National Park Service A Study of the Park and Recreation Problem of the United States

BETTER THAN 80 PERCENT of this State's people live in congested metropolitan districts and trends indicate a still greater concentration of population in the future. Eight million people live in New York City and its environs alone. Other points of population congestion are the Buffalo-Niagara, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, and Albany-Troy-Schenectady districts, all of which lie within a central strip across the State from east to west, and Binghamton in the south-central section.

The State's principal recreation resources are its mountains, its lakes and ocean frontage, the Hudson River, and its numerous historic sites. The climate of its mountain sections is such as to make it exceptionally well adapted to both summer and winter sports.

The State has made tremendous strides in recreation during the past 15 years. Officially adopted in 1924, and largely carried out since then, is a unified State park regional program based upon population requirements and the need for preservation of scenic, scientific, and historic sites for their intrinsic values and accessibility by parkways and improved highways. The system (not including the Forest Preserve in the Adirondack and Catskill regions) is administered by regional State park commissions whose efforts are directed and coordinated by a Council of State Parks in the State Conservation Department. Further expansion will depend largely upon the growth of population and the increased mobility of the citizens. Some sections of the State will require comparatively little expansion of parks and parkway facilities; others will require considerably more.

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¹ September 30, 1938.

² From municipal and county parks in the United States, 1935.