Carolyn Angiolillo

I was born and raised in Williamsburg Brooklyn in New York City in the 1950s. I attended Catholic elementary and high school and after a brief time at Brooklyn College transferred to St. John’s University earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Studies. After graduation, I was hired by the City of New York Parks & Recreation Department as an Urban Park Ranger creating and offering environmental programs to school children and adults using the city parks as outdoor classrooms. As I climbed through the ranks, I managed a $1 million grant from the Federal government to recruit Urban Park Rangers in disadvantaged neighborhood parks to expand environmental programming in those areas; and was selected as an Ambassador to other cities in the United States and abroad in Liverpool, England to aide in creating Park Ranger programs there. While working at the Parks Department, I attended St. John’s University at night and after three years earned a Master of Arts Degree in Government & Politics. After receiving my degree, I taught undergraduate students there as an Adjunct Professor. After working for the city, I was hired by The Parks Council (now New Yorkers for Parks) a civic, environmental advocacy nonprofit organization as Director of their Work/Study Program, created by Mrs. Sulzberger of the New York Times putting 800 disadvantaged teens to work during the summer and on weekends in jobs in the City’s parks to provide them with a wage and teach them about the environment and the world of work. Upon networking with other groups of this type, I was accepted to serve as a Board Member of the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps, an umbrella group that lobbied for these programs across America on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. At this time, I was able to get Parks Council Board approval to change the name of the program to more closely identify with its nature and renamed it the Urban Conservation Corps. With monies received from President George Bush’s Thousand Points of Light Program, I was able to hire teens year-round. In addition, when the Rodney King incident provoked the Los Angeles riots, I was able to procure $975,000 from the City’s Department of Employment to hire 3600 young people in summer jobs to work in approximately 80 parks throughout the city. While I traveled across the city every day, I noticed that even though there was a substantial amount of parkland in New York City, there were some neighborhoods that lacked recreational areas, and one of them was East Harlem. Bill Bell, a reporter for the New York Daily Newspaper was always gracious to do a story with photos each year on the young people working in the parks across the city and was instrumental on doing a two-page article with photos on a vacant parcel of land I was looking at in East Harlem to convert into a baseball field. Upon reading the article, Major League Baseball (MLB) gave me a call and said they wanted to help. With the permission of the Community Board, Metro North Railroad who owned the vacant land, and the Parks Department, MLB built two regulation baseball fields on the land. A press event was held with Baseball Commissioner Faye Vincent, the Parks Commissioner, Parks Council Board Members and the local community to inaugurate the opening of the baseball fields to the young people of the neighborhood. After reading this story, Bronx GreenUp staff called me to ask if I could help them find a vacant area to put a baseball field in the Crotona neighborhood in the south Bronx. The neighborhood kids had been using a vacant plot of land owned by the Wildlife Conservation Society/Bronx Zoo and now that land was selected for building a new animal exhibit. With the assistance of Bronx Zoo Officials, Bronx GreenUp staff, the Crotona Neighborhood Association and Congressman Eliot Engel’s Office, and balls and bats donated by New York Yankee Don Mattingly, we were able to ascertain a parcel of land to create a baseball field. A couple of years later, I went to work at the Bronx Zoo as Manager of Guest Services. In that roll, I recruited all ages for seasonal work at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s five Zoos and Aquarium. In this position, I was able to work with the Generoso Pope Foundation, to provide college scholarship funds to those young seasonal workers who were outstanding employees and could not afford tuition; and was instrumental in working with Charity Folks, a nonprofit organization to spearhead a fundraising campaign to name a new species founded in Bolivia which raised $650,000. After 13 years I retired from the Bronx Zoo and moved to Longboat Key, Florida where I worked for the Manatee County Parks & Recreation Department and afterwards for the United Way Suncoast. After being fully retired and sitting on my couch during the pandemic with little to do, I started to think about the book I always wanted to write – about my life growing up in Williamsburg Brooklyn. I wanted to capture the nostalgia of the old Italian neighborhood which had been eclipsed in the last couple of decades by a new generation. With my co-author Ronald Joseph Kule, our book, A Brooklyn Saga, Stories from the Stoop was born. The book traces the steps of young woman as she grows up amongst Mob mentality, Catholic Church vagaries and Old-World Italian culture in the 1950s-60s-70s! I really enjoyed the book writing process as it made me descend into a trance of years past. I dedicated the book to my parents and wish they were around to read it. Now I am off to promote the book through book signings and media opportunities.