of cuts, the public infrastructure most eagerly sacrificed. And as our City Hall works to build a city in partnership with elected officials at the city and the state levels, like the ones we have here today, a city where dignified life is available to each and every New Yorker, we will pursue that purpose by supporting the places where everyday people go to find that rarest of things in our city, peace of mind.
To lead this work, I am proud today to appoint Tricia Shimamura as New York's new Parks commissioner. She is an incredible New Yorker with a deep record of public service and a long-standing commitment to fighting for working people. Tricia has served New Yorkers from nearly every level of government. She has worked as a social worker. She has worked for Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney as a deputy chief of staff.
She has worked for a director of community affairs for then Manhattan borough president, now Comptroller Mark Levine. And most recently, she has worked as the Manhattan borough commissioner at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In that role, she oversaw all aspects of park services across that borough, developing a deep expertise in everything, from budgeting to horticulture.
But frankly, as interesting if not far more than Tricia's resume, is her reason for seeking to lead. She's the granddaughter of Japanese Americans who themselves were interned during the Second World War. The granddaughter of Puerto Rican grandparents who worked to make ends meet at a t-shirt factory in Brooklyn, cutting loose strings off shirts.
She grew up thinking that [the] government was not something meant for people who necessarily looked like her or came from families like hers. And yet as a social worker, she reckoned with systems that often seem too broken and too large for any one person to be able to fix. She started to see governing as not only a way to deliver change, but also a way to deliver belonging in a city that so many call home.
And where better to continue that work than in our parks, where every single New Yorker belongs. Tricia knows that stewarding our parks means more than cutting the grass and tending to the trees. It is a daily endeavor where parks leaders must work with local stakeholders to ensure that their needs are heard, to expand access to more New Yorkers, and to make these public resources truly belong to the public.
In that work, Tricia will be following in truly great footsteps. I want to recognize and express my gratitude to former Commissioner Iris Rodriguez-Rosa, the first Latina to ever hold the role in a truly incredible New York. Her 47 years of service to our city are a testament of her love of New York and quantifiable evidence of a genuinely remarkable career. I thank her and I wish her only the best in her next chapter of her time.
At my inaugural address, I quoted the great Jadakiss, J to the Muah, as guidance for how my administration intends to govern outside, alongside the people of this city. And we know that when so many New Yorkers are outside, they are outside in our parks. Whether it's here at the gorgeous Highbridge Park, running the loop at Astoria Park, hiking in Pelham Bay Park, seeing the cherry blossoms at [the] Conference House in Staten Island, watching the sunset from Sunset Park, or playing cricket like I did in Ferry Point Park.
