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The inauguration of Jimmy Walker in January 1926 brought in a mayor avowedly friendly to the expansion of the park system and the preservationists' goals. In just two years, his administration spent $10 million to add twenty-three hundred acres of park land to the park system -- more space than had been developed in the previous fifteen years. In 1930 Walker launched an even more ambitious $30 million effort to provide play space in crowded areas, although the increasingly severe depression as well as corruption and poor management left most of that program uncompleted. He also supplied the million-dollar appropriation for rehabilitating Central Park that its friends had been urging for years. [Ch1566] Thanks to this capital appropriation as well as a higher operating budget for the parks department, Central Park looked better in 1930 than it had in many years. At least initially, the Great Depression actually improved the park's condition. New York City's privately funded Emergency Work Bureau saw the parks and playgrounds as one of the easiest places to employ relief workers. By December 1930, sixty-four hundred new workers were engaged in a general cleanup of the city's parks. [Ch1567] From the preservationists' perspective a great triumph came on the long-debated matter of the Lower Reservoir. The thirty-five acre rectangular Lower Reservoir (between 79th and 86th) was no longer needed for the city After two decades of wrangling, preservationists and landscape architects had seemingly triumphed both over populist and progressive advocates of recreational facilities and over City Beautiful proponents of memorials and grand promenades.
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