The Battery Conservancy has a new president: Tribecan Paula Recart started her new role in November, taking over for Warrie Price, the founder and president of the organization for the past three decades.

Recart served as partner and later North America director at Ashoka, the global network of social entrepreneurs, from 2007 to 2020. She was subsequently recruited by Frank McCourt to guide his philanthropic strategy as chief impact officer of McCourt Global. She then conceived and launched a major public engagement initiative at The Shed, where she continues to serve on the board of directors. Recart was educated in Chile and spent nine years as the editor-in-chief of PAULA magazine, a significant Chilean women’s magazine known for its subtle political resistance and cultural commentary under dictatorship.

A lifelong horticulture enthusiast, Paula has completed master classes in naturalistic gardening and ecology at the city’s botanical gardens and has also been a volunteer gardener at The Battery for the past year and a half.

Warrie Price came to The Battery in 1994, after an unsuccessful run for City Council representing the Upper East Side, she told The Broadsheet in an interview last summer. As chair of Community Board 8, she had helped get several parks renovated and helped create Andrew Haswell Green Park on the East River at 59th Street. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who co-founded the Central Park Conservancy in 1980, suggested Price take on Battery Park, which was in horrible disrepair.

“Marred by graffiti, litter, mud in place of lawns, and broken equipment, it was avoided by residents and people who worked nearby, and used almost exclusively by tourists boarding ferries to the Statue of Liberty,” The Broadsheet wrote. “‘Our first step was to dig out a master plan that had been done in 1986 by architect Philip Winslow,’ Ms. Price recalls. ‘This plan had been paid for by the Battery Park City Authority, but had been sitting in a drawer for almost a decade. None of it had been implemented. That became our first to-do list. The Conservancy took charge of making this happen, because it didn’t look the Parks Department was going to.'”

Price would go on to raise $170 million between private donations and city funds, and revitalize the entire park, including the restoration Castle Clinton, the rebuilding of the playground, the creation of acres of gardens (the park is 25 acres overall) as well as an urban farm, and one of the coolest bike paths in the city, winding its way towards Bowling Green.

She also tapped the noted Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf for his first project in the United States in 2003. And she introduced the SeaGlass Carousel in 2015, a must-see stop for any Downtown visitor for its trippy, magical spinning fish — housed in a spiral shell of steel designed by Tribecan Claire Weisz’s WXY Architecture + Urban Design studio.

“It is a privilege to follow Warrie Price, whose vision transformed The Battery into the flourishing, welcoming landscape we know today,” Recart said as she started her new job. “Succeeding her is an honor I feel every day.”

The Battery’s June 9 gala will honor Price.