New-Age Central Parks

By Rutherford H. Platt and Peter Harnik

City parks don't just happen; each is a unique blend of nature, technology, design, culture, politics, and vision. Many European city parks are remnants of former royal estates. Examples include London's Hyde Park and Regent's Park, Jardin des Tuileries and Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris, Berlin's Tiergarten, and Vienna Woods.

American cities, lacking such aristocratic legacies, have had to fabricate parks out of colonial commons in New England, former military sites like San Francisco's Presidio, filled land such as Chicago's lakeshore, distinctive natural or scenic sites, or simply nooks and crannies of underused land.

An early notable example in the U.S. was the audacious 1858 Greensward Plan for Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, which transformed 843 acres of rocky wasteland into the world's best-known urban park. That masterwork in turn spawned an urban parks movement that endowed American cities with hundreds of parks and landscapes designed by Olmsted and his successors until the 1970s.

That era is over: Big new parks on the scale of Central Park aren't feasible today. One attempt to convert a former military base into a 1,300-acre Great Park in Orange County, California, has been tangled in design and financing issues. (See "Too Big to Fail?" in the April 2014 issue of Planning and a follow up in June: "Audit: 'Hubris' Killed Great Park Plan.") The winning design for Governors Island in New York Harbor may be as innovative as Greensward in its day, but the island can only be reached by ferry. One of us (Harnik) has documented how parks now are cobbled together in surprising places like rooftops, landfills, cemeteries, freeway decks, and stormwater channels.

While the size and complexity of the great Olmsted parks can't be replicated today, a new generation of much smaller but hugely successful facilities may claim to be "new-age Central Parks." This judgment is based not on whether they look Olmstedian; most do not. Rather, the resemblance lies in their audacity: How bold are they in concept and execution and how inventively do they use available scraps of urban space and serve diverse people?

The audacity of Central Park was reflected in such factors as:

Vision: advocacy by New York civic leaders to set aside a "central park" before Manhattan Island was fully built out

Opportunism: New York City's timely purchase of underused land in the path of development as a site for the future park

Ingenuity: creative adaptation of legal authorities, technology, financing, and landscape design

Tenacity: confronting bureaucracy and politics, requiring leaders and activists with unusual creativity, stamina, and political skills

Humanism: in Olmsted's words, welcoming "vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile."

With these indicators in mind, we now visit some of our favorite "new-age Central Parks," beginning in New York City, close to the mother lode.

New York and vicinity

Since the 1980s, much of New York City's waterfront has been transformed from a no-man's-land of derelict piers and warehouses to a green fringe of exciting new parks and bikeways. Unlike the Chicago lakeshore parks, which are managed chiefly by one agency (the Chicago Park District), New York's waterfront is a hodgepodge of diverse facilities, each with its own history, physical obstacles, vested interests, design features, funding sources, and administrative structure.

Riverbank State Park is one of the city's busiest but least known newer parks. It occupies the 28-acre rooftop of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, which extends 600 feet into the Hudson River at the edge of Harlem. The park originated as "compensation" to offset the environmental injustice of placing the city's biggest sewage plant on the doorstep of one of its poorest communities.

Designed and constructed over 15 years (1978–93) by Dattner Architects and ABB Landscape Architects, Riverbank features an Olympic-size swimming pool, basketball and tennis courts, garden plots, a year-round skating rink, cultural center, restaurant, and a 2,500-seat athletic complex. Modeled on Tokyo's Arakawa Nature Park, it demonstrates the feasibility of locating a park above municipal infrastructure and folding its capital cost into the overall project budget. Riverbank State Park attracts about four million visitors a year.

Continuing downstream, the west side of Manhattan is lined by eclectic old and new parks: Riverside Park, originated by Olmsted and completed by Robert Moses in the 1920s; Riverside Park South, donated by Donald Trump in the 1990s as a condition for approval of a high-end residential complex; Hudson River Park, built and managed by a state-created authority after defeat of a massive highway and park project (Westway) in the 1980s; Battery Park City, with 36 acres of public parks provided by the BPC development authority; and Battery Park, a historic common ground dating back to Dutch settlement in 1623.

Just inland from Hudson River Park, the renowned High Line snakes around former lofts and warehouses now going upscale at a dizzying pace. The High Line is a showcase of new-age park creation. An abandoned 1.45-mile rail viaduct on Manhattan's Lower West Side provided the opportunity. The vision to convert it into a linear public park, modeled on the Promenade Plantée in Paris, originated with neighborhood residents Robert Hammond and Joshua David, who founded the Friends of the High Line Greenway, Inc. in 1999.

Some $50 million from the city and even more in private donations funded an international design competition in 2003. The winning concept by James Corner Field Operations in partnership with Diller Scofidio+Renfro and Piet Oudolf has transformed the rusty viaduct into an elevated ribbon of walkways, gardens, casual seating, and public art — entirely removed from traffic and offering glorious views of the city and the Hudson River.

As a public-private partnership, the High Line is city-owned but managed by the well-financed Friends of the High Line. Now open for its entire length, the High Line is jammed with residents and tourists, in good weather and bad. Surrounding neighborhoods are exploding in value and new development is going up at a scale perhaps not seen since Central Park itself was built.

Just across the East River from lower Manhattan, the acclaimed Brooklyn Bridge Park, which won a 2014 National Planning Excellence Award for Urban Design from APA, is shoehorned onto a 1.3-mile strip of waterfront and abandoned piers bordered on the inland side by the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and the Robert Moses-era Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. BBP's modest 85 acres (one-tenth the size of Central Park) is offset by inventive design and stunning views of the Manhattan skyline, with the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge arching overhead.

The vision for the park came from a community group, Friends of Fulton Landing (later renamed the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition), when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey decided in 1984 to divest some obsolete waterfront properties. In 2002, the coalition persuaded the city and state to establish the BBP Development Corporation to design, build, and operate the park. Public agencies contributed $360 million toward its construction, but operating costs were to be generated mostly from concession revenue and high-end real estate development.

Under the 2005 BBP master plan by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the challenging site (including its piers) has been transformed into a collage of small hills, lawns, trees, playgrounds, sports fields, food vendors, wetlands, a pocket beach, boat ramps, and the 1920s-era Jane's Carousel, restored and donated by a local couple, Jane and David Walentas.

In October 2012, when Hurricane Sandy slammed the new park with a 13-foot storm surge, thousand-pound concrete planters became floating objects, low-lying electrical and mechanical equipment was disabled, and some playgrounds and landscaping were damaged. But the Van Valkenburgh plan anticipated sea-level rise in its selection of park elevations, soil types, vegetation, tree placement, and edge design, and timely sandbagging narrowly saved Jane's Carousel.

The unusual practice of funding a park's operation from real estate development inside its boundaries remains controversial. In April 2015, completion of a luxury residential building was stayed by court order pending the outcome of a lawsuit by a neighborhood group, Save the View Now, which fears the project will obstruct views of the Brooklyn Bridge and Midtown Manhattan.

Eighty miles north of Times Square, the Hudson River is spanned by another audacious new park: the Walkway Over the Hudson. In 1889, the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge opened as the longest bridge in North America and the only Hudson River span south of Albany at the time. Until closed by a fire in 1974, the 1.28-mile bridge was a vital route for trains bringing coal from Pennsylvania to New England.

Due to be scrapped, the decrepit bridge attracted the attention of Poughkeepsie resident Bill Sepe, who saw an opportunity to create a level-grade bike and walking route high above the most scenic reach of the mid-Hudson Valley. In 1992, Sepe and a local attorney founded Walkway Over the Hudson to promote the project.

Seventeen years later, at a cost of $38 million (substantially provided by the Dyson Foundation in Millbrook, New York), the bridge reopened as the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park. Now paved, lighted, and handicap accessible, the span is the world's longest elevated walkway — and one of the highest at about 200 feet above the river and the Poughkeepsie riverfront. A 21-story high-speed elevator, completed in 2014, connects the walkway deck with a riverfront park and train station beneath it. Some 700,000 people visit the walkway annually.

Ironically, both the walkway and the High Line benefited from a kind of making-the-best-of-it audacity. Each used obsolete structures that were too big to tear down. (Simply removing the elevated viaduct in Manhattan would have cost Consolidated Rail Corporation about $30 million.) The new park facilities were in effect "Plan B" concepts to save the government from expensively tearing down a huge, orphan structure.

Around the country

Chicago's much admired 30-mile chain of lakefront parks was long interrupted by a gaping void of parking lots and train tracks east of the city's Loop, its downtown business district, so named for the elevated train tracks that encircle it.

In 1997, Mayor Richard M. Daley, reportedly looking down at the unattractive scene from his dentist's office, resolved to seize a golden opportunity to convert this beleaguered site into a world-class park. His germ of an idea, implemented by a formidable public-private partnership, led to the construction of Millennium Park on a 25-acre platform above a new parking garage. At $475 million (split about fifty–fifty public and private), Millennium is the most expensive city park ever created, but the investment has already stimulated billions of dollars in nearby real estate construction and tourist spending.

When it opened in 2004, Millennium Park attracted more than 1.5 million visitors in its first six months, lured by its many delights: the wading pool between digital towers at Crown Fountain, a native-plant horticulture garden, a mirrored sculpture (Cloud Gate, usually called "the Bean"), a sinuous pedestrian bridge and outdoor performance extravaganza (both designed by Frank Gehry), and a bicycle station for commuters.

Located downtown, Millennium Park established a new public focal point and center-city destination, and thousands of high-end apartments and condos have since been constructed within sight of it. Its role as a free and democratic playground for millions of people is in the best Olmsted tradition.

Also downtown and connected to Millennium Park by the Gehry bridge, the 25-acre Maggie Daley Park is named for the late wife of the former mayor. (The relationship of the two parks can be seen in the photo on pages 14 and 15). Opened this spring, it reenvisions a corner of the enormous lakefront Grant Park, where seldom used tennis courts and formal gardens have been replaced with climbing walls, undulating hills, an ice skating ribbon, and inventive, adventuresome play spaces.

There's a great new park in Dallas, too, although its genesis came at a painful moment for the city. When the Boeing Corporation announced the relocation of its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, the news hit Dallas like a bombshell. Dallas had been a contender and was accustomed to winning these kinds of competitions, especially when up against older Rust Belt cities. But Boeing let it be known that it was the quality of urban living — including parks — that had tipped the balance to Chicago.

Dallas's powerful corporate community immediately began refocusing from simple growth to complex placemaking. And the city sprang into action on both the public and private fronts. Among many parks that have grown from these initiatives, the most transformative has been Klyde Warren Park, designed by the Office of James Burnett and built on a deck over the Woodall Rogers Freeway.

Barely five acres in size, the park packs in a load of spaces from dog park to event lawn to reading and games courtyard to jogging trail to performance pavilion to restaurant, along with more than 300 trees and 900 shrubs. Further, the park links downtown office towers and cultural icons with the arts district and residences situated in uptown.

Because the park has healed the 50-year-old gash of the below-grade freeway, it has stimulated downtown high-rise housing, something quite rare in Dallas. Named for the nine-year-old son of the park's biggest benefactor, Klyde Warren Park is certainly not Olmstedian in design or in conception, but it is having the kind of impact on real estate and city shaping that the best of the greensward parks did more than a century ago.

Klyde Warren Park is not the first park to be built on a deck over a highway — the earliest on record was built in New York City in 1939 — but it is quickly becoming the most influential since Seattle's Freeway Park opened to great fanfare during the nation's bicentennial year in 1976. The concept of a green and social oasis in the middle of a human and architectural bazaar is so novel and intriguing in formerly white-bread Dallas that it has become the place to see and be seen, just as Olmsted's more bucolic parks first were 150 years ago.

Not to be outdone in the new city park competition is Houston, Dallas's friendly rival. Already home to 445-acre Hermann Park (with the city's zoo and an iconic lake) and 1,466-acre Memorial Park (whose three-mile running track gets 10,000 users a day), Houston now boasts a new 12-acre gem in the bull's-eye center of its downtown. Called Discovery Green, the $182 million park was carved out of former parking lots and several streets that the city decertified and donated to the assemblage.

Funded about one-third publicly and two-thirds privately, the park is chock full of things to see, use, and experience — a playground, interactive fountain, dog park, cafe, putting green, kayaking pond, model boat basin, ice skating rink — and, like Klyde Warren, has stimulated a localized development boom, including the first downtown apartment tower built in 50 years. Discovery Green is located near the city's gargantuan Convention Center — the kind of facility that is usually the kiss of death for its surrounding neighborhood — but, with 1.2 million park visitors a year, it thus far has held its own against the needs of out-of-town conventioneers with other things on their minds.

Thanks to aggressive programing by the indefatigable Discovery Green Conservancy, the park is being adopted by Houstonians as their own special place. Although the number of children living downtown is still small, the Houston Independent School District schedules numerous field trips to the park, and Discovery Green is frequently encircled by yellow buses while students play in the water, listen to music, learn ecology, picnic, or happily take part in other activities.

Other cities are making their marks with high-profile parks as well. Cincinnati has invested $120 million its downtown waterfront. Smale Riverfront Park is a dramatic 45-acre destination that includes a stage and event lawn, an adventure playground, a carousel, a stairway that incorporates a light show, two interactive fountains, a striking Civil War monument to the Black Brigade, tree groves, a meditative labyrinth, a bike center, and a brewpub. (Future phases will include a marina and a boat dock.)

Cincinnati has, in fact, boasted an exemplary park system for many decades, but since the hilly city is segmented into dozens of insulated neighborhoods, each with its own special green space, there has been no central park that all citizens could share as owners. Smale Park, located in Cincinnati's front yard, between the baseball and football stadiums and facing the iconic Roebling Bridge, solves that problem in a way that would make Olmsted proud. Fittingly, despite the high-tech nature of some of the amenities, the park's most memorable and coveted features are the gently swinging steel benches with their alluring vistas of the Ohio River and Kentucky in the distance.

Small but mighty

Not every city park can or should be as iconic as Millennium Park or the High Line. Older city neighborhoods are often served only by scruffy, down-at-the-heels parks in dire need of help. The "new-age Central Parks" summarized in this article represent the most audacious level of park creation in the finest Olmsted tradition. But even the humblest city park may be revitalized through neighborhood initiative, supported by public and private funding.

The New York Restoration Project founded by Bette Midler has revitalized many neglected parks in distressed neighborhoods of New York City. While not world-class showcases, such revived parks may also reflect the humanitarian instincts of Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors. Nearly two centuries after his birth, creating and revitalizing city parks is a crucial part of making urban America more green, healthy, equitable, and humane.

Rutherford Platt is professor of geography emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Reclaiming American Cities; The Struggle for People, Place, and Nature Since 1900. Peter Harnik directs the Center for City Park Excellence of the Trust for Public Land in Washington, D.C., and authored Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities.

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Resources

Images: Top — Known as the High Line at the Rail Yards — where visitors can interact with the rails and other freight artifacts — the last section of the elevated trail opened last September, extending it north to West 34th Street. Photo by Iwan Baan, ©Iwan Baan, 2014. Middle — Reflections on city gems: A high-rise dweller snapped a photo of Millennium (at upper right in photo) and Maggie Daley parks from inside his rooftop gym. The undulating BP Bridge, designed by Frank Gehry, links the two compact spaces. The Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago (center, top) connects to Millennium via Piano's Nichols Bridgeway. Photo by John Y. Le Bourgeois. Bottom — Klyde Warren Park is the new central gathering space in Dallas — a far more inviting spot than the Woodall Rodgers Freeway that it caps. At 5.2 acres, the urban park features a performance pavilion, two restaurants, walking trails, a dog park, and the requisite children's play space. Courtesy The Office of James Burnett.

Public Parks: The Key to Livable Communities, by Alexander Garvin.

Reclaiming American Cities: The Struggle for People, Place, and Nature Since 1900, by Rutherford H. Platt.

Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, by Peter Harnik.

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