Thinking Like An Urban Park: Of Anniversaries and New OfferingsBy Jane Holtz Kay Thinking like a mountain may have worked for ecologists heeding Aldo Leopold's plea to make a place in peace with natural systems. But what would it mean today to think like an urban park? Would it mean being a good neighbor? An oasis-shaper in the city? The creator of a memorial for some late, great figure? A modernist landscape architect displaying his or her Art? Two major U.S. cities celebrated milestones this year: New York with the 150th anniversary of Frederick Law Olmsted's and Calvert Vaux's Central Park and, Seattle, with the 100th anniversary of John Charles Olmsted's park and planning system for Seattle. Some 500 people gathered at a celebration for Central Park in late June, and 150 came together in early May for Seattle's festivities. Conferences in both cities drew park professionals and park aficionados to discuss these parks and public spaces--their management, maintenance, and constituencies.
The great American urban parks and parks systems still draw multitudes, and, indeed, and new projects multiply of late: Providence has its downtown Waterplace Park along the Woonasquatucket River, New York City's Bronx River will be de-paved and greened, and brownfields restored for a new breed of ecological parks. Even Los Angeles, the paved-over paradise that neglected its 50-year-old Olmsted/Bartholomew plan is daylighting portions of the Los Angeles River and buying more land with funds voted in a $2.6 million statewide proposition. Still, there will be no repeats of Central Park, no new places of parallel majesty or size - any more than we will see another Appalachian Trail. The trail's father, conservationist/planner Benton MacKaye (1879-1975), that soft-peddling prophet who exemplified the "amphibian between urban and rural life," has no heirs. The great figure, explored in Larry Anderson's recent biography, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail, and his trail-blazing colleagues and contemporaries like forest advocate Gifford Pinchot, community-builder Clarence Stein, and wilderness advocate Bob Marshall, were masters of blending nature and human nature. But they have no real heirs and few constituencies for fusing the green and the grid at a majestic scale.
The latter, the work of Seattle landscape designer Kathryn Gustafson with landscape architects Anderson & Ray, created the Arthur Ross Terrace, a.k.a. the "Celestial Garden," atop a new parking garage abutting the Rose Center. Nearby, Judith Heintz' New York City firm reworked the north end of Theodore Roosevelt Park, owned and maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation between the Rose Center and West 81st Street. Their diverse missions - to create a new public space on the terrace and enhance greenery, access, and pleasure on the grounds - were challenging. The Rose Center itself houses the rebuilt Hayden Planetarium in a sleek glass box, and the Ross Terrace fronts the box and matches its modernity. During my visit on a rare sunny day after an unusually rainy spring and early summer, the terrace was lightly populated by people lunching on carryout fare. A bare handful of children were at play. No real greeting here, it seemed. The almost empty plaza prompted thoughts that this second story location, atop a long flight of steps, provides scant welcome. As Pattern Language guru Christopher Alexander might put it: a public space must be evident to the public to be used by the public. The terrace's oblong main plaza is dotted with water jets that erupt in random computerized spurts to create an erratic dance. Gustafson partner Shannon Nichol explains. "Rills of water" flow down the plaza's tilted surface. For all the designer's poetic description of "fine 'meteor trails,' subtly etched into the stone," the plaza looked sparse. In all, the 47,114-square-foot Rose Terrace seemed less "inspired by the Science of Astronomy," as described, than by notions of minimal modernist hardscape, as sterile and uninviting to viewers as its parsimonious sprays of water would-be to frolicking youngsters. The building's architecture dazzled the eye, but the granite terrace seemed to simply soak up the heat. On the other hand, the enhancements to the north end of Roosevelt Park spreading out at the foot of the Ross Terrace steps, create a sense of ease in the natural world. All seemed warm and luxuriant as Martha Burgess of the Heintz firm walked me through the re-graded lawns and recent plantings along the altered paths. Operation Dog Park, so to speak, was part of the mission and so it emerged in a made-over park adjacent to the building. Here, a large fenced area covered in wood chips allows an array of canines to run free, or semi-free, in a fenced area covered in wood chips. Environmentalists are said to be torn between anthropocentrism and biocentrism, but on this day the redesigned park seemed to resolve the conflict: Here was the quintessential sampler of New York natives, both vegetable and animal - including Manhattan mutts and thoroughbreds plus their oddlot owners, not to mention new plantings and dogless visitors.
Still, few seemed put off or predisposed to leave on the mellow afternoon of my visit. In truth, the park, though now sternly segregated dog-wise, appears to allow every dog to have his/her day. In a design sense, the re-greening of the northern part of the American Museum of Natural History doesn't significantly add or subtract from the museum's multi-block site. Unlike the Ross Terrace, a disappointment for this visitor, the remake of the park incites neither lavish praise nor real complaint in the planning or the planting. Some that some has passed since the park's creation, the grounds look in need of more plantings, the toppled fencing could use some stabilizing or replacing, and plans for the construction of a massive statue to Alfred Nobel at the foot of the terrace staircase cause concerns about scale. Still, incrementalism isn't easy, and both the great peacemaker Nobel and the wilderness hero Teddy Roosevelt, for whom the park was named would probably be pleased that man and man's best friend coexist harmoniously here. Roosevelt created America's first wilderness park exactly a hundred years ago. Olmsted died that year. And, surely, the great nature preserver and the urban parkmaker alike would take pleasure in the thought that this public green space would thrive through housekeeping and updating even in a Spartan age and tight budget for massive urban parks.
This critic-at-large column appeared in Landscape Architecture in October 2003.
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The time is ripe for surveying America's public parks, for refurbishing them--and for adding to them, too. Parks, like the folks who use them, go though stages, from creation to youth to middle and old age. Unlike their fabricators, such spaces emerge as something healthier than youth. They can grow into a rich adolescence, or age gracefully into a ripe old age beloved by visitors. And so, they seemed. The attendance at the conferences in New York and Seattle, and the sense of stewardship in evidence both in sessions and informal conversations reflect an uptick of the nation's city parks. In this era of federal cutbacks and reliance on shrinking city revenues, it is vital for parks to have everyday friends and formal Friends as groups.
It therefore remains the task of the creators of urban parks to fit additions and amendments into neighborhoods, bringing harmony and imagination to places that can be greened. And, surely, those values were felt by the people charged with modifying the tree-shrouded Theodore Roosevelt Park surrounding the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's upper West Side, from 77th Street to 81st between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue as well as those inserting the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space along the northern edge of the old museum.
