The City: Peopling the Parks

"You're the invention of the year!" exclaimed a West Side Manhattan housewife as she spotted New York City's parks committee lunching at one of his own best new inventions: the tent-topped, three-week-old Fountain Café in Central Park. Suddenly her friend was at her side. Why couldn't ther be deck chairs for hire? "People steal them," said the commissioner. Then how about miniature golf near Riverside Drive? "Hmm," said Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving, and in ten seconds he was sketching miniature-golf courses on a scrap of paper. "Sure," he said gaily. "It could work."

And it probably will. For at 35, Tom Hoving (rhymes with roving) has proved to be the brightest star on Republican Mayor John Lindsay's new team, and in the administration's first eight months has proved himself a spitfire of crackling energy with an astonishing record for cutting red tape and getting things done. So rapid-fire are his ideas and projects that one day last week he rated headlines in New York's two morning dailies, for entirely different stories.

The Daily News fancied his idea of installing a dating computer in Manhattan's Bryant Park, wryly quoted his statement: "The Parks Commission will take absolutely no responsibility for what happens next." The New York Times was all agog over his ideas for turning Flushing Meadows, the site of two world's fairs, into a future Olympic park. A three-decker golf driving range is already in the planning stage, Moving announced, and Japan's famed architect, Kenzo Tange, responsible for the main Tokyo Olympic buildings, has been asked to advise on a new Sports Palace.

Dogs & Fashions. Nor did the headlines end there. Whizzing back and forth across his five New York boroughs with their 35,859 acres of parks and 11,000 employees backed by an annual capital budget of $28.2 million, Hoving has managed to announce free dog schools in Central Park (40 dogs and owners showed up opening day), officiate at a kite-flying contest, and make sure that there were 500 old car tires ready for the upcoming tire-rolling contest.

New York's new master of games also showed up on Central Park's Mall to introduce Batman and Robin and dutifully wore his Bat tie. "It unfolds and becomes a cape," he told the awed gaggle of youngsters. He was also on hand for the Beatles at Shea Stadium, stopped off to buy a new Honda Hawkeye for faster mobility through traffic, and was ad-libbing at an outdoor park fashion show, backed by the blasting rock 'n' roll of a Yale combo known as the Five-Card Stud, when he got a call from the mayor. A bit petulantly, Lindsay told Hoving that he'd like a little advance notice; Lindsay himself would like to make the scene.

Out of Line. Hoving was one of Lindsay's first appointments when the new mayor took over the crisis-laden city and announced that he would make over New York into "Fun City." A mixture of madcap aristocrat, merry medievalist and serious scholar, Hoving gave up his job as curator at the Metropolitan Museum's Rockefeller-endowed Cloisters, even though it may have put him out of the line of succession for the post of director of the Met.