For environmental, financial, and legal reasons, urban stormwater management is getting much more attention – and the result is helping to build the urban parks movement. Gone are the days when flood-control engineers would prescribe the construction of straight, deep concrete channels, and one stream after the next would be converted into sterile spillways. (The poster channelized waterway, the Los Angeles River, was used for a spine-tingling truck chase scene in the movie Terminator 2 and was once also proposed–seriously–for use as a highway.) Cities that still have extensive natural wetland areas are now carefully protecting them to contain and filter stormwater; many others are now also creating artificial swales and other storage areas to slow down and capture the sheets of water running off streets and asphalt surfaces.

When it comes to water management and recreation, parks-as-ponds and ponds-as-parks are two sides of the same coin. Although the former doesn’t technically add parkland, it makes existing parks more environmentally productive; the latter can add to a city’s de facto parkland inventory and, of course, adds a second bin of funding opportunities–all the state and federal water protection programs–to the fundraising arsenal. There is no question that the marriage of stormwater retention and parks will become more common in the coming decades, for both ecological and economic reasons.

Staten Island Bluebelt. A man-made extended detention basin after a single growing season. Credit: City of New York.

New York City, in addition to the thousands of acres under Department of Parks and Recreation control, has another 480 acres of so-called Blue Belt land under the jurisdiction of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). The Blue Belt, located largely but not entirely in Staten Island (the least built-up of the city’s five boroughs), consists of mapped wetlands that DEP acquires for stormwater management. The Blue Belts are zoned as open space and are protected from development, although the protection is not as stringent as for mapped parkland. Parkland can only be de-mapped and “alienated” from the park system through a vote of the state legislature; DEP lands can be sold to a private party if the buyer agrees to protect the official drainage corridors that traverse it–no property owner is allowed to modify a watercourse. Although the Blue Belt lands are partially fenced (to help focus the points of ingress and egress), they are fully open to the public. “Since we’re spending Water Board money and aren’t supposed to be spending it on recreation uses,” said Dana Gumb, director of the Staten Island Bluebelt, “we don’t specifically build any walking trails or other features. But we do have lightly used maintenance access pathways which we’re happy to let people utilize, if they do so appropriately.”

The converse occurs when DEP utilizes official park property for water management and water purification. “We’ll install a storm sewer system under a street to catch rainwater from a neighborhood, and then we’ll daylight it–bring it up to the surface–in a park,” said Gumb. “We’ve done that in Conference House Park, Lemon Creek Park, Wolf’s Pond, Bloomingdale Park, and others.” The department constructs a pond-like water detention and treatment facility that holds the rainwater for about twenty-four hours, absorbs much of the destructive energy of the rushing torrent, allows sediment to settle out, and then permits the cleaned water to seep gradually into Raritan Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. “We’re usually able to locate the holding ponds in areas that had previously been degraded,” Gumb explained. “Places that had been disturbed with fill or were overrun with invasive vines. We use the opportunity to fix them up. When we’re done the community ends up with something beautiful that also cleans the water.”

Although many other municipalities regulate how individuals and commercial entities impact stormwater, almost none currently uses a municipal agency to construct and operate control facilities, and no other city has an agency as sensitive to public recreational use as New York’s DEP. Of course, it’s not always smooth sailing. There are times when DEP’s ecological requirements conflict with the community’s desires and the aesthetics of a park. In neighborhoods with combined sewers that mix household wastewater with street stormwater for joint processing, huge underground holding tanks with pumps and smokestacks are required to cope with the influx from large storms. In the worst of those cases the facility can be a blight on a corner of a park. Even in the best cases with successful restoration, a park may be closed for several years during construction.

“There’ve been instances where DEP has had to pay dearly for the use of parkland,” said Gumb. Perhaps most famous was a multiyear battle over the installation of a mammoth underground drinking water storage tank in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Although the tank was to be completely buried and invisible to park users, the construction project was so large and was slated to take so long that the courts ruled that it was effectively an “alienation” of parkland and would need to be approved by the state legislature. After protracted negotiations, DEP agreed to pay the Parks Department $200 million for the temporary loss of parkland; the money was used to buy and improve dozens of other parks in the Bronx.

As public awareness grows, potentially even more could be done with water detention facilities. In some cases boardwalks, benches and interpretive signage could be added to these natural and manmade marshy areas to put them to double use for walking, running and cycling. Some stormwater storage areas could conceivably also be used as dry-weather playing fields, or skateboard parks if they are fitted with proper warning signage, fencing, and a commitment to hosing down residue following each high-water incident.

High Point Pond in Seattle's Viewpoint Park. Additional amenities in the park include an overlook, trails, benches, a playground, and an artificial boulder-strewn stream. Credit: Seattle Housing Authority.

When the Seattle Housing Authority planned the demolition of the distressed High Point public housing site and its transformation into a new mixed-income community, the authority was required to capture all stormwater to keep it from running off the property. The water was required to be released gradually rather than being funneled destructively into a nearby salmon-bearing stream. But when it considered the aesthetics of the standard, unadorned, chain-link-surrounded holding pit, the authority balked. Instead, it created an extensive 130-acre drainage system culminating in one-and-a-quarter-acre Viewpoint Park with benches, a boulder-filled stream, a pond, a trail, a grass lawn, stairs, a playground, and gardens. “We turned what could’ve been a huge liability into an incredible asset for the community–in a place with a direct view of downtown Seattle,” says Tom Phillips, project manager. Constructed by the Housing Authority, the park has been turned over to the Parks and Recreation Department for management and maintenance.

In 1963 famed Morton Arboretum naturalist May Theilgaard Watts wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. “We are human beings,” she wrote. “We walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now there is a chance for Chicago and its suburbs to have a footpath, a long one.” Her visionary and poetic letter led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path and marked the beginning of the rails-to-trails movement.

Until the interstate highway program in the 1950s, the world’s best-engineered rights-of-way were railroad corridors. Hills and cliffs were excavated, valleys filled, curves softened, tunnels dug, bridges built, all to provide routes of exquisitely smooth gentleness with little or no cross-traffic. They were also extraordinarily well routed from, to, and through the centers of activity–cities. Today, 130,000 miles of these marvelous linear connections have been abandoned. Already, 1,500 segments totaling 15,000 miles have been turned into trails for biking, skiing, skating, running, and walking. Most are rural but the urban ones almost invariably become the spines of city biking networks that also include on-road bike lanes and other feeder-collector routes. Rail trails have become focal points for nonmotorized transportation and recreation in Seattle; Washington, D.C.; Boston; Indianapolis; Dallas; Cincinnati; Spokane; Milwaukee; St. Petersburg; Albany, New York; Arlington, Virginia; Barrington, Rhode Island; and scores of other cities and towns. And there are still abandoned corridors available for conversion into trails.

The Stone Arch Bridge portion of the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Trail going towards Minneapolis. Credit: Brian Monberg, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Minneapolis shows the multiple types of rail trails and their power to affect a city’s park, recreation, and transportation systems. Most dramatic is the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi, built by railroad baron James J. Hill for his Great Northern route to Seattle. Opened in 1883, it was in rail service until 1978. Rescued from demolition, the bridge was refurbished for non-motorized use through a variety of federal, state, and local funds and ultimately turned over to the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. Today it is the keystone of the bicycle/pedestrian network in both Minneapolis and St. Paul.

A few blocks away is the Midtown Greenway, created from a former Milwaukee Road track that maintained separation from traffic by being sunk in a box-shaped trench below street level. The 5.5-mile trail today serves several thousand bicyclists, runners, and skaters per day; in the future it will also host an extension of the light-rail system on a parallel track in the same trench. The corridor was bought for $10 million by the Hennepin County Regional Railroad Authority. Trail engineering and construction, which cost $25 million, was paid from a variety of local, regional, state, and federal sources. Annual maintenance, which includes lighting and snow plowing, comes to about $500,000 a year.

A couple of miles north, a different set of tracks has been converted into the Cedar Lake Park and Trail. This isn’t a rail-to-trail, it’s a rail-with-trail. When the Burlington Northern Railroad decided to divest itself of an underutilized freight yard, it kept one track for through service and sold the rest to the Park Board. The Board erected a fence and converted the wide industrial facility into a model nature habitat with three meandering, parallel treadways–two one-way paths for cyclists and skaters, and one soft-surface path for walkers and runners. With an extraordinary amount of community support, volunteerism, and sweat-equity, the 48-acre project cost only $3.5 million to acquire and develop, and it was finished in a record six years.

Six years is a record? Well, yes. Creating a rail trail, candidly, is not easy. The land ownership issues are confusing. Legal and regulatory complexities stretch from the local level to the state capital to Washington, D.C. A review of years-to-complete-a-trail validates the difficulty: for the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington, D.C., eleven years from conception to ribbon-cutting; for the Pinellas Trail in St. Petersburg, fifteen years; for the Minuteman Trail in Arlington, Massachusetts, eighteen years; for the Metropolitan Branch Trail in Washington, D.C., twenty-two years and (as of this writing) counting.

But the final results justify the heartache: These are truly “million-dollar trails.” Other than on a former railroad track, it is simply not possible in an existing built-up community to create a new pathway that is long, straight, wide, continuous, sheathed in vegetation, and almost entirely separated from traffic. And the annual usership numbers reveal the pent-up desire lines: 2 million on the Minuteman Trail outside of Boston; 3 million on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail outside of Washington, D.C.; 1.7 million on the Baltimore and Annapolis Trail; 1.1 million on the East Bay Bicycle Path outside of Providence, Rhode Island; and 1 million on the Capital Crescent Trail in Washington, D.C.

Many park directors initially shy away from taking on the challenge of a rail-trail. This is a serious mistake. In addition to all the connectivity and usership values, rail trails often have ecological and historical values very much in keeping with an urban park system’s mission. With corridor widths of 60 to 100 feet, or even more in the West, they frequently harbor interesting, unusual, and rare plant species on their margins, as well as having bridges, tunnels, and stations. Moreover, trails are so popular that they have radically increased the support base for virtually every park agency that has ever taken one on.

The reality is that creating one of these trails is so tough that it virtually requires a partnership between a park department (or sometimes a public works or transportation department) and the private sector (usually a citizen group, sometimes a foundation or corporation). The financial and legal issues are too much for a group of volunteers to handle alone, while the political issues are too intense for a government agency without citizen support. Some of these conversions are so difficult that a national organization, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, formed specifically to provide technical, legal, financial, and political assistance to communities around the country. The Trust for Public Land is another national organization that has been unusually active with creating urban rail trails.

More than that, trail advocates are fierce in their commitment to these facilities–many see them literally as “do or die” opportunities. In Seattle, when the Post-Intelligencer newspaper reported that the Burlington Northern Railroad had secretly sold off a piece of track that had been slated for a continuation of the Burke-Gilman Trail, cyclists were so outraged that they chained their bikes across the entranceway of Burlington Northern’s Seattle headquarters and began a vehement protest that stayed on the front pages for two months. (The railroad, which had sold the land to an out-of-state tycoon for a place to dock his yacht, found a way to rescind the deal and the corridor is now the trail extension.)

The Capital Crescent Trail as it enters Bethesda, Maryland, 7 miles from its starting point in Washington, D.C. Credit: Barbara Richey, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

In Washington, D.C., when the National Park Service was unable to get a quick congressional appropriation to save the Georgetown Branch from being developed by CSX Railroad into a string of million-dollar homes through a national park, land developer Kingdon Gould III loaned $12 million of his own money and held the land for a year until Congress acted. (The corridor is today the Capital Crescent Trail, centerpiece of what will eventually be a 20-mile “bicycle beltway” within the nation’s capital.)

The latest innovation is the overhead or trestle trail. Influenced by the creation in Paris, France, of the Promenade Plantée (“Planted Walkway”), activists in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis have all discovered abandoned rail trestles and launched campaigns to bring them back as trails. First to open, in 2009, was New York’s High Line, a sensational tour de force in the now-chic former meatpacking district. The walkway (which from day one was so crowded with pedestrians that bicycles were not permitted) includes sophisticated plantings, architectural landscaping reminiscent of railroad tracks, artistic benches and chaise longues, a viewing gallery with picture window overlooking 10th Avenue traffic, a large wall of glass panes dyed every hue of the Hudson River, food carts, seating areas, and more.

A bit less upscale but considerably longer and designed for cyclists as well as walkers, Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail is expected to open in segments as funds for the $45-million conversion are found. The Bloomingdale Trail should serve recreational cyclists as well as purposeful commuters since one day it could join an interconnected trailway linking all the way from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. St. Louis’s Iron Horse Trestle will also prove helpful to cyclists, runners, and walkers of all stripes since it passes over busy Interstate 70 and leads toward the popular Riverfront Trail along the Mississippi River.

New York City's no smoking sign. Credit: Susan Sermoneta (Flickr Feed).

In early February, the New York City Council (36-12) approved, and Mayor Bloomberg signed, a ban on smoking in the city’s parks, beaches, pedestrian malls and plazas. Effective as of May 23^rd, the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation can now impose $50 fines on rule breakers. Given what we know about the health value of parks, addressing the issue of smoking bans in parks is salient. What restrictions may a city or municipality place on park users in order to achieve some health or environmental value?

As residents of New York know, administrative code already bans smoking in bars, the subway, retail stores, and several other indoor and outdoor locations. But the most recent amendment, as codified in New York City Administrative Code § 17-503(c)(3), expands the scope of the ban to “any park or other property under the jurisdiction of the department of parks and recreation.” Exceptions to this ban extend to sidewalks immediately adjoining parks and public places, pedestrian routes through any park strip, median or mall adjacent to traffic, parking lots, and theatrical productions.

Two common lines of reasoning characterize the smoking ban debate. Arguments against bans on smoking in public parks often reference the overreach of government into the lives of private citizens, whereby the governmental entity unreasonably infringes upon an individual’s right to undertake a particular behavior. Arguments for bans invoke the government’s role to promote public goods, such as health, and to ensure non-smokers are free of a harmful nuisance. The following overview addresses the legal and policy issues implicating both sides of the argument.

Examples of Outdoor Bans

The New York ordinance is not new; towns and cities across the country have enacted outdoor smoking bans. There are 1,313 states, commonwealths, territories, cities, and counties with a law that restricts smoking in public outdoor places such as parks and beaches.[1] Levels of stringency vary from town to town, but the rationale underlying the bans are generally the same – there are environmental and health issues so important as to justify prohibiting individuals from lighting up in a public outdoor area.

Santa Monica, California no smoking sign. Credit: Flickr Feed.

An ordinance in Bellaire, Texas, a suburb of Houston, forbids smoking within the city’s public parks, in part to prevent children from exposure to smoke.[2] The ban, however, does not prohibit smoking on the public streets or sidewalks.[3] Santa Monica, California, passed an ordinance restricting smoking on its public beaches to address the environmental issue of cigarette butts littering the beaches and water.[4] In fact, the ordinance comprehensively prohibits smoking in a variety of outdoor places: public parks, public beaches, anywhere on city pier except in designated areas, outdoor service areas, or within two feet of any entrance, exit or window of a public building.[5] Both cities may impose fines on violators of the ban.

In 2006, the city of Calabasas, a small community northwest of Los Angeles, enacted one of the toughest anti-smoking ordinances in the nation.[6] It characterized its anti-smoking efforts as an attempt to limit exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS), as opposed to an outright ban on the act of smoking itself. The ordinance prohibits smoking in all public places where an individual may be exposed to secondhand smoke, including parks, sidewalks, outdoor cafés, bus stops, and athletic fields.[7] Fines for violation are imposed up to $500 with a misdemeanor criminal classification.

The New York ordinance allows for some smoking outlets if you are at a public park. Like Bellaire park users, visitors to New York parks are still able to light up on sidewalks bordering the outside of the park.

A Right to Smoke?

A man smoking in a Chicago plaza. Credit: Mary Anne Enriquez (Flickr Feed).

A ban on smoking in a public park raises an interesting question: are there particular rights that ensure that adults may freely undertake a legal act using a legal substance or item in a taxpayer-funded public space that may have a marginal detrimental health impact on other people using that space? Think of drinking a bottle of wine with your special lady friend as you lounge about on a picnic blanket (or grasping onto a flask of whiskey for dear life as you curl up underneath a bench to shield yourself from the brutal chill of a relentless winter wind). What about lighting fireworks? Yelling into an oversized bullhorn to warn of an impending apocalypse? Swinging a metal bat to smash a tightly wound baseball?

A court will invalidate law that, either on its face or in its application, violates a constitutional right. The Constitution does not explicitly reference a right to smoke, so any claim to a right to smoke will fall under the auspices of another constitutional right.[8] Here are just a few examples of avenues that right to smoke advocates have pursued to challenge smoking bans.[9]

Fourteenth Amendment. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that a state government will not treat similar groups of people differently without good reason. However, there are classes of people based on race, alienage, national origin and gender that receive greater protection against discriminatory government acts than do other classes – say, women under 5’2” or bald men. Courts review a law that applies to a protected class under a strict or intermediate level of scrutiny. Strict scrutiny requires a state or local law to be necessary to achieve a compelling government interest.

The Supreme Court has rejected the notion that a classification is suspect when the scope of the class is based on voluntary action.[10] Since smoking is a discretionary act, it does not merit greater scrutiny for equal protection purposes. A smoking ban will be constitutionally valid if there is a reasonably conceivable set of facts that provides a rational basis for the classification, such as the promotion of public health.[11]

First Amendment. Conduct alone, such as smoking, is not generally considered speech and thus not afforded First Amendment protections. Smoking bans not targeted at suppressing speech content, and not favoring a particular group, are deemed “content-neutral.”[12] For content-neutral regulations to be valid, they need only be substantially related to an important governmental interest. For example, the federal court in NYC C.L.A.S.H., Inc. v. City of New York upheld the smoking ban in restaurants and bars, finding that smoking in such venues is not a sufficiently expressive conduct to merit First Amendment protection and that the ban was a valid, content-neutral regulation with an important health interest.[13]

In the 2005 case, Roark & Hardee LP v. City of Austin, a federal district court held that an Austin ordinance prohibiting smoking in enclosed public places did not violate bar owners’ First Amendment right to be free from compelled speech.[14] The city “compelled” bar owners to take “necessary steps” to stop patrons from smoking in order to protect the city’s population from the effects of SHS. Since the ordinance regulated conduct and not actual speech, and the owners were free to express views on the ordinance, the city was within its bounds to regulate smoking.

As long as a smoking ban is rationally related to a legitimate government goal, the Constitution will not stand in the way of its passage.[15] Smoking bans have been uniformly upheld against a variety of challenges to their validity.[16] Courts embrace such legislation because of the time-honored acknowledgement that protecting the public’s health is one of the most essential functions of government.[17]

Legislative Rationale

When smoking bans are challenged on constitutional grounds, legislators must justify the ban by demonstrating a legitimate government interest. A frequent argument is that public health concerns justify infringements on smoking.[18] But the effect of public outdoor exposure to SHS is not conclusive. On the one hand, proximity to smoking, even outdoors, may lead to SHS exposure. A recent Stanford University study indicates that tobacco smoke within three feet of a smoker outside is comparable to inside levels. But, as Michael Siegel stated in a New York Times Op-Ed, there is no evidence demonstrating outdoor exposure causes substantial health damage.

Legislators may also cite “annoyance costs” related to smoking, such as cost of cleaning up cigarette butts.[19] Right to clean air advocates often compare smoking to nuisances regulated by the state, such as noisome factories.[20] There is also an argument for treating smoking like sex—as a legal activity relegated to the private sphere.

Public Support

Attitudes towards smoking bans vary depending on locale. Since 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics has conducted a nationwide survey asking participants if and where in outdoor parks smoking should be allowed.[21] The latest results, from a 2008 survey of nearly 1,500 people, showed that roughly 20 percent of respondents thought smoking should be banned outright in parks, 39 percent thought it should be permitted, and 42 thought it should be banned in some areas of parks. This differs slightly from the 2000 survey, in which support for some form of restriction was roughly 60 percent (although, at that time, 40 percent supported an outright ban). The same survey also addressed support of smoking bans in Mississippi. It indicated that over 50 percent of Mississippians do not believe smoking should be banned in parks.

Attitudes do differ. A 2006 survey showed that 70 percent of over 1,500 randomly selected Minnesota respondents favored tobacco-free park policies in parks.[22] Supporting rationale for such policies included reducing litter (71%) and reducing youth opportunities to smoke (65%). Prior to the New York’s outdoor ban, the Coalition for a Smoke-Free City commissioned a 2009 Zogby poll that surveyed 1,002 residents and showed that 65 percent supported a smoking ban in parks and beaches.

Smoking and Public Parks

A woman smokes in a park. Credit: Ripton Scott (Flickr Feed).

Cities and municipalities must weigh the benefits of placing restrictions on potentially harmful behavior to help cultivate healthy outdoor environments against the rights of residents in a public venue. For example, part of the context for the New York park smoking ban was a 2009 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene study showing that a greater proportion of New York adults, despite lower levels of smoking, are exposed to secondhand smoke than are adults nationally.[23] While there are rights issues involved with smoking bans, such restrictions generally fall within the ambit of legitimate governmental action. And, ideally, enactments to restrict smoking in a park will be borne out of people’s support for the restriction in a publicly funded venue.

The question then is whether the government action achieves its objective. If New York is attempting to improve air quality for park users, pushing smokers to the sidewalks outside parks may not accomplish that goal. It seems that where a park is quite small, such an outlet renders the ban moot because smoke can still get up into park users’ faces. And whether a park is large or small, or one smokes inside or outside the bounds of the park, the impact on the overall ambient air quality of the park would presumably be the same. However, as we learn more about the impact of secondhand smoke on individuals in an outdoor area, it may be the case that the ban, in its current state, is justified.

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.

Schoolyards are large, flat, centrally located open spaces with a mandate to serve the recreational needs of schoolchildren. Great schoolyards–the rare ones that have healthy grass, big trees, a playground, and sports equipment–seem a lot like parks. But they aren’t. For one thing, most have fences and locks. For another, they are closed to the general public. Schoolyards are parks for only a limited constituency. But they have terrific potential to be more than that. Even less-than-great schoolyards (those that are merely expanses of asphalt with few amenities) represent sizable opportunities in key locations. To many observers, schoolyards seem the best, most obvious source of park-like land to supplement the park systems of overcrowded cities. And they are–even if upgrading them into schoolyard parks is more difficult than it might seem.

“Schoolyard park” in this context means a space reserved for schoolchildren during school hours and used by the whole community at other times. In a few cities–New York, Chicago, and Phoenix–schoolyard parks are run cooperatively by the board of education and the parks department. In others, the parks department has no formal role at all.

The pockmarked and cracked asphalt lot before it was developed into I.S. 62-The Ditmas School playground in Brooklyn, NY. Credit: Julieth Rivera.

Most schoolyards originally had grass and trees. But without proper design, construction, and maintenance, grass can’t survive daily trampling by hundreds of little feet. And small trees can’t handle that much swinging and climbing without becoming spindly skeletons. After a few years of frustration with dust, mud, and dead trees, school principals begin to think that laying down asphalt might be a superior solution (and barely any worse ecologically). It’s also a lot easier to sweep up broken glass from asphalt than from dirt and weeds. Then, this being America, the expanse of asphalt starts to attract automobiles; in no time the former school park has a set of parallel white lines and a row of oil stains. Keeping a schoolyard green, clean, car-free, and environmentally productive can be more difficult than operating a regular neighborhood park.

Maintenance can also be thorny. Most school districts are either unable or unwilling to keep schoolyards up to the standards that parks require. After all, money spent on horticulture for the community-at-large is money not spent on the education of children. But school districts also generally balk at turning the maintenance responsibility over to the park department. They worry about losing control over their children’s space.

There are successful programs to refurbish school lands in both Boston (the Boston Schoolyard Initiative) and Denver (Learning Landscapes). Both programs are fully under the direction and control of the school system with no involvement of the park department. The schoolyards are open to the general community except during school hours; they are all fenced. Converting each former space in Denver from what one administrator called “scorched earth that resembled a prison yard” into an irrigated and drained Learning Landscape with a field, two play structures, a hard-surface court and a “community gateway” (an archway that invites the public both symbolically and physically) costs about $450,000. Boston schoolyards, which are considerably smaller, cost about $320,000 each for a new drainage system, plantings, hard surface area, play equipment, fences, decorative art, and an “outdoor classroom” with a micro-meadow, -woodland, and -garden.

As with so many other innovative ideas about the use of urban space, conflicts have arisen about cars. At one Boston site, a bitter battle broke out when some parents proposed converting a school parking lot into a soccer field; ultimately the soccer moms raised $200,000 in private funds and got their way.

Another successful program is Spark (School Park Program) in Houston, where the facilities are called Spark Parks. The program is run by a nonprofit in close cooperation with the mayor’s office. It works only with Houston-area school boards, not with any park department, but it has a strict requirement that the public must have access to the Spark parks after school hours and on weekends. The average Spark park costs between $75,000 and $100,000 and consists of modular play equipment, picnic tables, benches, an outdoor classroom (concrete steps and stage), a butterfly garden, a paved or crushed granite trail, and native trees. Founded in 1983, Spark created 203 parks in its first 25 years. Since 1990 the Spark program has put special emphasis on artwork, often murals or mosaics that the children help with. “It has become extremely popular,” said Spark Director Kathleen Ownby. “We’ve become one of the largest providers of outdoor art in the Houston area.”

The primary users of schoolyards are schoolchildren whose needs predominate. Because of the children, schoolyards are generally locked during school hours. While theoretically a minor issue, locks can cause unending problems, particularly if there is no park attendant or custodian on the premises. The central issue is: Who’s in charge? If the school system, the grounds are likely to be more tightly monitored but not as well maintained. If the park department controls and if the schoolyard is truly open as a neighborhood space, upkeep may be better but oversight of the children might be slightly compromised–there have been complaints of young early-morning users sometimes finding drug and sex paraphernalia in school parks that were open to the community the night before. (Others claim that the increased community use makes them safer than if they are locked.)

Many joint-use agreements break down over what seems to be an issue of legal liability but in fact is a smokescreen for more subjective factors of personality, power, and control. In Houston, the liability issue was resolved when the state of Texas agreed to indemnify schools and cities from certain incidents that occur on public grounds (aside from those due to inadequate maintenance). But in Philadelphia agreement over liability was never reached because there was no higher authority to force deadlocked negotiations to continue. (Until 2009, neither the Board of Education nor the Fairmount Park Commission was under the control of the mayor.) Creating a multiagency urban schoolyard park program succeeds more frequently when all the agencies are under the control of the mayor.

Chicago and New York are among the few cities where, because of mayoral interest, a partnership operates successfully between the board of education and the department of parks. In Chicago, in 1996, Mayor Richard M. Daley set an ambitious goal of converting 100 asphalt schoolyards into small parks. Called the Campus Park Program, it included playgrounds, baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, and running tracks on a total of 150 acres. It was completed in four years at a cost of $43 million–$20 million each from the school system and the city, plus $3 million from the park district. Design was handled by the park district, construction by the Public Buildings Commission, and the process included community organizations. Ongoing maintenance is handled by the school district with as-needed assistance from the park district for larger properties.

The colorful new school and community playground at I.S. 62-The Ditmas School on opening day in Brooklyn, NY. Credit: Julieth Rivera.

New York City has taken the concept the furthest. There, with the blessing of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, The Trust for Public Land entered into a partnership with the Department of Education, the Department of Parks and Recreation and private funders (including MetLife, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation) to convert scores of decrepit and uninviting schoolyards into showcase parks. The program is simple in concept, complex in practice. The school recreation grounds are owned by the Department of Education, but the renovation work is overseen by the Department of Parks and TPL. Many decisions are made by the principal, the parent-teacher association, and the community. Proposals can be killed by teachers who don’t want to lose parking spaces, by custodians who don’t want to handle park maintenance, or by communities that don’t want kids out late playing basketball.

“This program is community-run,” says Mary Alice Lee, director of TPL’s New York City Playground Program. While all properties are fenced and have locks, in some places it’s the school custodial staff that has the only key, while in others it’s held by the neighborhood sponsoring organization or a block association. A few of the parks are left permanently unlocked. Also, each community sets its own hours. Most common is a schedule of 8 a.m. to dusk seven days a week except when school is in session. In some tougher neighborhoods the community wants the park closed earlier; the most restrictive schedule is 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays, and closed on Sundays.

Designing the space itself is a delicate balancing act that can take up to three months. The children themselves are the lead designers, responding to a set of questions and opportunities posed by TPL, but of course there are a bevy of realities that also affect decisions, including liability, equipment breakability, horticultural survivability, cost, and life lessons from previous play-parks. The children learn how to innovate, compromise, and reach a consensus when their initial ideas turn out to be too expensive or require too much space.

“Because of the kids,” says Lee, “we’ve created murals and mosaics, a hair-braiding area, a jump-rope zone, planting gardens, performance stages, outdoor classrooms, rain gardens, and bowling lanes–as well as the usual soccer fields, running tracks, basketball and tennis courts, and play equipment.”

Maintenance is the responsibility of the school custodial staff. Often they turn down a particular piece of equipment; in some cases they have nixed the playground entirely. As for natural grass, it has proven impossible to maintain under intense usage, and TPL now uses only artificial turf for the play-parks’ ballfields. Houston’s Spark program, in contrast, forbids artificial turf and uses only natural grass.

Rain damage at Glenhaven Park in Portland. Credit: Portland Parks and Recreation.

After a damp, cold winter that morphed into a damp, cold spring, Portland was recently forced to close all of its grass play fields for several weekends in order to prevent irreparable damage (see right photo). On a typical weekend, the fields are replete with soccer players, kickball tournaments, and pick-up Frisbee games.

Should Portland follow the lead of New York City, the largest municipal buyer of artificial turf in the country, and consider replacing some of its waterlogged grass fields with synthetic surfaces? Health impacts are one important consideration for any city making such decisions, which brings us to our first “Ask the Expert” post:

Since artificial turf is made from synthetic materials and ground-up tires, is it safe for people to play on?

By general consensus, the answer is yes for both adults and children.

A joint study by ALIAPUR, the French government body associated with used tires, and ADEME, the French Agency for Environment and Energy Management, concluded that there is no threat to human health, or the environment.

Turf field at C.S./P.S. 66 schoolyard in Bronx, New York City. Credit: Avery Wham.

Another evaluation, done by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, found that while low levels of lead were associated with artificial turf fields, “young children are not at risk from [the] exposure.” Furthermore, a test result from the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services confirmed that lead chromate levels are well below the level that can cause harm to children and athletes using the surface. In fact, the results showed a 50 lb child would have to consume 100 lbs of synthetic turf to be at risk of absorbing enough lead to equal the minimum threshold of elevated blood lead.

While synthetic turf may be chemically safe, risks do still exist. One is from skin burns since synthetic turf does not reflect heat as well as natural grass. A study by Brad Fresenburg at the Department of Horticulture, University of Missouri found that on a 98-degree day, when natural grass had a temperature of 105 degrees, synthetic grass rose to 173 degrees. Also, while natural grass is able to wash out and clean itself from bacteria, saliva and even blood, synthetic turf is not. Therefore a threat of bacterial infections can be higher on synthetic turf, and certain precautions should be taken, such as making sure to treat any “turf burns” acquired on the surface. Fresenburg also points out that due to the increase in velocity and traction associated with artificial turf, injuries such as strains and spasms may be more common. Conversely, while field grass may be natural, it too has drawbacks. Natural grass surface can be uneven, with potholes and slippery, even harder surfaces, especially in the winter. The study even goes on the state that “more concussions per games played occurred on natural grass fields.”

The untouched Santa Monica Mountains behind the famous H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D sign were saved in 2010 by a very public and successful Trust for Public Land campaign to prevent development on the 138 acres behind and beside the “H.”  Cahuenga Peak has been added to 4,100-acre Griffith Park.

The awards also recognized New York City as the “Greenest City,” particularly due to its ambitious master plan, called PlaNYC.

Named by the NDRC as a Smarter City for Transportation in 2011 and a Smarter City for Energy in 2010, New York City is following a plan, released by Mayor Bloomberg on Earth Day 2007, to reduce its carbon footprint – and its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% – and improve its environs by 2030. PlaNYC encompasses improvements in land, water, transportation, energy, air and climate change impacts. Notable accomplishments in the last year include making Times Square into a pedestrian-friendly causeway, planting thousands of trees and fighting to get hybrid taxis on the streets.  

Though perhaps overshadowed by PlaNYC, New York also recently released Vision 2020, a comprehensive plan to reshape its substantial waterfront. It may come as a surprise to many that New York’s waterfront, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the sixth borough, is larger than that of Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland combined. Recognizing that the task of reshaping 520 miles of shoreline may seem incomprehensibly large, New York’s planning department also released the Waterfront Action Agenda, which outlines 130 specific projects to be started in the next three years.

That report was preceded by a manual produced by the Design Trust for Public Space called “High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC.” It contains best practices for park design and plant selection, guidelines for implementing the goals of PlaNYC, and suggestions on how parks can better promote cycling and walking.

Both of these high-profile cities, though in opposite corners of the country, share a commitment to improving livability through the development, protection, and rejuvenation of parks. We offer our congratulations for their newest green credentials.

Velociraptors in Prospect Park? Credit: Jennifer Small.

While unicorns may not strike fear in the heart of a ne’er-do-well, we’re thinking the other two carnivores just might do the trick, even if one of them is only the size of a large turkey. But if all else fails, maybe the ninjas will keep trespassers out. (There were signs for them too.)

You can view photos of the additional signs here. Hope this post inspired a little April Fool’s Day humor

February’s selections highlight the importance of recreation in urban areas.

One of the primary functions of urban parks is to provide places for recreation.  The types of recreational opportunities can be influenced by park size, neighborhood demographics and demand, community design culture, and, of course, funding.  We typically think of city parks as places developed with ballfields ,sport courts, playgrounds, and swimming or spray pools.  Larger parks may have recreation centers or field houses.  But there is a different sort of urban park, too.  Across the country, cities are preserving and re-establishing natural areas and developing nature-based recreational experiences within their borders.  These parks feature trails, restored habitats, and environmental centers.  And though it seems that these types of parks would have nothing in common, this month’s featured parks share something quite significant: park partnerships that deliver results.

New York City is the most urbanized place in the United States.  And yet, in the middle of Staten Island, there beats a green heart of forests, meadows, streams, trails, and parks.  The 2800-acre ribbon of natural beauty, the Greenbelt, provides many nature-based recreational opportunities such as hiking, bird-watching, and environmental education programs.  New Yorkers can enter this place of respite through one of the many public access points along the length of the greenway. This valuable gem is protected through a partnership between the Greenbelt Conservancy and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.  Click here to read more.

Fifty years ago, on the site of what is now Gilbert Lindsay Park in Los Angeles, stood Wrigley Field, a ballpark hosting minor league teams in the Los Angeles area.  Today, instead of baseball, the park hosts family gatherings and activities at one of its many recreational facilities, such as the synthetic soccer field donated by Nike, the new recreation center, or the inclusive Boundless Playground.  Thanks to the many partners and donors who stepped forward to convert this park from neighborhood eyesore to a thriving center of community, neighborhood residents now have a safe place to play.  Site furnishings in the park were manufactured by DuMor, Inc.  Read more

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