Parks are some of the most valuable assets a city can hold. Parks connect people to people. As such, they play a vital role in community building. Neighborhood-scale parks often serve as “third-places,” familiar locations where residents seek community with neighbors at the playground or dog park. Large parks often serve as the centers of their cities, reflecting community identity or brand through design and programming.

It is the enormity of this influence that demands investment to be sure that parks look good and function well, because a bad park can drag down a neighborhood, just as a good one can revitalize it.

The two parks featured last month have a long history of creating and sustaining community. By viewing their roles broadly as centers of community, they have stepped beyond “parks and recreation” and become vital civic places.

Prospect Park, New York.

Prospect Park

Prospect Park is a 585-acre urban oasis and boasts a stunning array of natural features, including Brooklyn’s only forest, shaded hillsides, beautiful waterfalls, and rolling meadows. The Park is home to a hand-carved carousel, the nation’s first urban Audubon Center, and a watercourse that can be explored by pedal boat or a turn-of-the-century style electric boat, the Independence. This historic urban space hosts activities year round, from ice skating and sledding in winter to team sports like football and soccer in the summer. The Park also has designated trails for horseback riding, seven playgrounds and a zoo.

Planning for the Future

Everything is operated by a partnership between the Prospect Park Alliance, the City of New York’s Parks and Recreation Department, and the community. This partnership has been instrumental in restoring the forest and lakeside, as well as offering a vast array of programming, historic preservation, and development. In order to ensure that the park will be loved long-term, Prospect Park is partnering with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York City Department of Education to assist the Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment prepare the next generation of stewards.

For more information about Prospect Park, please visit www.prospectpark.org.

City Park, New Orleans.

City Park

New Orleans’ City Park, at 1,300 acres, is one of the largest urban parks in the United States. Each year, more than ten million visitors enjoy strolling beneath its 800 year-old live oaks, wandering through the Botanical Garden, visiting the New Orleans Museum of art, riding the carousel, picnicking, or fishing on the bayou. City Park is rich in New Orleans history. The original park, since enlarged, was the site of the Allard sugar plantation. During the Great Depression, it served as a key WPA investment-job-creation site, where workers dug more than 10 miles of lagoons by hand.  Site furnishings in City Park were manufactured by DuMor, Inc.

Restoring a Park and a Community

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused billions of dollars in property damage throughout New Orleans, including City Park. 95% of the park flooded after the levees failed, resulting in thousands of felled trees and hundreds of damaged buildings. After the floodwaters retreated, it was left with $43 million in damage and had to reduce staff by 90%. These challenges have made the park’s recovery all the more remarkable; to date, $83 million in funds have been raised and a force of 35,000 volunteers have worked countless hours to restore and improve City Park.

For more information about City Park, please visit www.neworleanscitypark.com.

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

Concert in East River State Park, Brooklyn

The New York Times had an nice story over the weekend about Senator Chuck Schumer’s interest in music in a Brooklyn park. The Senator has fervently supported (and attended) the indie-music series popular among many of the city’s younger crowd in East River State Park. Interestingly, the part of this park home to the concerts was a brownfield only a few years ago, that the Trust for Public Land helped turn into this great riverfront venue.

Here’s a bit of history. The six-acre site was home to the Eastern District Terminal, a major rail-to-barge shipping facility until the middle of the 20th century and  abandoned for decades after shipping moved to the west side of New York Harbor. In the 1990s, a  waste transfer station was proposed for the property — a plan that the community organized successfully to oppose. With the support of local and state politicians, TPL negotiated to acquire the property. After the site was found to have soil contamination, remediation measures were taken and the property conveyed to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.  The parcel is now the core of a seven-block park along the waterfront in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, one of the hottest areas to live in the city.

The best areas for public land in many older industrial cities have in the past been taken by these industrial uses. For other cities looking to revive their once industrial waterfronts, parks are a great way to turn eyesores into assets.

One such program is Science for All, an environmental science outreach program for elementary school children in grades 2-5. It’s held in Brooklyn, New York’s Prospect Park Audubon Center. Teacher naturalists at the center facilitate program activities for each students, focusing on one of three topic areas: pond life, forests and birds (the current year’s program is called “Bonkers for Birds”). The program stresses hands-on learning activities, utilizing the interactive exhibits of the Audubon Center and the forest, water features and varied natural settings of 585-acre Prospect Park.

The Audobon Center also offers daily nature crafts and classess (such as introductory birdwatching) each day that are free and open to the public. It’s an amazing facility that brings nature into the lives of kids who might not normally be exposed to it.

More information can be found through the Prospect Park Alliance and its Audubon Center (a story that is itelf worth telling about the innovative revitalization of the historic Boathouse in the park).

Separated bike path, pedestrian path, and seating on Ocean Parkway

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 the boulevard is a world, separated from the next by trees. First, the dwellings, from the two-story micro-mansions on deep lots near Avenue U to the apartment blocks further north with names like Imperial Gardens. Then there are the service roads, the scenes of mild-mannered evening parking arguments. Next come the malls, for biking and vodka-fueled domino scrums. Finally, at the center of the parkway, cars hug one another in six narrow lanes, and ambulances regularly tear through a seventh, a turning lane.

Olmsted and others designed parkway systems that were built in many U.S. cities – Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds, the boulevards and parkways of Denver, Buffalo, Louisville, Chicago and more. Including bike paths, seating, tables, lighting, attractive walking paths, rest stop areas featuring gardens, public art and even recreational elements can make them more than thoroughfares – but park-ways – as their name implies.