That brings me to my recent tour of Prospect Park’s Nethermead, in the company of my dog Monk. We found a sun-baked mud scar running along the path from the lake to the Nethermead. Another dirt track cut a scabrous scar across the meadow’s western flank.

This is the residue of the Great GoogaMooga, the food and music festival that recently took over the heart of this Olmsted gem. Last year it left much of the meadow unusable for the summer. Yet to leave my grumpy accounting at the doorstep of the Alliance president, Emily Lloyd, who signed off on the festival, would be unfair, or at least incomplete.

Two decades ago I wheeled my son’s stroller into the Nethermead and discovered that vandals had smashed every lamp. Tree roots suffered from erosion; graffiti was everywhere. The Prospect Park Alliance oversaw the revival of this park, on a shoestring.

So it turns to fund-raisers like GoogaMooga, which cause many to howl.

New York’s parks offer a feudal landscape of the privileged and underprivileged. There is the squire’s fancy that is the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Von Furstenberg/Barry Dillered ornament that is the High Line, and of course the grand duchy that is the Central Park Conservancy.

These largely private operations are not for plebes. The Central Park Conservancy manages $220 million in assets, and has four officials who make more money than the city parks commissioner, Veronica M. White. At a High Line fund-raiser, a host held aloft a million-dollar check and asked for a match. Another $1 million check was written on the spot.