Central Park Draws a Huge Gift From a Fan in High Finance

Central Park has long been a favorite cause for the financial world. Now one of the most prominent names in high finance has given Manhattan’s largest park a record gift.

John A. Paulson, the hedge fund magnate who reaped a windfall by betting against mortgages before the financial crisis, has given $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy, in what city officials say is the largest donation ever made to the group.

“This is a donation that will touch literally every acre of the city’s park,” Douglas Blonsky, chief executive of the conservancy and the Central Park administrator, said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Mr. Paulson’s gift is certainly outsized: half of it will go toward the Central Park Conservancy’s endowment, which currently stands at $144 million. But the billionaire investor, whose hedge fund has been having a rough time, is only one of many financiers to support the 843-acre park.

A quick look at the Central Park Conservancy’s board reveals over a dozen members who hail from the world of finance. They include not only Mr. Paulson but also:

• Henry R. Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
• William B. Harrison Jr., the former chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase
• Thomas L. Kempner, Jr., an executive managing member of Davidson Kempner Capital Management
• Michael A. Steinberg, the president of Steinberg Asset Management
• William M. Lewis Jr., a co-chairman of investment banking at Lazard

Central Park is a favorite haunt of another onetime power broker on Wall Street: Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former Treasury secretary and chief executive of Goldman Sachs. Virtually every profile of him mentions his affinity for bird-watching and his habit of getting up early to spot winged denizens of the park.

From The New Yorker last year:

It was a drizzly day, and Paulson showed up at the Boathouse wearing a baggy suit and carrying a London Fog rain jacket. In person, he seems less like the “Superman” villain Lex Luthor, whom his grandchildren thinks he resembles, or William Hurt, who played him in “Too Big to Fail,” and more like a park ranger, full of jerky energy.

“My wife’s jealous,” Paulson said, of his walk in the Park. (His wife, Wendy, is a naturalist who led bird walks there when the couple lived nearby.) Spotting a logbook where visitors record bird sightings, he flipped through until he came to a good entry. “See, this is someone who knew what they were doing,” he said and read off the species: “Everything from a house finch to a tufted titmouse and an Eastern towhee.”

At the news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Blonsky described a long walk he took with John Paulson last fall through the park’s North Woods. The hedge fund manager kept asking about the Cascades, the waterfall and staff efforts to improve the lands.

“This was a guy who understands the park the way we do,” Mr. Blonsky said.

For his part, Mr. Paulson said that after achieving what he modestly called “business success,” he looked at various potential recipients for his largess.

What he decided upon was Central Park, where, as a New York City native, he hung out at Bethesda Terrace and roller skated around the grounds. The latter, he admitted, is something he’s not quite as good at doing these days.

Speaking at the news conference, he said: “It kept coming back that Central Park, in my mind, is the most deserving of New York’s cultural institutions.”

New York’s parks more generally have drawn attention from bankers and investors as well. The hedge fund manager Philip Falcone and his wife, Lisa, are well-known supporters of Manhattan’s High Line.

And John A. Thain, chief executive of the CIT Group and a former head of Merrill Lynch, supported the restoration of a forest in the New York Botanical Garden last year. To repay that generosity, signs noting the “Thain Family Forest” were placed throughout the are, a fact that our colleague David W. Dunlap at City Room certainly noticed:

They turn up on prohibitory signs, too. “Please Stay on the Path: The Thain Family Forest is a fragile ecosystem.”

Indeed, by the time you reach the sign beginning, “When a tree falls in the Thain Family Forest —,” you may be tempted to finish the thought yourself, “— does it make a Thain Family Sound?”