Community Garden Dedication

This 87-acre North Philadelphia park is located in one of the city’s most challenged areas. In the 1940s and 50s, the park was a magnet for activity and a destination for tourists, boasting a popular carousel, ball fields, playgrounds, and John Philip Sousa’s music wafting from the bandstand. As the neighborhood lost population and the landscape deteriorated, it became a place that was to be avoided at all costs—and had come to represent the worst of urban decay. Once a space that was the neighborhood’s biggest liability, today Hunting Park is becoming a source of community pride again and it is setting a new standard for Philadelphia’s 10,200 acre urban park system.

The transformation has been made possible through the Hunting Park Revitalization Project, an initiative led by the Fairmount Park Conservancy and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation. The Hunting Park Revitalization Project aims to create a safe and well-maintained park space that will provide a place for healthy recreation for children and families, bring neighbors together and serve as a catalyst for larger neighborhood renewal. To date, the Fairmount Park Conservancy has raised $4 million for capital improvements in the park and Phase One of the project is nearly complete.  Site furnishings in the park were manufactured by DuMor Site Furnishings.

Ryan Howard with the Hunting Park Indians

Through Phase One of the Hunting Park Revitalization Project, the Fairmount Park Conservancy managed the creation of a new community garden, farmers’ market, two playgrounds and a brand new baseball field. Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard and his Family Foundation helped kick off the park’s renovations with a grant to rebuild the baseball field. Currently, the Fairmount Park Conservancy is managing the reconstruction of the park’s football field and the installation of new lighting around the park’s loop road. The success of the Hunting Park Revitalization Project to-date is due to the leadership of the Fairmount Park Conservancy and Philadelphia Parks & Recreation and key partnerships with the park’s civic group Hunting Park United, Philadelphia city officials, national sports figures and community members.

Hunting Park is being featured on CPA’s website, www.cityparksalliance.org, during the month of May.

The “Frontline Parks” program is made possible with generous support from DuMor, Inc. and PlayCore.

National Urban Biodiversity Week evolved from New York City Wildflower Week, a 10-day annual event now in its fifth year. The event is sponsored by Nature Block Party, a non-profit organization, in partnership with Project Noah, an interactive web and mobile application that enables users to track wildlife sightings, and the National Wildlife Federation, a grassroots conservation advocacy organization.

According to Marielle Anzelone, the event’s founder, the goals of National Urban Biodiversity Week are to:

• Create an urban constituency for nature by connecting people through hands-on opportunities
• Build a national conversation around urban biodiversity issues
• Encourage new ways of thinking about urban environments

Creatures from gray squirrels to roosting red tailed hawks remind us that nature is everywhere (the Project Noah sightings for New York alone show species as diverse as great egrets in Prospect Park to osage-orange in Inwood Hill Park).  Events like those that comprise Urban Biodiversity Week highlight opportunities for ordinary citizens to protect urban wildlife; we can create and improve urban habitats in our parks and community gardens as well as street medians, roof gardens, and window planters.

Engaged urban constituents can also support large-scale habitat conservation and improvement. For example:

• In response to community priorities, the current plan for the new downtown waterfront park in Seattle includes marine features to provide safe passage for salmon.
• The volunteer-supported Native Plant Nurseries program sponsored by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy propagates approximately 270,000 native plants per year to aid restoration projects within the park, maintaining the quality and integrity of the Bay Area’s protected natural lands.
• In recent years, private advocacy and fundraising has supported urban conservation land acquisitions across the country.  Last fall, The Trust for Public Land led efforts to conserve a 570 acre parcel 5 miles from downtown Albuquerque in partnership with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The new Middle Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge will protect critical habitat of the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher and provide new recreational opportunities for over one million local residents.

We caught up with Dr. Miller as she was, typically, running — in this case, catching a plane from San Francisco to a speaking engagement in Kentucky. And we began by speaking about the idea of “Park Prescriptions” — a term she coined, and has become popularized, for a practice she began using with her patients — but which she made clear right away was the result of some collaborative brainstorming.

“I may have been the first to write about it, but it was really born of meetings with a whole lot of folks representing public lands, so I cannot take full ownership,” she explained. “I wrote about it in The Washington Post, and that really launched it, but it’s something that represented a movement that really was already happening.  Physicians can really influence behavior with their patients if they give structured advice to do things differently. It’s what I call a ‘structure prescription’: give them something specific to do for 45 minutes a day, give them a specific place to go and tell them exactly what they should do there.  I give them trail maps to parks, and the kinds of exercises they should do there….It literally is the same idea as getting medicine on a prescription pad.”

Dr. Miller has worked and lectured to spread this thinking, encouraging other physicians to do the same, and has advocated this sensibility being incorporated into public park planning and the public health discussion.

A prescription for nature

“In a nutshell, my goal is to make our public lands a part of our health care system. That’s the overarching reason I’m at the conference this summer, and I think it’s really exciting that I was asked to be a part of it because it’s not a typical place to find a physician, as part of this discussion. But a vital part of looking at our cities in the future is how to make them healthier. So it’s very creative thinking on the part of the conference, and a very exciting opportunity for me to have a voice in a very interdisciplinary approach to looking at how we build the [new] city. I’m there to give a perspective on how we can build cities to keep people healthy and even help them treat illnesses they already have.”

Dr. Miller is part of the plenary session, “Exploring The New Green City,” taking place on Monday, July 16 at 9 a.m., where the discussion will focus on the trends and challenges in designing new models for modern urban living, and the role of parks and green space in helping cities realize their greatest potential. Among the questions to be addressed: What should these cities look like? How can we create more beautiful cities? How can parks drive city building strategies? How can green space support healthier urban populations?

“Anyone can intuitively tell you,” she goes on, speaking above the airport boarding announcements, “that having access to nature and the outdoors has many beneficial effects. But in today’s busy world it can still be hard to get people to buy into it in a wholesale way. But now there’s hard research that shows being outdoors increases endurance, fights depression, improves Vitamin D levels, improves recovery time from an illness…Now we need to apply that knowledge. Many of our cities are very dysfunctional. There are no sidewalks, you need to cross freeways to get to outdoor space.”

So what should urban planners do? Where are some of the best models?

“We have to make [green space] accessible from every dwelling, so people can pass through [our parks], have a greater sense of what they can tap into. In many cities in Europe, regardless of where you live in those cities, there is public access to lead you into this artery of greenery…we need to do a better job of that, and in [providing in our parks] more structured activities — hikes, guided tours, senior exercise programs.”

And it’s about getting the word out. She tells the story of one patient  in northern California who didn’t even realize the healthful and stimulating opportunities for both physical and mental wellness within minutes of her own home.

“This patient, who lived near my office in Noe Valley had knee issues so severe that walking on any pavement hurt. But [a place called] Glen Park Canyon was right near her house and she’d never even heard of it; I saw her eyes grow wide when I spoke about it — a quarter mile loop through a nature trail that was literally 7 blocks from her front door.

“At first she drove to the trail head, and did the loop once.” But after a process of gradually upping the dosage on the park prescription, if you will, “Now, several years later, she does eight loops, two miles, and she no longer drives there, she walks, she’s lost 30 pounds, her knees are much better, she’s wonderfully fit, and she’s joined the Glen Park Conservancy Group to get the word out to others.”

Attendees of the plenary session may also get to hear Dr. Miller speak about another of her passions: healthful eating. Her book “The Jungle Effect” is “part travelogue, part nutrition adventure, part recipe book,” about what can be learned — and incorporated into western life — from some of the healthiest native diets around the world. She went to northern Iceland, to the Greek island of Crete, to Cameroon in west central Africa, to Okinawa in Japan, and to small villages in Mexico.

The journey was prompted by a patient who whenever she returned home to her native village in Brazil lost all this weight — and then immediately regained it when she returned to San Francisco. “I began thinking — these native diets have evolved over thousands of years — so I began exploring these traditional diets from all over the world, and brought them back to my practice….I tend to [incorporate] myself now into what I eat a lot of the lessons I learned from ‘Jungle Effect.’”

Which, just as she’s about to hop on another plane, leads to this obvious “travelogue” question for someone who tends to spend a fair amount of time at airports: How does one eat healthfully in an airport?

She laughs. “You try not to.”

– Steve Sonsky

For more information on how to register for Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21^st Century Cities, please visit www.urbanparks2012.org.

Sunset on the pier. Photo Credit: Julienne Schaer

The resulting master plan mixes active and passive recreation in a sustainably designed site that incorporates vestiges of its industrial past and capitalizes on the singular vistas to the harbor, bridge and Lower Manhattan skyline. With a 50-yard-line view of nearly every architectural marvel and monument New York City has to offer, it’s no wonder the park averages 60,000 visitors per summer weekend, even though its first phase of development won’t be fully completed until 2013.

Beyond the views, the park has also drawn favorable attention for its lush plantings and innovative playgrounds. The park is further distinguished by its self-sustaining financial model, which uses carefully selected development sites within the boundaries to generate revenues for its ongoing maintenance.

At this summer’s Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21st Century Cities, the international urban parks conference being presented by the City Parks Alliancefrom July 14 to 17, park professionals, environmental advocates and attendees from all over the world will get to see all this first hand, with several featured events taking place at Brooklyn Bridge Park to show off its various aspects, including a guided tour with planners and designers, and an outdoor screening of the documentary “Olmsted and America’s Urban Parks.”

Jane's Carousel.
Photo Credit: Julienne Schaer

New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe has stated a particular fondness for Brooklyn Bridge Park, referring to it as a “true 21st Century park model,” and praises the partnership behind it. “It [the public-private model] doesn’t work in all applications, but particularly in the case of Brooklyn Bridge Park [and Hudson River Park on Manhattan's west side], the properties were formerly shipping piers, so they used to be income-producing. So when the city and state no longer needed them, the land could have been just sold off to the highest bidder. But we didn’t.  We have parks instead…. Hundreds of millions of dollars in public investment [was spent] to build fabulous waterfront parks. And when you see a beautiful park, you also see growth in property values, and then that spurs more new development.”

To learn more about Brooklyn Bridge Park, visit www.brooklynbridgeparknyc.org

For more information on how to register for Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21^st Century Cities, please visit www.urbanparks2012.org.

Creative and technology firms respond to their employees’ preferences by locating in vibrant cities near destination public spaces. This trend can be observed across the country, from the growing tech cluster in Boulder, CO to Google’s recently-opened New York City offices, located one block from the High Line.

Parks have long been regarded as anchors of excellent city neighborhoods. Historic parks like Boston Common are cherished public gathering spaces in established communities, while brand new city parks, like Washington DC’s Yards Park, serve as the hubs around which fledgling communities can grow.

More recently, parks have been regarded as economic assets that create value for their communities, attracting tourism, sustaining real estate values, and increasing public health and enjoyment in ways that can be quantified (as the Center for City Park Excellence does in its Economic Value of a City Park System reports).

In addition to creating near-term economic benefits, parks can generate and sustain long-term economic growth. Over the past several decades, technological change has shifted the national and global economy toward the production of ideas over goods and services. In its Creative Economy Report 2010, the United Nations Council on Trade and Development (UNCTD) reports that growth in the creative economy, including arts, technology, and media has significantly outpaced global economic growth. It states:

In 2008, the eruption of the world financial and economic crisis provoked a drop in global demand and a contraction of 12 per cent in international trade. However, world exports of creative goods and services continued to grow, reaching $592 billion in 2008 — more than double their 2002 level…

In the U.S., the technology sector represent 29% of all growth in the office real estate market in 2011 (as reported by The Wall Street Journal).

In this new economy, a talented workforce – including scientists, programmers, artists, designers, and entrepreneurs – is the most valuable economic resource a city can procure. In a recent report that ranked cities around the world by their economic competitiveness, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) found that human capital is closely correlated with overall economic competitiveness.

The EIU then explains that urban amenities and quality of life are the defining factor in attracting a talented workforce. All other factors equal, talented employees prefer living in cities that are socially, culturally and intellectually vibrant, with diverse and high-quality public amenities that include excellent parks. The UNCTD report affirms these findings:

…comprehensive cultural asset management is a prerequisite for sustained growth in the creative-industries sector and, in a wider perspective, for sustainable economic development and vibrant community life. It is therefore necessary to maintain the principle that cultural assets are intergenerational capital and that their viability may legitimately be sustained by public investment.

The private sector has, as expected, responded swiftly to market forces by relocating to vibrant urban neighborhoods near public spaces. Now, there are promising signs that cities, too, are beginning to view parks as sound, long-term economic investments:

• Synchronous public investments in creative industries and public space. For example, significant public investment in the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, which unites downtown Boston with its waterfront district, was coupled with investments in a new public transit line (the Silver Line) and incentive programs to help technology companies move to the newly branded waterfront “Innovation District.”

• Major investments in new “signature” parks. A recent survey issued by the City Parks Alliance found that 55% of independently managed signature parks, those parks that define their cities, have been built in the past decade.

• Partnership with the private sector. Cities are increasingly partnering with the private sector to access additional resources for parks, from the significant private fundraising that supported Millennium Park’s construction to the corporate sponsorship that provides public programming in Bryant Park.

That being the case, there may not be a better way to combine leisure with learning then the Hudson River Greenway Bike Tour that the Commissioner will lead, and which promises to be a highlight for a lucky few early registrants for the International Urban Parks Conference, Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21st Century Cities, being held from July 14 to 17 in New York City.

The three-hour tour on the afternoon of Sunday July 15 will traverse the longest continuous car-free bicycle and pedestrian path in New York City: the Hudson River Greenway, an uninterrupted 11-mile route between Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, and north beyond the George Washington Bridge. The trail passes through Hudson River Park, Riverside Park South, Riverside Park and Fort Washington Park.

New York City’s historical legacy as a pioneer of urban park innovation in America will be both on visual display — and on display in the accompanying ruminations of the Commissioner. Bicycles and helmets will be provided and the stunningly scenic and informative ride will be at a relaxed pace with, Benepe promises, about a half dozen or so stops. “Hopefully the weather will cooperate, and there’s usually a breeze along the river and many places to stop, talk, get water and get a bite along the way.”

Sunblock and cool clothing are good ideas. Perhaps only an excessive fear of helmet hair should be a deterrence.

“I haven’t figured out the exact route yet that we’ll take,” the Commissioner says, “but we’ll see Battery Park and Battery Park City,  Hudson River Park and the new park that connects Hudson River Park and Riverside.  We’ll see some new parks on the Upper West Side and Harlem…we’ll pass by the state park on top of the sewage treatment plant in West Harlem, and [maybe] will see some of the improvements [underway] to Fort Washington Park.  If we have the energy, we can go as far north as the Little Red Lighthouse — the iconic structure underneath the great bridge, the George Washington Bridge. You know, the story as told in the children’s book is more or less true. The river didn’t come to life and we don’t know if it was exactly called back into action on one dark and stormy night — but we do know it was saved from demolition and restored.”

Hudson River Greenway, New York

Benepe points out that the necklace of parks and the continuous bike paths that now adjoin them, “the opening up of the formerly industrial waterfront for recreational use,” is felt by many to be one of the city’s two or three greatest urban planning accomplishments of recent decades. “I’m a recreational cyclist. I get out and ride on weekends,” he says, “and you can now do a continuous ride without ever having to cross a street, from the Battery [on the south end of the island] all the way up to Dyckman Street [in the Inwood neighborhood of most northern Manhattan] because all the missing links have now been filled in. That’s a distance of almost the entire length of Manhattan.”

This has all occurred during the biggest period of park investment, construction and expansion for New York City since the 1930s. “The waterfront parks and re-purposing the post-industrial and post-maritime landscape for public recreation has been a major focus in particular,” Benepe explains. “This is being done around the world and has been a particular emphasis here in New York.” As a signature program of the Bloomberg mayoralty, Benepe estimates the city has invested in excess of $1 billion dollars on waterfront parks alone, $3 billion on parks in total over the last 10 years. “Just look at Brooklyn Bridge Park and Hudson River Park — those alone are half a billion. Plus [the development] along the Bronx River, the Harlem River, the East River waterfront park south of South Street Seaport…so I think a billion is probably accurate. Certainly no one else in the United States is doing this much.

“New York City has become both a lab and a bellwether for urban park design, development, construction and management [with] all permutations of creative public-private partnerships,” he explains. Conference attendees will be able to see first hand “many examples of terrific landscape design by talented architects, and more varied models of park management in one place then you can find in 10 other cities.”

Presented by City Parks Alliance, Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21st Century Cities will feature over 100 tours and workshops.  Space for the Commissioner’s bike tour is very limited, so be sure to sign up soon.

Please visit www.urbanparks2012.org for full program and registration details.

Dancing in Franklin Park

The park has hundreds of daily visitors, and thousands who come for cultural festivals and sporting events and is viewed by the city police department as one of the safest parks in the Boston. However, Franklin Park’s reputation as a popular community destination was shaken when, in late fall 2011, a woman walking through Franklin Park with her grandchild on a midweek afternoon was attacked, a victim of random violence. Some golfers in the area heard the woman’s cries for help and ran off her attacker, but the evening news seemed to confirm the worst fears of suburban denizens: urban parks are not safe. Regulars of the park had spent many years convincing their friends, neighbors, and colleagues of the beauty and safety of the area, and with one unlikely event, all that work could have been undone.

Three nights later, 200 people from the surrounding communities gathered with flashlights in hand to traverse a 2.5 mile path around the park in the dark. The statement was clear: people who used the park would not be scared away from their favorite place in Boston. Neighborhood organizations have now taken up park safety in their regular meetings with local police and buddy system walking groups have formed.

Franklin Park will be featured on CPA’s homepage through the end of March.

The “Frontline Parks” program is made possible with generous support from DuMor, Inc. and PlayCore.

The conference will be a four-day immersion in best practices and bold new thinking that can be taken home and applied to green space planning the world over. Its plenaries and workshops — more than 40 of which are coordinated with outdoor tours — will let you experience New York City’s visionary park lessons first hand. Customize your conference experience by building your own program from the more than 100 sessions and events taking place at New York University and throughout the city.

• Hear thoughts on new park design as a driver of community redevelopment
• Discover new revenue streams from public and private sources
• Explore the latest uses of social media for fundraising and advocacy
• See how eco-design technologies are bringing water, wildlife and whimsy back to urban neighborhoods
• Listen to experts who’ll help you measure impact and maintain your park effectively
• Learn how to forge alliances with civic groups, elected officials, private organizations, the National Park Service and entrepreneurs!

Sign up early to bike with the NYC Parks & Recreation Commissioner, kayak down the Hudson, canoe on the Bronx River, visit new green markets and park-based foodie meccas, and join us across the East River in Brooklyn for a marvelous evening of food, wine and breathtaking Manhattan skyline views under the Brooklyn Bridge, in the city’s newest sustainable waterfront park.

Don’t miss an unparalleled opportunity from July 14-17, 2012 to catch up with colleagues, make new contacts, and network with leaders in urban park innovation across North America and around the world!  Visit www.urbanparks2012.org for more details.

Waterfront Park in autumn

Talk of redevelopment along the blighted sections of river had gone on for years. More than a dozen public meetings showed overwhelming support for public green space, but no progress was made. That began to change in the early 1990s during a meeting of community leaders led by Humana Chairman David Jones. Jones, along with local philanthropists Sally Brown and Mary Bingham, had participated in an earlier phase of the project by funding the development of the Waterfront Master Plan by San Francisco-based Hargreaves Associates. With the Hargreaves plan in hand, Jones started the meeting by pledging to match the largest contribution to the project. At the other end of the table, Mrs. Bingham reached into her purse, pulled out her checkbook, and wrote a personal check for $1,000,000. From that moment, the project was off and running and hasn’t stopped since. In the twenty years since that meeting, Waterfront Park has completed 3 phases and received more than $40,000,000 in private donations, many in amounts of $10, $100 and $1,000 from a highly engaged community.

Photo Credit: Nfocus Images, Wales Hunter

Waterfront Park will be featured on CPA’s homepage throughout the month of February.

The “Frontline Parks” program is made possible with generous support from DuMor, Inc. and PlayCore.

“We selected Hudson River Park for recognition because it exemplifies the power of public-private partnerships to create and maintain urban parks that build community and make our cities sustainable and vibrant,” said Catherine Nagel, Executive Director of City Parks Alliance.  “We hope that by shining the spotlight on this park that we can raise awareness about both the necessity and the promise of these kinds of partnerships to spur investment in our nation’s urban parks.”

“Hudson River Park is the realization of more than a decade of work to restore Manhattan’s waterfront into a true community resource and model for public projects,” said A.J. Pietrantone, Executive Director of Friends of Hudson River Park, “We are proud to be selected as a Frontline Park, a testament to the positive results that come from partnerships between citizens and city government.”

Pier 45 before renovation

Hudson River Park stretches the five miles from Battery Park City to 59th Street, making it the second largest waterfront park in the nation and the largest open space project in Manhattan since Central Park was completed. It is the first in a series of waterfront revitalization efforts in New York, and is currently one of the most visited urban parks in North America.

“It is an honor to receive recognition from the City Parks Alliance for innovation and leadership in this field,” said Madelyn Wils, President and CEO of Hudson River Park Trust. “As the first project of its kind, Hudson River Park provides an exciting glimpse at what the future holds for all of the City’s waterfront parks.”

The renovation of Hudson River Park has improved quality of life on Manhattan’s West Side, helped spur the boom of families living downtown, and served as a catalyst for economic development in surrounding neighborhoods. For instance, over the past decade, there has been $3 billion in new construction in the blocks surrounding the Park.

In total, more than 17 million residents and tourists take advantage of the bike path, walkway and  piers, enjoy a cruise, or attend a concert each year. More than 7,500 children a year participate in the Park’s free educational programming and almost 120 different organizations use its recreation fields.

“It’s hard to overstate the impact of Hudson River Park on the city’s waterfront and on the quality of life of the park’s neighbors,” said Hudson River Park Trust Chair Diana L. Taylor. “Once a dilapidated remnant of New York’s industrial past, the Hudson River waterfront is now a blue and green playground for the whole city to enjoy.”

Pier 45 after renovation

Hudson River Park is being featured on CPA’s website during the month of January.

The “Frontline Parks” program is made possible with generous support from DuMor, Inc. and PlayCore.