|
Written by Peter Harnik, director of TPL's Center for City Park Excellence, this report from the Trust for Public Land and the Urban Land Institute. (ULI) analyzes park systems in the nation's 25 largest cities based on funding, facilities, and amount of land, then looks behind the numbers to the philosophies, politics and practices that shape the park systems.
The 215-page, color-illustrated report analyzes park systems in the nation's 25 largest cities based on 15 indicators of park performance and offers a brief history of each city's park system. Order online from the ULI bookstore, or by calling 1-800-321-5011.
Updated park data tables for 55 cities area attached below.
Introduction: Inside City Parks
 |
Central Park, New York
Photo by: Paula Hewitt | by Peter Harnik
Finally, a book about big city parks.
Parks with evocative names like Golden Gate, Mission Bay, Belle Isle, Druid Hill, Eden, and Encanto. Parks with topographical names like Piedmont, Prospect, Forest, Fairmount, and Bayfront. Parks with workaday names like City, Memorial, and Central. Parks honoring the great -- Lincoln, Grant, Washington, Jackson, and Franklin - the rich - Rockefeller, Schenley, Griffith, Swope, and.Hermann - and the uplifting - Freedom, Volunteer, Friendship, and Pioneer. Parks that are right around the corner and down the street, as comfortable as well worn shoes but also as special, at times, as a tophat and tails.
Everyone has memories about a city park - a romantic stroll, an athletic triumph, a family gathering, a clamber in a playground, a bike ride, a hike through the snow, an autumnal drive - yet the literature on these evocative places is slim. There are thousands of books on cities (few of them mentioning parks) and thousands of books on natural areas and national parks (almost none of them mentioning cities), but precious little on that complex amalgam, the city park.
No, they aren't as famous as national parks, and most of them are not as well kept up, and they don't have geysers or underground caverns or snow-capped mountaintops, but acre-for-acre and hour-for-hour, city parks are the places where Americans most often enjoy open space and outdoor recreation.
 |
Neponset River, Boston
Photo by: Rick Friedman | At the same time, there isn't a city in the nation whose space, layout, real estate value, traffic flow, public events and even civic culture is not significantly defined by its urban parks, plazas, squares, circles, waterfront promenades, linear greenways, civic centers and public gardens. Without open spaces our cities would be unrecognizable and unmemorable.
And yet we've compiled so little information about our city parks: their locations and sizes, their geology and ecology, their histories, the politics of their creation and utilization, what they contain and how they're used, how much is spent on them and how many visitors they get. We've known even less about the larger issues - how much total parkland each city has, how many acres of open space per 1000 residents, how many dollars spent per person or per acre.
The urban parks partnership between the Trust for Public Land and the Urban Land Institute began in 1997 with the publication of Urban Parks and Open Space, a detailed look at 16 of the most innovative and influential new city green spaces in the U.S. today. Each project was analyzed from both a design and a political standpoint, showing the great opportunities in our metropolises as well as some of the harsh realities that urban open space proponents face at every turn.
 |
Olympic Centennial Park, Atlanta
Photo by: Dixi Carrillo | This book, Inside City Parks, takes the investigation a big step further. Instead of looking at single parks, it contemplates the functioning of entire city park systems, highlighting particularly the most innovative programs and initiatives. It analyzes the link between the parks departments and the other public agencies, and it explores the relationship of the government to the many private forces at work in the urban core. It shows the public's enthusiasm for park conservancies (like the pioneering Central Park Conservancy), for Business Improvement Districts (like New York's Bryant Park Restoration Corp.), for greenway networks (as in Indianapolis, Houston and elsewhere), for waterfront parks (as in Pittsburgh and Portland), for conversion of old, used brownfields into brand new parks (as in Denver and Minneapolis) and for conversion of former federal facilities into new city oases (as in San Francisco and Phoenix). It demonstrates that park systems can be improved during economic boom times - and that they can also be expanded during economic downturns. Best of all, it confirms that the wonderful old city parks of the 19th century still have an enormous emotional grip on countless urban dwellers (and even former urban dwellers), so much so that restoration campaigns are able to generate enthusiasm, millions of dollars, and thousands of hours of volunteer effort.
Does the healthy city come first, or the healthy park? Not long ago the question itself would have been laughable since both cities and parks seemed in terminally failing health. But today both are recovering and the question has real relevance. Attractive, safe and usable parks prop up their neighborhoods, but cities need a strong economic base to fix (or create) those parks in the first place. And it's hard to get that economic base without middle class taxpayers who often won't move somewhere that doesn't have decent parks.
 |
Los Angeles River
Photo by: Tom Lamb | More than a century ago, Frederick Law Olmsted, the great park designer and city planner known as the father of landscape architecture, found this very issue to be central to his work when he pointed out that "a park exercises a very different and much greater influence upon the progress of a city in its general structure than any other ordinary public work."
Parks, in other words, give a city a survival advantage. Every city, after all, is in competition with every other city, not to mention every other suburb and small town. By performing all the miraculous functions that people appreciate -- cleaning the air, giving cooling shade, providing space for recreation and play, offering attractive vistas, furnishing outdoor environmental classrooms -- parks improve a city's quality of life. Each amenity, from the job market to the housing stock to cultural opportunities to even the weather, is part of the equation people use to decide where to live. A great park system can positively tip the balance. While not every park system is yet great, there's a growing recognition of this goal - as evidenced by the fact that almost every city in this book has new parkland either recently opened, under construction or in the planning stages.
And what a diversity of approaches!
Are you interested in seeing how parks can help shape the growth of a city? Look at Denver, Chicago, and Kansas City. Intrigued by public-private partnerships? Consider New York, Houston, St. Louis, and Atlanta. Seeking excellent neighborhood-based planning? Study Minneapolis and Seattle. Turning derelict riverfronts into cultural and recreational promenades? Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Converting ugly highways into parkland and using the amenity to redevelop neighborhoods? Portland, San Francisco and Boston. Ecologically-based planning? Phoenix. Community gardens? Philadelphia. Greenways and rail-trails? Indianapolis, Baltimore and Dallas. Parks as stimulators of tourism? San Diego. The list goes on and on. Cities face similar overarching problems yet tackle and solve them in unique and instructive ways.
Moreover, as we're learning, design alone isn't enough -- parks must also be properly managed and programmed. In fact, it turns out that things are not much different today than they were in Olmsted's day: creating public places and keeping them in excellent condition is and has always been extraordinarily difficult. What it took in 1859 (with Central Park) and 1870 (with Golden Gate Park) is the same thing it took in 1983 (with Cullen Park in Houston), 1991 (Post Office Square in Boston), and 1999 (Friendship Trail in Tampa) -- leadership and commitment. Public or private leadership that has a vision of how healthy parks can make healthy cities.
Happily, this book reveals that many of our biggest cities now have that leadership, variously from the mayor's office, the citizen sector, or the corporate community, and sometimes from all three. And there is a "followership," too. In most big cities there are hundreds or thousands of volunteers who are demonstrating their deep commitment to parks by doing physical labor, donating money or other goods, or giving of their time and personal skills to beautify and improve one park or the entire system. As a result of this rejuvenation, parks in some cities are taking on the physical, spiritual, and economic role that they haven't been able to play since before World War II.
The new urban vision is also playing a role on the other side of the equation - far out in the suburbs. There, some residents are beginning to recognize that large-lot, auto-dependent living has its own set of drawbacks, and as higher-income families with a variety of lifestyle choices realize that there is more than one "American Dream," the attraction of "green cities" is helping to provide an alternative to urban sprawl and center-city disinvestment.
Almost exactly 100 years ago the U.S. was in the midst of the City Beautiful movement, a great emotional outpouring of architectural and urban planning enthusiasm that shaped and reshaped many of our cities, clearing tenements, opening up broad avenues and vistas, generating huge increases in parkland, and yielding monumental signature buildings. After centuries of ever more cramped and unhealthy conditions in urban agglomerations, the awesome economic power of cities had finally produced enough personal wealth to allow some people to dream of a life -- a city life -- that was both beautiful and urbane. The movement was potentially transforming but it was nipped in the bud by the growth of the automobile culture and by suburbs, which dominated most of what happened for the rest of the century.
Now it's 100 years later and we're in a new movement, a City Revival movement. As one indicator, the parks departments themselves are trying to revive and revitalize what they have. Collectively, the 25 surveyed cities spend about $1.2 billion in a year on their day-to-day operations and programs. But these days they are also spending just under half that amount - a bit over $500 million in the average year - on capital construction and reconstruction. For Americans, who are generally loathe to spend money fixing old things when they would rather throw them out and buy new ones, that's an impressive development.
The suburbs are by no means passe, but the pendulum is swinging back toward the center, and with it comes a renewed appreciation of the physical location, shape, and design of our big cities -- and of the parks that are so instrumental to that design. To understand where each of our big cities is going, it's necessary to know where each has come from.
This book is an attempt to give a portrait of America's big city park systems, partly through statistics and partly through a brief, broad-brush picture of the nuances behind the numbers. Some of the facts are impressive, some are bleak. Some of the stories are heartwarming, some infuriate. Taken together they should help all Americans - from urban planners and park professionals to park advocates and just plain park users - to gain new insights into the workings of the devilishly complicated public spaces we call urban parks.
Updated 6/2004
|