John Paulson gives US$100m to Central Park

When the hedge fund manager John Paulson stood in front of the Bethesda Fountain in the heart of New York's Central Park and announced a US$100 million gift to the Central Park Conservancy, it seemed to come out of nowhere, like an errant ball from one of the park's playing fields.

But the largest donation in the history of parks in New York - and possibly the nation and the world - was, in a sense, decades in the making. It stretched back to the days when Paulson, now 56, hung out at the fountain as a teenager, beneath the bronze statue Angel of the Waters, which was then scrawled with graffiti and bone dry. And it took shape more recently on walks with the president of the conservancy, Doug Blonsky, through the park's North Woods.

The gift comes as Central Park is at a high point, after decades of improvements and restorations - of stone bridges and historic buildings, great lawns and bodies of water - undertaken by the conservancy, the non-profit group that manages it on behalf of the city, since its formation in 1980.

The park, by all accounts, has not looked this good since the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created it in the mid-19th century from a 341-hectare rectangle in the centre of Manhattan.

But the conservancy's leaders note that the park's future success was never assured, citing past periods of decline, particularly the nadir of the 1970s. The US$100 million donation should change that.

"The cycles of decline and restoration that this park has suffered for so long will be broken forever," Blonsky told a briefing attended by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as past and present parks commissioners and the conservancy's founders.