Published: April 07, 1997
Correction Appended
August Heckscher, a Parks Commissioner under Mayor John V. Lindsay who was long active in public affairs and as a writer, died on Saturday at New York Hospital. He was 83 and lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
The cause was heart failure, which he suffered after being admitted to the hospital because he had been having chest pains, his family said.
Landmarks of Mr. Heckscher's tenure as Parks Commissioner included a 1967 concert in the park by Barbra Streisand, attended by 250,000 people; the first New York City Marathon in Central Park, in 1970; and a number of very large-scale antiwar demonstrations, in the park, for which permits were issued.
Mr. Heckscher was active in civic institutions and was chairman at various times of the New School for Social Research, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Parsons School of Design, the Cooper Hewitt Museum and Civitas, a neighborhood group whose role was described by the present Parks Commissioner, Henry J. Stern, yesterday as ''defending the Upper East Side from overdevelopment.''
Mr. Heckscher's 1991 biography, ''Woodrow Wilson,'' was praised by the historian John A. Garraty, in The New York Times Book Review, who said the author's ''description of Wilson's personality is by far the most persuasive I am familiar with.''
Mr. Heckscher was born in Huntington, L.I.. His paternal grandfather, also named August Heckscher, was a real estate operator, mine executive, financier and philanthropist, and is the man for whom Heckscher State Park on Long Island is named.
The younger August Heckscher attended St. Paul's School in Concord, Mass., and graduated in 1936 from Yale College. He went on to receive a master's degree in government from Harvard and to be an instructor of government at Yale.
In World War II, he served with the Coordinator of Information in Washington and later with the Office of Strategic Services in North Africa. In 1945 he was attached to the United States delegation at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco.
He also wrote and lectured widely on the arts and on politics and was the chief editorial writer at the New York Herald Tribune from 1952 to 1956. President John F. Kennedy chose him to be the coordinator of cultural matters at the White House in 1962, and he went on to serve the Kennedy Administration as special consultant on the arts.
He succeeded Thomas P. F. Hoving as Mayor Lindsay's Parks Commissioner in 1967 and held that post through 1972, serving as Administrator of Cultural Affairs at the same time. When he took charge of the parks, he said one aspect of his job was ''keeping the parks full of people and full of life.''
Mr. Stern said yesterday that Mr. Heckscher's years as Parks Commissioner ''were a vigorous period, there was a lot of capital building in those years,'' with work on new and renovated playgrounds. Mr. Stern, who was an adviser to Mr. Heckscher in that period, added yesterday, ''There was money in those days to build.''
''And he was a kindly leader,'' Mr. Stern recalled. ''If you think of parks commissioners, you think of the imperial Robert Moses and the mercurial Hoving -- and here you had the Good King Augie, who reigned for six happy years.''
Mr. Heckscher is also remembered as a man of gumption. The current Deputy Parks Commissioner, Alan M. Moss, recalled the time when ''there was a Black Panther encampment at 125th Street, in an empty lot, and the Panthers had run up their flag on a city flagpole'' nearby after taking down the United States flag.
Mayor Lindsay said he wanted the Black Panther flag taken down, according to Mr. Moss, who also worked under Mr. Heckscher, and the ''Police Commissioner didn't want to go out there.''
As a result, Mr. Moss said: ''Augie took a group of us and we went up there, and Augie went by himself to the flagpole and he took the flag down, and then a group of blacks approached him. The Parks Department group feared a confrontation, but the blacks said, 'May we please have our flag?' and Augie said, 'Certainly. Please don't put it up again.' ''
Mr. Moss added yesterday, ''I'll tell you, that took courage.''
His survivors include his wife of 56 years, the former Claude Chevreux; three sons, Stephen A., of Concord, N.H., Philip H., of Manhattan and Charles C., of Princeton, N.J., and six grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Correction: April 8, 1997, Tuesday An obituary yesterday about August Heckscher, a Parks Commissioner under Mayor John V. Lindsay who was active in civic causes, misstated the location of St. Paul's, a school he attended. It is in Concord, N.H., not Concord, Mass.
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