A Teen Wants Lights on a Riverside Park Field, and Parks Likes the Idea. There’s Just One Big Problem

A high school student wants to make it possible to play soccer after dark in Riverside Park, and the park’s top official says the city likes the idea. Making it happen is another story.

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Emma, a Beacon High School student, pitched her plan for sports lighting at Monday night’s joint meeting of Community Board 7’s Parks & Environment Committee and Public Safety Task Force. Her target is the big turf field in Riverside Park between West 107th and 108th Streets (Neville Colman Field).

Emma mapped every soccer field she could find in Manhattan. The area around the 100s has plenty of them, including about a dozen in Central Park’s North Meadow and three in Riverside Park. But none of the 18 full-size fields she counted in the 100s had lights. “This neighborhood, which has so many athletic fields, does not have a single field of lights,” she told the committee. The closest lit fields she identified are up at Riverbank on West 145th Street and down around West 53rd Street. She said the 107th Street field is the biggest of the 18, setting aside the cluster of fields in Central Park.

She also showed a photo she took a few weeks ago of people playing a game on the field around 9 p.m., in the dark. “It is extremely dangerous to play soccer at night,” she said, adding that players can’t see the ball and are more prone to injury. Under her plan, the lights would stay on until 10 p.m.

Emma argued the lights wouldn’t bother neighbors, because the field sits several levels down in the park and the lights would be tilted toward the ground. She said she also contacted the NYC Bird Alliance, which told her that properly aimed lights turned off at 10 p.m. wouldn’t create a significant additional disturbance to wildlife, especially with the highway right there.

She’s submitted the idea to participatory budgeting through the office of Council Majority Leader Shaun Abreu, and she said she’s set to meet with his team in November. She’s also built a following on Instagram at @lettherebelight107, which as of writing has 942 followers, and she said one of its videos has 331,000 views (it appears to be this one). What she couldn’t find out on her own was what the project would cost, or whether there’s enough electrical infrastructure under the park to support it. She said she’d asked the Manhattan Borough President’s office, but it didn’t have that information.

Riverside Park administrator John Herrold, who joined the meeting remotely, had some answers. He called the presentation “amazing” and said Parks has been studying sports field lighting. “The parks department, the commissioner, and the mayor’s office are very much in favor of doing this,” he said.

He agreed the 107th Street field is “a tremendous candidate,” but said participatory budgeting “will not cover this.” Council members typically have about $1 million in total to split among several projects, he said. His rough estimate for lighting the field is $5 million, a number he said he was pulling “out of the air” based on installations elsewhere.

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The bigger obstacles are technical. “Riverside Park was pretty much constructed in the 1930s, and we’re lucky if we have 60 amps in a park house to run the hand dryers in the bathroom,” Herrold said. The fields sit on the far side of the railroad tracks from Riverside Drive, and the nearest cross street, 96th Street, is about half a mile away. Herrold said the lighting vaults that power both the park’s lamps and the highway lights are “just about tapped out.” Parks had to bring in new power lines when it built the field house at 102nd Street, he said.

Then there are the light poles, which need large concrete footings. Herrold pointed out that the 107th Street field was returfed in 2025. “How do we go into a brand new field and dig those big holes?” he asked.

For comparison, he pointed to the new field at Riverside Park South around 64th Street, which has lights. That park was built from scratch, so installing footings was straightforward. Its LED lights use roughly 30,000 watts, he said. Herrold expects that final section of Riverside Park South to open within about a month, give or take, once the property is transferred from the developer to the city. He told Emma she’ll be able to add it to her map as a lit field.

Emma asked whether fields closer to Amsterdam Avenue, like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, might be easier to light. Herrold said that’s possible but that he didn’t want to speculate. A board member also suggested solar power. Herrold said he wasn’t ruling it out, but that it would need a large array plus batteries to store the energy for nighttime use.

Herrold said Parks is still working on options and offered to keep Emma posted.

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