Many people might not know that Los Angeles has a 4,218 park right in the heart of the city. Griffith Park was donated to the city 112 years ago by industrialist Col. Griffith Jenkins Griffith — who wanted to create the largest urban park in America. (He accomplished this task, but Griffith Park has not [...]
Filed under: maintenance/management, partnerships | Tagged: los angeles | Leave a Comment »
P&R Now, the blog of Parks and Recreation magazine has a post up from Abby Cocke of Baltimore’s Parks and People giving her take on Majora Carter’s (of Sustainable South Bronx) keynote speech to the Recreation and Park Association’s annual conference in Baltimore. Just one excerpt here, but the paragraph below describes both an innovative [...]
Filed under: renewal | Tagged: bronx | Leave a Comment »
Next American City’s Daily Report writes about the Congress for the New Urbanism’s push for tearing down freeways in several cities. Urban designers took the freeway, which was perfectly suitable as a connector between cities, and tossed it into the city itself……… It sliced through cities, severing their once-convenient grid systems. It blocked access to [...]
Filed under: renewal, transportation | Tagged: freeways | Leave a Comment »
A brief look at the connection of parks and transit. Turns out most of the most visited parks in the United States have mass transit access. (See table below.) And with the exception of Mission Bay, most of the parks below are probably reached by transit in high numbers. Central Park and Prospect Park have [...]
Filed under: transportation | Tagged: transit | Leave a Comment »
Progress is being made on Atlanta’s face-changing Beltline project, as a two-mile segment of trail recently opened, and groundbreaking just occurred on the project’s first new park. We’ll be posting on the Beltline’s progess and different aspects of what it is all about — trails, parks, economic development and transit. But today, we’d like to [...]
Filed under: green infrastructure | Tagged: atlanta, beltline, stormwater | Leave a Comment »
Kaid Benfield, a leader in the smart growth movement, makes a great case today at his NRDC blog that “it is time for advocates and practitioners to embrace a broader, more holistic vision of what smart, sustainable development should be in the 21st century” and that this “will mean retaining, but also being more ambitious than, [...]
Filed under: planning | Tagged: smart growth | Leave a Comment »
An article the other day in the San Francisco Chronicle describes the parks in Mission Bay, a new neighborhood now springing up that city: Sometimes it’s hard to separate the identity of a San Francisco neighborhood from its park. After all, what would the Mission District be without Dolores Park, or North Beach without Washington [...]
Filed under: funding, planning | Tagged: new parks, san francisco, tif | Leave a Comment »
A new report, Active Transportation for America, makes the case for an adequate federal investment in bicycling and walking. The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy presented the report today at an event in D.C. with Congressman and Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar and Bikes Belong. The findings show that modest increases in bicycling and walking could lead to [...]
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In our posts, we’ll be looking for older, industrial cities that are using parks as tools for renewal – both as ways to transform abandoned industrial land and as drivers for economic development. (See our post on Detroit for one example.) In the October, 2008 issue of Landscape Architecture we learn of the many ways [...]
Filed under: renewal, transportation | Tagged: decking freeways, st. louis | Leave a Comment »
The New York Times recently highlighted Ocean Parkway, one of the earliest examples of a parkway in the U.S. and designed by Olmsted and Vaux. Constructed in 1876, the five-mile Ocean Parkway stretches from the heart of the borough to Coney Island. The Times describes its mix of users and lively feel: Every layer of [...]
Filed under: transportation | Tagged: Brooklyn, parkways/boulevards | Leave a Comment »
