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Meg Cheever is not the least bit ashamed to say how much her Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy owes to the Central Park Conservancy of New York City.

In fact, in the mid-1990s, when she first organized her small non-profit group of fellow Pittsburgh park-lovers, Cheever deliberately set out to be a clone of the New York group.

It made perfect sense for someone seeking ways to improve the run-down condition of Schenley Park.

The Central Park Conservancy — what Cheever still calls “our shining example” – had invented the wheel when it came to saving city parks from decades of government neglect and civic apathy. In partnership with the city government, it had figured out how to rid Central Park of most of its crime and trash and restore it to its long-lost original grandeur. It even invented the Hat Luncheon as a way to raise money and public awareness.

Since 1996, Cheever and her gang of park-lovers have learned many lessons by visiting cities like New York and Boston and picking the brains of 18 national parks experts. One of the earliest and most important lessons, she said, came from the Central Park Conservancy.

Everyone she talked to had urged her to get a master plan written for the parks, Cheever said. But the New Yorkers told her that while it was being written, Cheever's groups should get a "showcase project" underway as fast as possible.

"Until you do a project," Cheever explained recently, "people don’t get what it is you’re doing.”

While raising money from foundations and individuals, gathering new members and solidifying its partnership with the city, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy completed its first showcase project in 2000: the restoration of the Homewood entrance to Frick Park, which cost about $450,000.

Next came the spectacular Schenley Park Visitor Center and cafe. Costing the conservancy about $2 million, it opened in December 2001 and included important landscaping and walkway work done by the city Public Works Department.

It was just one example of how well conservancy-city partnership is working, said Abbie Pauley, the conservancy’s director of education and programs.

“We couldn’t be where we are today without our relationship with the city. They own the parks. We work with them regularly to make decisions on behalf of the parks. Meg’s famous quote is that our relationship with the city is like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

“The city is Fred Astraie and we are like Ginger Rogers. We follow their lead, only backwards and in high heels. They do the maintenance and we are there to do things they can’t do — raise money, raise the profile of the parks and bring in expertise for various park projects.”

One expert the conservancy has called in is Tupper Thomas, president of Prospect Park Alliance in Brooklyn, N.Y. Thomas, whose group instigated the resurrection of Prospect Park with lessons it learned from the pioneers at Central Park Conservancy, has been to Pittsburgh often and loves its parks.

Thomas said creating and maintaining a good relationship with the city is crucial for all parks conservancies.

The public-private partnership only works, she said, “if both partners have respect and understand each other's needs and work together.” Keeping that balance, so that the private side doesn’t get an attitude of self-importance and the public side doesn’t feel that it is getting no respect, “is what all of us work on the most,” she said.

The partnership in Pittsburgh seems to be doing well, Thomas said. “Both sides have worked very hard and are impressive. There has been a lot of give and take that I think is going to make it work so well.”

Thomas said the most important role a conservancy fills in the long run is to become what amounts to an eternal advocate for the parks. The idea is to make sure the conservancy is around for a long time “speaking up for the parks, raising private dollars and creating public awareness, so that these parks never have to go back down again.”

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