Mixing uses in parks has its challenges and requires good design, adequate signage, and clear rules. Trail use, for example, can create conflict between walkers, skaters, and fast cyclists. Many cities appropriately prohibit fast cycling on trails shared by pedestrians. On the other hand, hard pedaling and fast running provide more health benefit than casual spinning and jogging. Other than putting bikes on roadways, the only safe solution is to provide parallel treadways for fast and slow users—and to clearly mark the allowed uses by location or time of day. Then, too, the alternate trails need occasional enforcement.

Even if a park system offers varied spaces for physical activity, not everyone will know how to take advantage of them. Some users need to learn new skills, some need encouragement, some need an exercise regimen, some need social support. Even with all this, many require other assistance—partners, equipment, referees, timekeepers, music, safety paraphernalia, and more. In a word, programming. Good programming can increase park use many times over, make activity more enjoyable, and increase its benefits to health and fitness.

Credit: Phil Schermeister.

Traditional park  programming consists of league sports, exercise routines, children’s camps, and oldies-but-goodies such as ballroom dancing. More recent additions have been Jazzercise, tai kwon do, tai chi, rock climbing, and bicycle “roadeos.” But in response to changing technologies and new immigrant cultures, innovative ideas come along all the time. In Minneapolis, the park department offers open gym periods to play sepak takraw, a remarkable kick volleyball game brought to this country by Hmong immigrants from Cambodia. Raleigh, North Carolina, uses the reward of a free pedometer for diabetic children who sign up for special athletic programming that includes nutrition instruction. Seattle has launched monthly Women of the World swims at two pools at the request of Muslim women whose faith bars them from recreational activities with men. Women of all faiths are welcome, and the sessions are privately funded. Overseen by female lifeguards and held at pools without street-facing windows, the swims provide some women with exercise they otherwise would not get.

Of course, programming has a health impact only if people know about it, and that requires promotion and marketing through advertisements, program pamphlets, TV and radio public service announcements, flyers, email‚ and social networking services such as Twitter. Outreach is difficult in times of tight budgets, but creative park departments attempt to find private sector collaborators in fields such as health, media, banking, and public utilities to help them spread the word.

Finally, every new program and every new facility needs to be evaluated, particularly when dealing with health, since this approach is standard in the medical community. It is not enough to assume that an activity has a positive impact. The only real way to know is through monitoring and before-and-after measurement. Sometimes the research can be done by the park agency itself. But when this is prohibitively time-consuming or expensive, it may be possible to partner with a local university, college‚ or high school whose student researchers can observe usership and even measure such health indicators as body mass index, heart rate‚ or muscle strength.

Credit: Susan Lapides.

When it comes to programming, Cincinnati—the nation’s 56th-largest city—packs a wallop. On a per-capita basis, Cincinnati ranks in the U.S. top ten for its number of ball diamonds, recreation centers, swimming pools, tennis courts, basketball courts‚ and golf courses. More important for public health, the Cincinnati Recreation Commission’s programs attracted over 3.2 million participant-visits in 2009, some 691,000 of which were visits by youth. All this in a city of barely 330,000 residents—giving Cincinnati the highest per-capita recreation participation rate of all cities reporting information to The Trust for Public Land.

Among the hundreds of programs offered are youth and adult league sports ranging from soccer and basketball to track and field and kickball; senior programs such as golf, swimming, tennis‚ and the Senior Olympics; programs for the disabled, including wheelchair football and basketball; and such offerings for youth as afterschool programs, summer day camps, and bike outings. In addition to the formal programming, most of the recreation commission’s 29 recreation centers offer fitness centers and open gym hours. Residents can use the recreation centers and the city’s 26 pools for a yearly membership fee of $25, or $10 for seniors and youth.

The Cincinnati Park Board—a landowning and land management agency separate from the recreation commission—plays a part, too, by working to make Cincinnatians feel safer in their parks. In Burnet Woods, a place with a mixed reputation, the board thinned out invasive vegetation and installed a disc golf course through the forest. The sport, which is growing in popularity throughout the country, drew so many more people into Burnet Woods that the park became safer and more appealing even for visitors not there for the game.

Credit: Rich Reid.

Fitness zones are easy-to-use, accessible outdoor gyms designed to promote general  health within a park experience, creating a supportive social context for getting fit. Using only a gravity- and-resistance weight system, fitness zones require no electricity and employ their users’ body weight to engage different muscle groups. The exercise equipment is durable, vandal- and weather-resistant, and appropriate for people 13 years of age and older of all fitness levels.

Working under the leadership of The Trust for Public Land and with funding from health insurer Kaiser Permanente and the MetLife Foundation, the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department have installed 30 fitness zones across the region, including six in existing Los Angeles city parks.

Fitness zones are often placed in areas of high need, including communities with high rates of obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Some are located adjacent to playgrounds to encourage adults to exercise while keeping an eye on children. Others are placed near administrative offices to reduce safety worries.

The El Cariso Regional Park in Sylmar is one example of a successful fitness zone. It includes nine pieces of easy-to-use outdoor gym equipment along with bilingual health and fitness information panels.

“The bottom line is that fitness zones attract new users to parks,” says Dr. Deborah Cohen, a researcher with the RAND Corporation who carried out an exhaustive before- and-after study of the facilities in 12 parks. “We also know that fitness zones are used throughout the day, that fitness zone users increase the amount they exercise, and that they use the parks more frequently than other park users.”

Twelve parks – one each month – will be featured on CPA’s website home page in 2012.  Each “Frontline Park” story will show how parks and their stewards are on the forefront of creating healthier, more sustainable cities.  With each month’s feature, CPA will coordinate with each park partner a joint press release for local, national, and social media to announce their selection as a “Frontline Park.”  Featured parks will also be included in CPA’s quarterly e-newsletter Benchmarks distributed to hundreds of CPA members and on the City Parks blog.

We are looking for the best stories.  Is there a non-traditional leader who has helped to bring about change in your local park?  How has park programming helped to address pressing urban issues, such as public health, job creation or community revitalization?  Have you done something really fun and innovative to increase revenue, cultivate volunteers or educate young people?  How did a crisis create an opportunity to build a new partnership?  Stories should be related to one or more of the following topics:

• Community Capacity Building
• Design
• Economic Development
• Education
• Environment
• Funding
• Health
• Maintenance
• Programming
• Public/Private Partnerships
• Safety
• Transportation
• Workforce Development

For more information about application guidelines, please click here: Frontline Park Nominations

Community gardens are a vastly underappreciated and underprovided resource for cities, both at ground level and on rooftops. As reported by University of Illinois Landscape Architecture Professor Laura Lawson in her excellent book City Bountiful, surveys from the 1970s and 1980s revealed that while gardening was Americans’ favorite outdoor leisure activity, somewhere between 7 million and 18 million people wanted to garden but weren’t able to because they did not have the space. With today’s higher population, including millions of immigrants who live in cities but still have deep cultural attachments to agriculture, the situation is now unquestionably more severe. In a nation engulfed by profligate use of land, the irony is hard to miss.

Not only does the Central Bainbridge St. Community Garden produce thousands of pounds of vegetables, it also serves as a hub of activity in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant community. Credit: Avery Wham.

Community gardens do not have full-fledged pedigrees as parks, but they are certainly members of the extended family, and they are overwhelmingly urban. Coming in a diversity of forms, they can provide beauty, supply food, educate youth, build confidence, reduce pesticide exposure, grow social capital, preserve mental health, instill pride, and raise property values. In 2008, The Trust for Public Land’s survey of the park systems of the seventy-seven largest cities revealed 682 gardens (and 12,988 individual garden plots) specifically owned by park departments and located on urban parkland.

The national movement has a great deal of exuberant vitality, demonstrated even by place names and their fostering organizations: the Garden of Eatin’, Queen Pea Garden, Harlem Rose Garden, Jes’ Good Rewards Children’s Garden, Paradise on Earth, Garden Resources of Washington (GROW), Denver Urban Gardens (DUG), Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG), San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), and Los Angeles’ Gardening Angels. But the movement is also severely underfunded, poorly organized, and subject to a bruisingly high level of burnout and turnover. (GROW, SLUG and BUG have all gone out of business.)

Put simply, between the legalities, the neighbors, and the typical challenges of soil and weather, urban agriculture is extraordinarily difficult, even more difficult than running normal public parks. But, community gardens make extremely efficient use of space. An area that could barely fit a single tennis court might hold 75 garden plots; a soccer field might be replaced with 300 or more. Moreover, gardens can be placed close to streets and railroads because they have no errant balls bouncing into traffic.

Most cities have plenty of underused or even unused chunks of parks that could be developed into community gardens. Even super-crowded places like Jersey City and San Francisco have parkland that is essentially unvisited. That doesn’t automatically mean it’s perfect for gardening–it may be too shady or too deep within a big park to be reachable by potential gardeners–but those drawbacks might be fixable through tree trimming or park redesign. Gardens need to be near edges where they can be seen and where people, vehicles, and irrigation water can easily reach them. But putting a garden near an edge helps open up the next internal ring of the park to greater use, thus gradually reclaiming what might be a no-man’s land in the interior.

On the other hand, putting a community garden into an existing park could well mean not putting in a soccer field, dog park, or memorial grove that some other constituency wants. Thus, developing a new, standalone community garden leaves existing parkland unmolested and raises the tide for everyone. (It also provides a boost to home values in the surrounding community; a 2007 study by the New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy found that gardens in New York’s poorest neighborhoods lifted property values by up to 9.4 percent after five years.)

A community garden program cannot be left to operate reactively. It must be designed to protect gardens at the beginning of the process, not at the end. Gardens must be clearly recognized as an integral part of a city’s park system, and they should be included in all redevelopment projects–particularly those that are high-density and that are marketed to former suburbanites who may love all aspects of the city except its lack of gardening space. As of 2009, the only city that has a truly sophisticated garden structure is Seattle. Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and several other places have relatively strong private-sector agencies or public-private partnerships that own, hold and support significant numbers of community gardens, but only Seattle’s P-Patch program proactively plans, sites, negotiates, sets rules, and protects gardens throughout the city.

With 68 gardens totaling 23 acres and containing 1,900 plots cultivated by 3,800 gardeners, Seattle's P-Patch is the national model for a city-run community gardening program. Credit: Seattle P-Patch Program.

P-Patch, which began in 1973 and was named after Rainie Picardo, the farmer who first allowed residents to begin gardening on his land, once even counted as a gardening member Mayor Wes Ulhman. Today P-Patch has sixty-eight gardens, an annual budget of $650,000 and a staff of six, and Seattle has more garden plots per capita than any other major city. Even more impressive, Seattle’s City Council passed a formal resolution supporting community gardens and recommending their co-location on other city-owned property. The city’s comprehensive plan calls for a standard of one garden for every 2,000 households in high-density neighborhoods (known in Seattle as “urban villages”). Nevertheless, despite this abundance, P-Patch still has a waiting list of 1,900 persons; in crowded neighborhoods that translates to three to four years.

Standalone gardens need not be slotted only to old home sites. One particularly promising locale is along rail lines, both abandoned and active. Community gardens have already been created alongside the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad Trail in Arlington, Virginia; the Ohlone Trail in Berkeley, California, and the Capital City Trail in Madison, Wisconsin. In Queens, New York, the Long Island City Roots Garden was created directly over the tracks of the unused-but-not-abandoned Degnon Terminal Railroad. (To prevent official abandonment the railroad required that the tracks be retained, so the gardeners bulldozed out 140 cubic yards of garbage and covered the rails with 160 cubic yards of clean dirt; the garden is a train-shaped 26 feet wide and 145 feet long.)

While gardens alongside rail trails are fine, they don’t actually increase the amount of parkland in a city. To do that requires moving up to the next level: creating community gardens alongside non-abandoned rail lines. This is a tougher challenge but has an added benefit since there are few parts of a city less attractive than the edges of a railroad. Some analysts are convinced that rail ridership would jump up a few notches solely if the view was pleasanter. Back in the 1960s, Lady Bird Johnson spearheaded the remarkably successful highway beautification program, but no subsequent first lady (or anyone else) has taken on what might today be called an extreme track makeover program. Could gardens lead the way?

One notable success is in Madison, Wisconsin, where the St. Paul Avenue Garden operates under a license with the Wisconsin Central Railroad, a subsidiary of Canadian National Railways. The line is lightly used by low-speed freight traffic, so there is not even a fence alongside the tracks. The 72-plot, 25-foot-wide garden runs for about two blocks in an intense utility corridor that includes a buried fiber-optic cable and an overhead high-tension line. “It used to be a dumping ground sort of place,” explained Joe Mathers, garden specialist with the Community Action Coalition for South Central Wisconsin. “Then, in the early 1980s Madison got a lot of Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia so we started looking for land for them to farm. We were in a recession so there was land available. When the economy improved development resumed and we lost some spaces. But we should always be able to hang on to this garden–nothing is permitted to be built here.”

There are a scattering of community gardens alongside rail lines in Chicago, some consisting of flower gardens to beautify station areas, and there is a garden in the Bronx, New York, alongside a large railroad storage yard. In both those cities, the rail owners are public agencies–Metra and the MTA, respectively. Public rail agencies may be more amenable to leasing or licensing trackside space than private train operators, although no detailed study of opportunities has yet been carried out.

Read more about the benefits of community gardens in an earlier post.

July’s Frontline Parks are known for keeping patrons cool and for their unique water conservation technology.

Grapeland Water Park

Grapeland Water Park is the first public water destination attraction within the City of Miami.  With four pools that include slide play structures, a lazy river and recreation pool, the facility has brought splashy fun to the backyard of a community.  The bright and colorful environment was designed by acclaimed international artist Romero Britto.  A popular destination for families and groups, the park is located adjacent to an exit off a major highway in Miami, making it accessible for those who live in the neighborhood and surrounding counties.  During the summer, it’s common for the park to hit peak capacity several times a day.  The combination of innovative water conservation technology, creative design and fitness/recreation programs for people of all ages and abilities make Grapeland a wonderful warm weather neighborhood attraction.  Site furnishings in Grapeland Water Park were manufactured by DuMor, Inc.

Mary Bartelme Park

Occupying the site of a former infirmary, Mary Bartelme Park combines a sense of history with modern, innovative design elements.  This uniquely designed green space in the West Loop serves a community that has experienced tremendous growth over the last 10 years.  The Chicago Park District worked with the local elected officials, community members and nonprofit organizations to create a park that specifically caters to the neighborhood.  The size and amenities in this park give it the feel of a local space, but the unique design and location make it an appealing regional destination.  Innovation abounds in this park, from using pieces of the original infirmary building in seat walls to capturing and storing all storm water with permeable paver paths.  But one of the most popular features manages to conserve water and keep park patrons comfortable at the same time.  Using only three gallons a minute, each of the five stainless steel fountain gates emit a fine mist of vaporized water on hot Chicago days, cooling off families while immersing the area in a cloud.

Frontline Parks is generously supported by DuMor, Inc.  and  PlayCore.

What does a daffy have in common with a downward dog?

Both are moves you might see in this month’s featured parks, because parks can be as varied as the people who use them.  One may be designed to support a single activity, such as skateboarding.  Other parks are planned to support a wide assortment of uses, such as walking or running, children’s play, competitive sports, natural resource protection, or beautiful landscapes.  Programs can be as varied as a park allows, promoting mind-body exercises, cultural performances, or water-based fun.  Whether a park promotes a wide range of activities or a single use, it is but a single piece of a larger, complex parks system.  Parks and open spaces must be envisioned as whole systems, not only to best meet diverse recreational goals, but to also best deliver the wide range of associated parks’ benefits, such as health, economic development, and community-building.

June’s  featured parks demonstrate diversity in uses, and both are prime examples of parks as civic spaces, bringing people together to connect around common experiences.

Houston Skyline.

You might see a daffy performed at the Lee and Joe Jamail Skatepark in Houston, Texas.  In response to an important need for an often under-served age group, a group of skaters formed PUSH (Public Use Skateparks for Houston) to advocate for a safe, well-designed skate park.  In response, the Houston Parks Board, a non-profit parks partner, raised the funds and built a state-of- the- art skatepark along Buffalo Bayou and the edge of downtown, an area already used by skateboarders.  Opened in 2008, the 30,000 square foot facility is owned and operated by the City of Houston.  The park is free, open late year-round, hosts classes and exhibitions, and has become an extreme sports destination.  Site furnishings were manufactured by DuMor, Inc.

Fourth of July Celebration.

Though best known for its Fourth of July Boston Pops concert and fireworks, the Charles River Esplanade performs a wide-variety of public service the other 364 days a year, as well.  The park began with a seawall and landfill in the late 19th century and has become the crown jewel of Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace.  The conversion from polluted mudflats to linear park continued decade by decade.  Today, this riverside gem provides waterfront activities such as boating and fishing, as well as land-based trails for running, walking, and bicycling.  Programs are diverse, too, and provide yoga lovers and baseball players alike room to practice their favorite activities.  This three-mile stretch of greenspace encourages people from all walks of life to share in its natural beauty.

Frontline Parks is generously supported by DuMor, Inc.  and  PlayCore.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 percent of Americans are fully sedentary. They are not all obese, of course, but lack of exercise is certainly a risk factor for being overweight. On average, an obese American racks up nearly $1,500 more per year in health care costs than an American of normal weight, for a national total of $147 billion in direct medical expenses.

Urban park facilities are a resource to help city-dwellers be active. As Jason Cissell, administrator of community relations of Louisville Metro Parks puts it, “we’re the largest gym in the city, and we’re free!” But the system only works if people know about it. A 2002 study for the American Journal of Preventative Medicine showed that community-wide fitness campaigns can help, succeeding in encouraging, on average, 4.2 percent of residents to begin engaging in regular physical activity.

If even one in ten of those newly active people transitions from obesity to a healthy weight, medical costs would fall by $6.30 for each man, woman and child in the city per year. In Washington, D.C., with 600,000 residents, that translates to $3.7 million – an amount that dwarfs what is spent on park marketing in Washington.  In fact, that is more than the country’s largest park marketing budget, the $2.7 million spent by the Chicago Park District (for a city of 2.8 million people).  Compared to expected benefits, every city park marketing effort in the country is underfunded.

San Antonio's marketing effort set the standard for cost efficiency. Credit: San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department.

In July 2009, San Antonio, Texas launched a marketing campaign that must have set a record for frugality. The city-wide, multi-media “Get Active. Get Fit. Step Up to Recreation” campaign cost only $28,000, thanks to the use of public service placement rather than paid advertising and the use of city officials and local athletes instead of paid actors. To stir excitement the department used prizes as rewards, handing out free “Step Up to Recreation” water bottles and tee shirts. But since there’s no money to count users, it’s not known if the campaign actually increased park use or fitness.

Louisville's parks and health departments cooperated to raise awareness of the city's "best parks for exercise." Credit: Louisville Metro Parks.

The truth is that marketing parks is too difficult, too expensive and too important to be left only to park and recreation agencies.  The effort needs and deserves to be a partnership between the parks community – with its land and facilities – and the health community – with its science, its funding and its outreach. A few of these partnerships do exist, but they are challenging enough to require strong leadership from above. In Louisville, where Mayor Jerry Abramson was determined to combat Louisville’s high levels of obesity and inactivity, Metro Parks joined with the Department of Health and Well-Being to launch the “Healthy Hometown Movement” in September 2009. The city-wide initiative encourages citizens to get 30 minutes of physical activity at least five times per week. The health department, going further to focus on the eight neighborhoods with the most serious obesity-related risks, granted Metro Parks $25,000 to provide free fitness classes in recreation centers.

The powerful and well-heeled insurance industry has not yet done much cross-marketing with parks, but United Healthcare may be the harbinger of a new approach, having partnered with the City of Denver, Colorado to advertise parks. The company gave the Department of Parks and Recreation $60,000 to print and distribute 75,000 copies of its programming guides, more than three times the number printed in 2008. In addition to recreation centers, libraries and the Sunday Denver Post, the guides are distributed in United Healthcare offices.

With Colorado boasting the lowest obesity rate in the nation, it is either ironic or emblematic that this kind of partnership is coming out of Denver. Regardless, it is the kind of creativity that park departments, health departments and mayors will increasingly utilize in the future: according to The Trust for Public Land’s analysis of 2008 (the most recent year available), the marketing budgets of city park agencies fell by another 11 percent.

The full text of this article, which ran in the August 2010 issue of Parks & Recreation magazine, can be accessed through The Trust for Public Land.

The growing prevalence of obesity and illnesses related to inactivity underscores the importance of cooperation between the medical community and parks departments. This idea was promoted recently by Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative, which stresses the role of the built environment in improving public health.

Some parks departments have reached out to inactive people by providing financial incentives or prizes for participation in parks and recreation programs. The Kids in Parks program in Asheville, North Carolina, offers prizes like walking sticks, nature journals, and backpacks for kids who complete trail hikes and log them online. Insurance companies have joined in – the Senior Dimensions Fit for Life Club, a program of the Health Plan of Nevada, provides free fitness programs at more than 30 park facilities in southern Nevada as part of coverage.

But what do you do if you already have a great park and recreation system but a persistently unhealthy population? The solution might be a doctor’s intervention.

A park prescription. Credit: New Mexico Health Care Takes On Diabetes

Park prescription programs combine a written prescription for increased activity with guidance aimed at eliminating common barriers to outdoor exercise, such as lack of information about facilities or inability to pay for recreation programs. Such initiatives are growing in prominence across the country.

One physician-led program, called Recreation Rx, offers prescriptions that can be redeemed for free community recreation services in the San Diego area. Dr. R. Christopher Searles worked with the Chula Vista recreation director to identify existing programs for which fees could be waived and strategies to offer more free programs with existing staff and space. The program has few expenses other than the printing of prescription pads.

As it turns out, appropriate design of the prescription pads is critical to the success of the program. Dr. Searles noticed early on in the program that the prescriptions were underused, so he supplied participating clinics with wall dispensers so that the pads could be displayed more prominently. Posters were put up in the waiting room to prompt patients to ask about the program. Dr. Searles regularly meets with the recreation director to update the available activities, customizing the prescription forms for season and age range.

The prescription pads tend to be colorful, friendly, and motivational, but also must appear official if they are to be taken seriously. One program initially had patients sign the prescription along with their doctor, but later decided to only have the doctor sign the form so as to convey a greater sense of authority and significance. Some pads have suggestions of different ways to get active outdoors and for gradually increasing exercise frequency, and some programs offer prescription forms in different languages.

Doctors play an important role in tracking the programs to better understand how their recommendations are being put into action. Tracking success is not too difficult when the prescriptions are submitted as vouchers for programs. Dr. Searles found that during a three-month period, 1,304 prescriptions were dispensed and 650 were redeemed at recreation and aquatic centers. The Chicago Exercise Prescription Fitness Center Waiver, started in 2003, offers prescriptions to patients with obesity-related illnesses that can be redeemed for a free 12-week fitness center membership at any of 66 parks in Chicago. Patients must return to their doctors to renew their prescription between sessions.

Prescription Trails, a program of New Mexico Health Care Takes on Diabetes and the Albuquerque Alliance for Active Living, is focused on ensuring that patients can easily locate and access a well-maintained trail. A Parks Evaluation Committee has identified three transit-friendly, wheelchair-accessible parks for each zip code in participating communities. Volunteers evaluated local trail loops, allowing doctors to provide booklets of approved parks accompanied with ratings, amenities, and directions. Trails are periodically reviewed, and the program has worked with the city to install distance markers and make sidewalk improvements.

Portland Rx Play, which this month expanded to 23 park and recreation facilities and 24 pediatric clinics, has doctors provide the contact information of an unhealthy patient to parks and recreation staff. The goal of the physician is to create a “warm handoff” to the recreation center staff, who then take over to help identify activities that might be of interest at a nearby community center, such as karate, yoga, and “active gaming” like Wii or Dance Dance Revolution. The children involved in the program will be part of an Oregon State University study comparing the activity levels of participants with another group who are advised to exercise but not given any structured programming.

Seniors practicing yoga in a Portland, Ore. park.

The American College of Sports Medicine has been at the forefront of this effort in the medical community, developing a program called Exercise is Medicine. It encourages doctors to include a standardized exercise evaluation with every visit and make exercise prescriptions. It is already in use by over 400 medical organizations. But is not focused specifically on encouraging park use, which raises the question of how park departments can ensure that free, public park facilities remain valuable elements of exercise prescription programs. We’ll look at some programs led by parks departments in part two of this article, coming soon.

Credit: Alan Miles NYC (Flickr Feed)

Of the many unique activities New York is known for, the most entertaining this summer involved closing roads and opening pools, specifically dumpster swimming pools.  

For the third summer in a row, New York’s Department of Transportation presented the Summer Streets program, closing almost seven miles of posh Park Avenue to motor vehicles from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park. Numerous residents and visitors came out to run, walk, bike, blade, play and even swim on the first three Saturdays in August.  

There were many free activities to choose from including attending concerts and theater productions, a group bike ride set to music, yoga, fitness and dance classes, and of course, pool parties in a dumpster. Wait, swimming in a dumpster? Who ever thought shipping containers used for trash could serve a higher purpose?  

The unique dumpster swimming pools, located near Grand Central Station, enticed New Yorkers to grab their swimsuits and make a splash in the streets. Three clean, unused, garbage dumpsters were repurposed into portable, code-compliant swimming pools. The 8-feet by 22-feet pools, 3 to 4 ½ feet deep, all had protective liners (with felt on the bottom) and their own built-in water filtration system. Even though the pools came with lifeguards and 5-foot wide wrap-around metal decks (with a nonstick rubber surface to prevent slipping) swim time was limited to 10 people a session. And just like permanent pools, there were even showers for rinsing, hammocks and bean bag chairs for lounging and stalls for changing underneath a colorful cabana. The dumpster pools were created by design company Marco-Sea and actually debuted last summer in Brooklyn. This year, the pools moved to Manhattan and drew more attention.  

Considering much of the Mid Atlantic and Northeast broke records with all-time-high temperatures this summer, dipping (because diving is actually prohibited) into a re-imagined swimming pool sounds like a mighty fine way to cool off

Some great photos of the dumpster pools can be found here.

Credit: Steve Punter (Flickr Feed)

Sometimes all it takes is an unusual piece of greenery to draw visitors to a part of town not very known on tourist maps. London, England’s Trafalgar Square temporarily received a laurel and thuja hedge maze at the foot of Nelson’s Column earlier this month as part of the West End Partnership’s summer marketing program. 

The program is geared towards tourists who usually bypass Theatreland in London’s West End for more popular locals such as Big Ben and the Change of the Guard. Measuring 98 feet by 66 feet, and almost 8 feet high, the labyrinth was divided into different sections, with the name of a West End street at each segment. Blue plaques with each street name provided quirky, little-known facts about the landmark. Those who reached the center of the maze were rewarded with different cultural shows and performances each day. (There was no cost to enter the maze.)  

The importance of plazas and squares in crowded downtown areas cannot be over emphasized. Having public spaces for a breath of fresh air from stuffy office buildings, smelly buses and crowded subways can be a haven to residents and tourists in cities. Looking at an aerial view of Trafalgar Square, the hedge maze was a major source of greenery in the immediate area.  

The planted hedge remained for five days to the amusement of office workers and visitors. Just months away from the release of the next Harry Potter movie, perhaps grownups and children alike were half expecting to see flying red sparks and hovering Dementors in the maze   

The aerial views and a fun video of the construction of the maze can be found here.

Th article indicates that a rush to get into classes was happening in “thousands of homes across the city Monday, as parents frantically attempted to get their children into the 10-week spring classes including gymnastics ($47), basketball ($20) and children’s theater ($12) offered at bargain prices compared to those charged by private gyms and activity centers.”

According to the park officials, the popularity of park programs is at an all-time high, with some classes filling up a second after on-line registration begins — something only otherwise seen in the sale of hot musical act tickets.

The article reports that 40,000 kids enrolling in programs at 228 city parks each season. One parent notes that “the Park District program is so worth it, and it’s the only thing we can afford,” going on to say that a $28 swim class is a lot better than $200 at DePaul University.

This is exactly the great kind of economic value that city parks provide to residents, and in turn allow for a healthier citizenry. In Chicago, this is something deeply rooted in the city’s history, partly through Jane Addams Hull House and a strong recreation program. Aside from the financial benefit provided through these affordable programs, they allow kids to be more physically active. With obesity at an alarming rate, the success of the Chicago programs may be one thing to look at more in depth.