Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Credit: Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation

From Wyuka Cemetery in Lincoln, Nebraska, where Shakespeare’s plays are performed each summer, to Hartford’s revered Cedar Hill Cemetery, which held a successful series of evening jazz concerts in the summer of 2008, cemeteries may seem like a surprising source of liveliness. But historically, this is not a new idea.

Before there were public parks, cemeteries – most famously Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1831) and Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York (1838) – were the primary manicured and sculpted green space within urban locales. As parks arose, graveyards’ recreational use diminished. But today some cities have hundreds of acres of public and private cemetery grounds which could theoretically help with issues of urban parkland shortage.

The main hurdle is, of course, people’s skepticism about the propriety of jogging, picnicking, or hosting performances in a place of reverence. But Bob Hall, director of Flatwater Shakespeare in Wyuka Cemetery, whose mother and father are buried at Wyuka, feels the performances are “life endorsing.” And to skeptics, he developed a standard response: “I asked my parents, and they didn’t say anything.”

“Cemeteries are for the living,” agrees Mark Smith, sexton of the publicly owned Salt Lake City Cemetery. Rejecting the idea that his facility is only for somber reflection, Smith refers to it as “a hidden gem within the city,” an open space resource that can and should be utilized.

A second obstacle can be family rights, with cemetery authorities owning the ground and individuals owning a burial right that is similar to an easement. In Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, whose collection of old and unique trees add to the alluring park-like atmosphere, the issue arose when a family asked cemetery authorities to cut down a tree they discovered growing on their ancestral plot. “That was painful,” confesses Kevin Kuharic, director of restoration and landscapes for the Historic Oakland Foundation, “but they were within their rights.”

As a whole, however, public cemeteries of all stripes are discovering ways to welcome the community into these underused spaces. The benefit is double – more people can enjoy the abundant natural and historical treasures within the cemeteries, and the increased visitation helps foundations and park departments preserve these predecessors of the modern public park.

The full text of the article, Cemeteries Alive: Graveyards are Resurging as Green Spaces for the Public, written by Peter Harnik and Aric Merolli, is available here.

For more information about cemeteries, see an earlier post.

Do you park in your park? Does it seem to be a parking lot more than a park, a lot?

Urban park advocates struggle mightily to create new green space through a precious parcel here and an irreplaceable acre there. But a large swath of existing parkland is given over to the prosaic task of automobile storage, complete with its side impacts–impermeable surface, water runoff and erosion, oil drippings, heat island effect, displacement of trees and meadows, and loss of playing area.

A 2007 study by the Center for City Park Excellence of 70 major city parks in the United States revealed that, collectively, they devote a total of 529 acres to the very technology that many people seek to escape when they head into their local patch of nature. That’s an area larger than Schenley Park in Pittsburgh, City Park in Denver, Lake Harriet Park in Minneapolis, or Franklin Park in Boston. In Chicago, where the city spent $475 million to create 24-acre Millennium Park, almost twice that much land–46 acres–is given over to auto storage within nearby Lincoln Park.

Hard to find parking spaces in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Credit: Google Earth.

On average, CCPE found that signature urban parks provide slightly more than one auto space for every acre of parkland. The range is from almost zero spaces in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to more than 6,000 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, more than 7,000 in St. Louis’s Forest Park, and 10,000 in Flushing Meadow/Corona Park in New York.

Storing an unused car requires approximately 330 square feet (.008 acres), according to Donald Shoup, professor of Urban Planning at University of California at Los Angeles and author of The High Cost of Free Parking. This factors in the actual surface area of the auto plus the extra space for aisles required to maneuver in and out of an enclosure. For a 500-car lot, that comes to four acres. Of course, Americans assume they have the right to drive, one person per car, from home to a space directly next to a tennis court, rose garden, or picnic table–at least until it’s pointed out that 100 percent auto access means 0 percent park.

Despite the popular assumption, auto storage doesn’t correlate directly with visitation. The nation’s most heavily used park, Central Park in New York, has only 130 parking spaces yet gets 25 million visits per year. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, receives 6 million visits while providing only forty spaces for skaters at Wollman Rink–and that lot is open only periodically. On the other hand, in Houston, about 15 of Hermann Park’s 445 acres are devoted to 2,000 spaces for automobile storage. Interestingly, although it gets about 2.3 million visits per year, Hermann is less heavily used than Riverside Park in New York, which has almost no auto storage.

“On about fifty days per year there is no possible way to meet the demand, and on another fifty we’re right at the limit for capacity,” says Rick Dewees, administrator of Hermann Park. Nevertheless, he points out, “It’s hard to add spaces when the lots are empty three-fourths of the time.” Dewees has been forced to become a bit thick-skinned about the issue: “You’re always going to have people complaining there isn’t enough parking during peak times,” he says.

Parks surrounded by low-density housing with little or no mass transportation and filled with high-intensity sports facilities are under relentless pressure to provide large amounts of space for cars. But not every park is held hostage by the automobile. Parks with many people living or working in close proximity and a range of good transit options nearby are able to succeed with little or no car storage.

Of the nation’s big-city signature parks, Atlanta’s Piedmont Park is relatively small, making an internal auto repository particularly undesirable. Not only is there no open-air lot, there aren’t even curbside spaces, since the city closed all Piedmont’s internal roadways to cars in 1983. The park is fairly well-served by transit, but overflow autos end up in the surrounding neighborhood. Also in Piedmont Park is the Atlanta Botanical Garden which has the same automobile problem. The Garden’s original proposal to construct a multilevel garage in an underused portion of the park generated shock and opposition, but gradually a broad compromise was crafted, and in 2008 an 800-car garage was built relatively inconspicuously in a steep, wooded hillside. In return, the Piedmont Park Conservancy removed the existing open-air lot and also added more park entrances for walkers and cyclists. Serving both Botanical Garden visitors and Piedmont Park users (with the Garden covering the costs of construction and operation), the garage charges $1.75 per hour.

There are three ways to reduce the problem of car storage in city parks. By far the simplest and most effective is to charge a parking fee. Storing a car in a park is a service with value. Doing so also places many human and environmental costs on the park system. With an equation like that, a payment should work.

Most of the high-population-density cities rely on residents to walk, use transit or bikes, or pay to use private garages nearby. Most of the low-density cities don’t necessarily get enough usership in any one park for it to be an overwhelming problem. It is in the mid-density cities that the issue often comes to a head. Minneapolis has taken the lead in charging for cars. After a failed 10-year experiment with an honor system in the busiest of its six regional parks, the Park Board installed meters, charging between 50 cents and $1.25 per hour, depending upon demand. Because the Park Board receives all the meter revenue, it can determine how the money ($795,000 in 2005) is used, with some of the funds going to park maintenance and some to youth athletics.

Aerial shot of Hermann Park looking south with light-rail in the foreground. Credit: David J. Schmoll.

The flip side of the coin, of course, is to provide park users with transit options. Eight of the ten most heavily used city parks have subway or light-rail access within one-quarter mile, and all of them have bus service that comes even closer. Outside of New York City (where almost all parks have subway service), among the parks best-served by rail are Boston Common, Forest Park in St. Louis, Grant Park in Chicago, Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Naturally, instituting transit service, especially rail, to major parks is expensive. But it is not out of the question. In Houston, the city’s first light-rail line, opened in January 2004, features two stops in Hermann Park.

At Washington Park in Portland, Oregon, home to the popular Rose and Japanese Gardens, cars and buses regularly exceed the auto storage capacity from May through September. The city is unwilling to add to the 86 spaces (though it is unwilling to charge for them, either). In response to the crunch, Tri-Met, the regional transit agency, has added a peak-season bus that shuttles between eight stops within the 130-acre park and the closest MAX light-rail stop. The service, which runs every 15 minutes and costs $1.70 (or is free with a transfer) is aggressively advertised by the park department, Tri-Met and by event promoters. The route gets about 500 riders per day on weekends and 420 on weekdays.

Which leads to the third way of reducing auto storage problems in parks: increasing population density nearby. For every person who lives within walking distance of a park, one fewer needs to drive and deal with a car when he or she gets there. Comparison in point: New York’s Riverside Park and Fresno’s Woodward Park. Both are approximately the same size (325 and 300 acres, respectively) but Riverside has only 120 parking spaces while Woodward has 2,500. The difference is in the surrounding neighborhoods. Riverside has the Hudson River on one side and a solid row of twelve- and sixteen-story buildings on the other. Woodward is bordered by single-family homes, most of which have lots large enough for pools, on cul-de-sac street layouts. The residential population density around Woodward is about 6.5 persons per acre, virtually guaranteeing heavy reliance on autos to get to the park. The density around Riverside Park is about 150 persons per acre, and most users of the park walk from within about four blocks.

Obviously, adding residential (or commercial) density around parks is not a short-term project. Nor is it noncontroversial. People who live in single-family homes on large lots around parks enjoy their quality of life and understandably want to maintain it. However, a case can be made that increasing density unlocks a great deal of value for the benefit of the whole city, including more property tax revenue, the likelihood of healthier citizens because of park views and use, and the ability to reduce the presence of stored automobiles in parks.

In the past, before official parks came into being, cemeteries were the principal manicured greenspaces for cities – most famously Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. As parks arose, the recreational use of the open areas of cemeteries diminished in importance. But today some cities have hundreds or thousands of acres of public cemetery lands, both with and without gravestones, which could theoretically help with the parkland shortage.

Congressional Cemetery, Washington. Credit: Caryn Ernst

Is a cemetery a park? It certainly qualifies as pervious ground and visual relief, but whether it does any more than that depends on its rules and regulations. The more one can do there – walk, walk a dog, cycle, picnic, play music, throw a ball, sit under a tree (does it have trees?) – the more it’s like a park. The more restrictive, the less justifiable it seems to pretend it’s a park.

The Washington, D.C., area has extremes on either end of this spectrum. At Arlington National Cemetery virtually nothing is permitted other than walking from grave to grave. Jogging and eating are prohibited and there are almost no benches. Across town, at Congressional Cemetery, not only is picnicking and child-play allowed but the facility is also a formal off-leash dog park. (Membership for dog owners is limited to a sustainable number and costs nearly $200 a year, with the funds used to support the nonprofit organization whose mission is to operate, develop, maintain, preserve, and enhance the cemetery grounds; use by humans without dogs is free and unrestricted.)

Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Credit: Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation

Another famous cemetery, Cedar Hill in Hartford, Connecticut, not only allows residents to run, walk dogs, and ride bicycles, but also programs the space with jazz concerts and other events and even allows residents to bring food and wine. In Fort Collins, Colorado, Grand View Cemetery has the city’s finest remaining collection of elm trees and thus garners a steady stream of birdwatchers. Its dirt roadway system not only attracts fat-tire cyclists but is also used as a training site by Colorado State University’s cross-country team. And in Charleston, West Virginia, the city-owned Spring Hill Cemetery was formally renamed Spring Hill Cemetery Park in 1998. The park has a friends organization, it schedules regular birdwatching walks Sunday mornings during peak migration season, and its trees and flowers serve as an outdoor classroom for the many visiting school classes.

In Portland, Maine, 236-acre municipally owned Evergreen Cemetery is not only run by the city’s park division but also happens to be much larger than the city’s largest “regular” park. Besides gardens, ponds, open lawns, 65,000 gravesites, and 45,000 monuments, Evergreen also contains a 111-acre stand of primordial trees–the largest and reputedly healthiest urban forest in the state of Maine. The cemetery is used for hiking, walking, running, biking, picnicking, cross-country skiing, and snow-shoeing. The warbler migration in May brings millions of exotic birds and thousands of passionate watchers. Back in the nineteenth century, when Evergreen was considered a full-fledged destination, residents and tourists boarded trolleys for all-day excursions to enjoy its combination of horticulture, history, and sculpture. And the cemetery is becoming more park-like all the time. Most recently, a group called Portland Trails brought Evergreen directly into the citywide trail network by constructing a path through the woods and linking it with an abandoned rail corridor and a waterfront route.

Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery, owned by the city’s parks department and run by a foundation, is one of the city’s oldest public spaces and offers a fascinating glimpse of the possibilities of a well-rounded cemetery park. Forty-eight-acre Oakland contains 70,000 graves (well above the rule-of-thumb 1,000 per acre), ranging from some of the city’s most prominent citizens in large and elaborate monuments to Civil War casualties under neat rows of identical stones to thousands of unnamed indigents in two Potter’s fields. Since it had been the city’s only cemetery for many years it also has small sections for Jews and African-Americans. By the 1970s Oakland Cemetery (along with its wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighborhood) was in sad shape with overturned monuments, unmaintained trees, cracked roads and pathways, unkempt grass, and virtually nonexistent horticulture. Naturally, it was feared and largely shunned, but a small group of idealists had a dream of bringing it back. Just in time for the nation’s bicentennial in 1976 they convinced Mayor Maynard Jackson to choose the facility as Atlanta’s signature project.

Jackson had a big vision, according to Oakland’s director of restoration and landscapes, Kevin Kuharic. “The mayor wanted to transform Oakland from a municipal expense to a municipal benefit.” To do that, the private Historic Oakland Cemetery Foundation was created, and a formal management partnership was arranged with Atlanta Department of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs. As with virtually all successful public-private partnerships, ultimate authority remained in the hands of the city, but the foundation was given wide latitude on programming, publicity, and fundraising. The facility has been on a steady upward trajectory ever since, and its surrounding neighborhood has been following a similar rising arc. (Directly across the street now is a popular new gathering place, the Six Feet Under Pub and Fish House.)

Besides the usual cemetery fare of roads, walkways, and gravestones, Oakland has benches, gardens, and a small central building for events and programs. Over time, as funding permits, selected gardens are upgraded and beautified. In 2001, a water line was installed and drinking fountains added. Visitors are allowed to bicycle and jog and, as with any other Atlanta park, they can picnic and stroll with their dogs (on leash). The foundation offers or encourages tours, photography classes, charity runs, a Halloween festival with period costumes and educational talks, and an annual Sunday in the Park festival with music, food, and crafts.

The latest development in the funeral business is the movement known as “green burial,” a variety of practices that lessen the environmental impact of death – from foreswearing embalming chemicals, concrete vaults, large monuments, and pesticides to using only naturalistic design and native species, to providing special garden areas for scattering ashes. All these action lead toward a more park-like ambience and less toward the traditional graveyard. While green burials are now a largely rural phenomenon, the concept is spreading to cities: Colorado Springs plans to convert a 3-acre hillside within Fairview Cemetery to green interments in the near future.

As a group of us stood watching children jumping rope on a nearby sidewalk,

Christine Farris [Martin Luther King's sister] began reminiscing about her own childhood on Auburn Avenue, playing hopscotch and hide-and-seek with her brother and other children. And I was struck by the way that the avenue–location of both the King birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King and his father were both pastors–has been preserved by the historic site, while remaining a dynamic neighborhood, one of our few lived-in national parks.

It almost wasn’t that way. Thirty years ago, as the National Park Service was gearing up to create the historic site, The Trust for Public Land was able to get ahead of the wrecking ball and buy for the site five of the mostly derelict structures along the avenue. Over the past 30 years, all but one of the remaining homes within the designated park have been purchased, renovated, and rented, creating a vibrant, historic neighborhood. Existing renters were offered the opportunity to move back into their renovated homes at no raise in rent. And the historic district has been great for the local economy, too.

TADs encourage development in blighted areas by freezing tax payments for a period of time. Instead of paying higher taxes when property values rise, developers use the money to pay down project costs. Cities, counties and school districts choose whether to participate in TADs. The tool has helped challenging projects such as Atlantic Station and was part of the financing plan for Atlanta’s Beltline of parks and transit. But in February, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution prohibited TADs from funneling school tax money to redevelopment. Tuesday’s ballot question asked voters to amend the constitution and again allow TADs to tap school money, which represented roughly half the tax subsidy TADs offered.

Kaid Benfield, calling the Beltline one of the country’s best smart growth projects, writes about the project, which had been set to use up to $1.7 billion in TAD funds over several years, and appears set to use the funds now again, with local re-approval:

The 6500-acre BeltLine TAD has received overwhelming support from the community and votes of approval by the Atlanta City Council, the Atlanta Public School Board, and the Fulton County Commission.  The majority of the BeltLine TAD funds will be used to invest in land acquisition, multi-use trails, green space, transit, transportation improvements, affordable workforce housing, and school facilities.  Some BeltLine TAD funds will be used for developer infrastructure, primarily for environmental brownfield cleanup, or to jump-start development in underdeveloped areas.

With this barrier removed, the funding will now need to be re-approved by the Atlanta Schools and City Council.

But today, we’d like to highlight a feature of the first new 35-acre Beltline Park being converted from a former industrial area. The park will add acreage, provide the base for economic development and enhance recreational opportunities in the surrounding area, but it will also signficantly alleave stormwater issues in the area. A stormwater detention pond will be constructed as the centerpiece of the park and will help reduce overflows in the low-lying area. The Beltline is addressing parks, transit, housing and economic development, and now we see, stormwater management through its enhanced green infrastructure. “This project not only helps eliminate a serious problem, it also provides an attractive and functional amenity,” City Dept. of Watershed Management Commissioner Rob Hunter said.