Thirty Years of the New York Restoration Project: Bette Midler’s Legacy

Bette Midler once spent her mornings clearing parks in Northern Manhattan that the city had all but abandoned. Thirty years later, that early effort has grown into the New York Restoration Project, a charity credited with reshaping green space across all five boroughs.

The organisation has planted more than 200,000 trees since 1995, alongside removing over six million pounds of rubbish from parks and gardens citywide. Its work has extended well beyond planting, too. The installation of a 500-foot artificial oyster reef along the Harlem River, built to protect Sherman Creek Park from rising sea levels and storm damage.

According to the New York Restoration Project Annual Report 2025, the charity stewards more than 80 acres of parkland and operates over 50 community gardens, with recent projects including a chestnut restoration scheme in Highbridge Park. Three decades after Midler first picked up litter alone, her charity now reaches over 1.6 million New Yorkers.

NYRP traces its origins to the mid-1990s, when parks in Northern Manhattan had fallen into serious disrepair. When NYRP began working in Northern Manhattan parks in the mid-1990s, many were informal dumps, overrun with debris.

Highbridge Park was among the sites in the worst condition, littered with abandoned rubbish and largely unused by residents. Midler founded the charity that year, with the belief that access to well-informed green space should not depend on where a person lives.

The report notes that the organisation now stewards more than 80 acres of parkland, including Highbridge and Sherman Creek Parks, which it describes as "beloved community spaces with innovative restoration projects."

Tree planting has formed a central part of NYRP's work since its earliest days. The charity has planted more than 200,000 trees, a total the organisation says amounts to more than three times the number of trees in Manhattan.

The figure spans both large-scale reforestation projects and smaller community plantings carried out with volunteers across the five boroughs. The pace of that work has continued in recent years.

It planted and distributed 4,649 trees during 2025 alone, alongside removing more than 98,000 pounds of rubbish and building or renovating eight new green spaces in underserved neighbourhoods. The charity states that it now owns and operates more than 50 community gardens across New York City.

Beyond tree planting, NYRP has also worked on habitat restoration along the city's waterways. The organisation collaborated with NYC Parks in 2020 to successfully install a living shoreline: a 500-foot artificial oyster reef with expanded marsh grass plantings at Sherman Creek Park on the Harlem River.

The project was designed to protect the park from sea level rise and wave action while creating habitat for local wildlife. The report describes the reef as an example of nature-based climate adaptation, noting that the surrounding marsh has developed alongside it.

NYRP states that the newly established marsh area is "already matching the existing marsh in its capacity to remove nitrogen pollution," which the charity attributes largely to sewer discharges into the river.

NYRP's most recent restoration efforts have extended to species-specific projects as well as broader greening work. According to the Annual Report 2025, the charity has partnered with NYC Parks and the American Chestnut Foundation since 2017 to plant more than 200 blight-resistant hybrid chestnut trees in Highbridge Park, which began producing nuts in 2023.

In 2025, this work expanded into the 1,000 Chestnut Challenge and the opening of New York City's first official Chestnut Trail. The organisation says it intends to plant and distribute thousands more trees in 2026, alongside one of its largest community gardens.

Reportedly, the charity's work now means over 1.6 million New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of an NYRP green space.