All Parks on Deck

By Jeffrey Spivak

A new era is dawning for freeway deck parks. The completion of Dallas's celebrated Klyde Warren Park in 2012 reignited nationwide interest in such projects. Now there is a new wave of deck parks in various stages of development, encompassing some two dozen ventures from coast to coast.

This new era is also characterized by an entirely different planning approach to some of these projects. Traditionally, deck parks have been located in downtowns as part of revitalization strategies, but today some new deck projects and plans are being positioned in neighborhoods and sites where highways split apart urban residential districts decades ago. This new approach is designed to reconnect neighborhoods and restitch part of the urban fabric.

So far, Dallas, Denver, and Pittsburgh are at the forefront of this trend of using deck parks to reunite neighborhoods. Each has a project currently or nearly under construction. Similar plans also have been proposed or are being discussed in San Diego, Seattle, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

A grassy land bridge over I-44 now links the renovated Gateway Arch National Park with downtown St. Louis. It opened this summer. Photo courtesy Gateway Arch Park Foundation.

Seattle's five-acre Freeway Park opened in 1976 and inspired other cities to build their own deck parks. Photo courtesy Freeway Park Association.

Two primary community motivations are driving this new type of deck park: First, an interest in relieving some of the urban distress caused when highways cut large scars through neighborhoods. Second, a desire to balance public investments between well-off and not-so-well-off parts of central cities. This focus on equity development is intended to provide new recreational amenities and spur additional reinvestment in lower-income, under-served, and largely minority residential areas.

"In places where highways have been disruptive, we have an obligation when we redo those projects to do everything we can to knit those communities back together," says Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, which is funding the bulk of Dallas's new $72 million deck park. "These neighborhoods feel like someone's paying attention to them again."

In Dallas, the 5.5-acre deck park will relink Oak Cliff neighborhoods divided by Interstate 35. In Denver, a four-acre deck will span the Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods splintered by Interstate 70. In Pittsburgh and Seattle, the intent is to reunite isolated residential districts with downtown. And in St. Paul and San Diego, the idea is to use deck parks to reunite historic neighborhoods.

In San Diego, "SR (State Route) 94 severed the communities of Golden Hill and Sherman Heights when it was built, so it makes a lot of sense to reconnect them," says Chris Schmidt, AICP, division chief of transportation planning for the California Department of Transportation.

It's worth noting that none of these neighborhood-oriented deck parks has been built yet, so it's too early to tell if they will succeed in these goals. But planners are playing key roles in conceptualizing that vision.

Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway was made possible by the city's massive "Big Dig" project. Photo by Kyle Klein Photography.

Deck park renaissance

Freeway deck, or cap, parks are still relatively rare infrastructure projects in the U.S. About a dozen parks built over portions of below-grade highways have been completed in large and mid-sized cities since the 1970s. The first one opened in 1976 over Interstate 5 in downtown Seattle. Called Freeway Park, the five-acre oasis immediately became a popular gathering place, and a string of cities copied the idea: Phoenix; San Diego; Duluth, Minnesota; Trenton, New Jersey; and Boston's "Big Dig," among others.

But the trend had seemingly died down when Dallas philanthropists assembled a public-private partnership to create Klyde Warren Park over a stretch of Woodall Rodgers Freeway between down-town and the Uptown district. The five-acre, $110 million park contains a performance pavilion, putting green, fountain plaza, even a dog park, among other features. It's become Dallas's veritable public square, drawing one million visitors a year and helping spur hundreds of millions of dollars in nearby real estate development.

Based on that successful model, deck parks are all the rage again. Most of them follow the traditional model tied to downtown redevelopment. St. Louis this past summer completed a public green over the interstate between downtown and the Gateway Arch, and similar downtown-centric concepts are on drawing boards across the country.

Philadelphia has an 11-acre, $225 million deck plan for its waterfront. Washington, D.C.'s Capital Crossing deck is designed to include medium-rise mixed use buildings on top. Atlanta has a 14-acre, $300 million park proposal called "The Stitch." Austin, Texas; Cincinnati; and Kansas City, Missouri, are other cities with projects under consideration. And as many as eight different decks are in discussion stages across California, such as in Los Angeles and suburbs such as Glendale, Hollywood, and Santa Monica.

These projects are popular because they're basically covering up an eyesore and creating an urban oasis out of thin air — highway air rights, actually — especially in downtown locales where open space is often scarce. As Jennifer Ball, vice president for planning and economic development for a business coalition called Central Atlanta Progress, explained last year during a panel discussion of Atlanta's project: "It's really an economic development strategy."

Yet there's a simple reason why such projects take years to develop, if they develop at all: They can cost $20 million or more per acre to build.

A putting green in Dallas's Klyde Warren Park. Photo courtesy Klyde Warren Park.

Rendering of the Oak Cliff deck park, part of the Southern Gateway highway reconstruction project in Dallas. Rendering courtesy OJB Landscape Architecture.

Planning tool

Deck parks are complicated infrastructure projects, often involving multilevel government partnerships including transportation and park agencies, along with engineering solutions for such issues as air quality and deck weight loads. The neighborhood-oriented deck parks have additional circumstances and challenges that planners must help overcome.

In Denver, the challenges included forging a community consensus. The I-70 deck park is merely one piece of the Colorado Department of Transportation's large-scale highway redevelopment, called Central 70, which broke ground in August and covers 10 miles, with a $1.2 billion total price tag. But the deck portion itself took some six years of planning, negotiating, and compromising with the Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods.

Located about four miles from downtown Denver, the Elyria-Swansea area is a mixture of factories, livestock yards, the city's oldest cemetery, and small bungalows on narrow lots. Some 80 percent of the 6,500 residents are Hispanic, and more than 70 percent of household incomes are below the metro median, according to community facts compiled by the local Piton Foundation.

The interstate is a dominant feature — an elevated viaduct that cuts both neighborhoods basically in half. Transportation planners' early concept for widening the highway called for demolishing nearby Swansea Elementary, one of the hubs of community life. Pushback from the community eventually led to the deck park idea. It was a compromise: Widening and creating a new below-grade trench for traffic would require displacing 56 residential properties and 17 businesses, but the school would stay and the deck would become an extension of the school's playground, with new soccer fields.

"The highway's been a major shadow on the neighborhood, and we're trying to repair that and return a sense of place to the community," says Rebecca White, Central 70's deputy director of external programs.

Meanwhile, in Dallas the challenges have included synchronizing separate planning initiatives. On the one hand, the Oak Cliff deck park is, like in Denver, just one piece of a large-scale highway reconstruction known as the Southern Gateway project, which broke ground earlier this year and stretches 11 miles with a nearly $700 million total price tag. On the other hand, the city government this year approved its first Comprehensive Housing Policy, which intends to target new housing investments on the south side of the city — including Oak Cliff.

While these initiatives involved different agencies, they found a common cause in the deck park. Just a couple miles from downtown Dallas, the Oak Cliff deck site sits in an area tainted by blight and drug houses, with a median income that's one-third of the citywide average, according to city data. The neighborhood fit the Regional Transportation Council's interest in repairing some of the highway's original divide. And the deck park — which has public funding and is pursuing private fund-raising for additional amenities — is expected to be a catalyst for some of the private-sector housing rehabilitation programs and incentives included in the new city policy.

"This will be a focus area for some of those investments," says Peer Chacko, director of Dallas's Planning & Urban Design Department. The deck park, he adds, "will begin to be the pebble in the pond and generate ripple effects outward."

Elsewhere across the country, the planning challenges for other neighborhood-oriented deck parks are different, because most projects are still in their early stages.

In California, no deck project is close to starting construction. Yet so many cities in the state are considering deck parks that the California Department of Transportation last year developed a planning and development best practices guide for such projects (see Resources). Deck planning is "not our traditional charge," says Chris Schmidt of the DOT, "but it's increasingly part of the conversation" about highway improvements.

In Seattle, the city's planning department is leading a study to explore the expansion of the original Freeway Park to adjoin nearby residential districts. Separately, several community groups organized volunteer design teams, and in October they unveiled a series of possible deck — or "lid," as they call it — concepts, ranging from a bike path and community garden to a civic plaza and school.

The hope, says Scott Bonjukian, an urban planner and cochair of the Lid I-5 Steering Committee, one of the community groups advocating for the new deck, is "the results will pave the way for the next steps in design, capital funding, and eventual lid construction to heal the fractured urban neighborhoods."

Putting a cap on gentrification

The plan for the deck park over I-70 in Denver took years of planning and compromise with the Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods, and ended up preserving an elementary school and adding a playground extension. Image courtesy Colorado Department of Transportation.

For sure, neighborhood-oriented deck park projects are well-intentioned — to reunite divided neighborhoods, build a new park in underserved urban areas, and create a catalyst for additional new investment. Despite such equity development goals, though, some residents have been skeptical of the projects.

In both Denver and Dallas — the two cities where neighborhood deck projects are furthest along — the specter of gentrification has been part of the community planning discussions. The fear is a new attractive amenity could spur real estate speculators to redevelop properties, and new investment could raise overall property values and taxes, which current low-income residents can't afford, thus forcing them out of their long-time neighborhoods.

As Ellie Hajek, president of Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhoods umbrella association, explains: "Our neighborhoods have had mixed feelings. Having additional park space is certainly something that's beneficial, but there's a wariness about it, too."

Certainly, there are already limited signs of speculative commercial property purchases around the Dallas and Denver deck park sites. But officials in the two cities are hoping to minimize any gentrification effects through programs to stabilize and rehabilitate the existing housing stock, to help current residents stay in their homes longer.

Dallas, of course, has its new city housing policy that will use a combination of city and federal funding along with zoning code amendments to offer more targeted incentives for affordable housing developers, for both new units and rehab preservation. Zoning amendments, for instance, could allow higher densities with provisions for lower-income units, according to planning director Chacko.

In Denver, the state has committed a total of $4 million to two programs in Elyria-Swansea. Half the money is committed to create a new affordable housing development collaborative, partly to offset homes being demolished for the highway widening. The other half of the money is earmarked for energy efficiency-related improvements for 250 homes, including new air conditioners, windows, and caulking.

The Colorado DOT has never taken such steps before outside the boundaries of a transportation project, according to the deck park project's Rebecca White. "It's new territory for us," she says.

Despite all these issues, the anticipation for these deck park projects is building. Denver's deck park will feature the school soccer fields, along with a community amphitheater and a fountain splash park. Dallas's park — being designed by the same firm as Klyde Warren Park — includes amenities requested by the neighborhoods, such as an open-air pavilion, a dog park, a garden, and multiple water features. Pittsburgh's $26 million deck park is proposed to include wide-open green spaces and elevated terraces, plus art and history installations.

Completion of any of these deck parks is still at least a couple years away. But the anticipation also extends to the projects' potential to ultimately reconnect parts of neighborhoods that have long been separated.

Says Dallas Oak Cliff neighborhoods association president Ellie Hajek: "Being able to stitch them back together is an exciting possibility. We want this to be as good of an outcome as possible."

Jeffrey Spivak, a market research director in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, is an award-winning writer specializing in real estate planning, development, and demographic trends.

Resources

Seattle's Freeway Park made the short list in this episode of the PBS series 10 That Changed America. to.pbs.org/2xJhLLO

Seattle's Lid I-5 community campaign: lidi5.org.

Federal Highway Administration "Successes in Stewardship" 2016 brief about successful community partnerships for freeway deck parks: bit.ly/2xs4tD7.

California Department of Transportation "Freeway Cap Best Practices Guide," 2017: bit.ly/2prB0oq