A Small Casualty in Hard Times

April 23rd, 2009 • Related • Filed Under

By GREGORY BEYER

WHEN it comes to the recession, tactful New Yorkers may refrain from complaining too loudly about their misfortunes, knowing that the chances are, there is someone else out there who has it worse.

But try explaining to a 6-year-old, no matter how worldly and well mannered, that budget cuts may prevent him from spending quality time with a penguin.

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages the city’s zoos and the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, is among the many organizations in the city facing steep budget cuts.

Last week, the society announced that 100 of its 1,200 employees had accepted buyouts and that dozens more would be laid off. Gov. David Paterson has proposed eliminating all funding for zoological institutions in the next fiscal year.

Amid the marine life, budget cuts.

The consequences of these cuts and threats may seem trivial in a landscape of home foreclosures, disappearing jobs and a pervasive sense of fragility. But the cuts would mean the trimming or elimination of certain longstanding pleasures that until recently seemed eternal.

One is the New York Aquarium’s summer education program, which for more than 30 years has run science-theme children’s camps and which the aquarium has decided to cancel. At the four-day-a-week camps, younger children learned about marine life and conservation, and teenagers earned community service credits in an intern program.

“It’s sort of this perfect storm of economic pressures,” said Jon Forrest Dohlin, the aquarium’s director. “It’s not as though anybody would like to see summer camps stop. It’s a shame, and we’re incredibly distressed about it.”

Aquarium employees have been told to direct inquiring parents to the Bronx and Central Park Zoos, where summer camps will continue, because they serve more children each year, Mr. Dohlin said. The Bronx Zoo serves about 750 children a year and the Central Park Zoo 225, compared with 175 at the aquarium.

Julie Fissinger, who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, sent two of her three children to the aquarium’s camp last summer. With the camps canceled, she said her family may opt this year for a day trip to the Bronx Zoo instead. Her son Gavin Mulcahy, 10, said he enjoyed throwing fish into the shark tank from above, as well as the camp’s access to animals, including his favorites: sea lions and clownfish.

“I enjoyed getting to spend so much time with certain animals,” he said. “I feel like they would remember who I was.”

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