Madison Square Park Conservancy, Madison Square Park, New York

Jaume Plensa’s Echo sculpture in Madison Square Park, New York. Credit: Tom Giebel (Flickr Feed)

Madison Square Park was officially dedicated in 1847. In 1870, soon after the creation of New York City’s first Department of Public Parks, the 6.2-acre park was re-landscaped with well-defined walkways and open lawns to capture both formal and pastoral elements. In the late 19^th century, the neighborhood surrounding Madison Square Park was one of Manhattan’s most elite, flourishing as a bustling commercial district with fashionable residences and hotels.  But by the 1990’s, despite its prominent location and cultural significance, the park had fallen into disrepair with cracked and broken asphalt, eroded lawns, decaying monuments, visual clutter, insufficient lighting, and confusing signage.

In response, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation asked the City Parks Foundation to take the lead in organizing a revitalization campaign in 1999.  The “Campaign for the New Madison Square Park” led to restoration in 2000-2001 and the creation of a “Friends” group in 2002.

The renovation restored elements of the original 19^th century design, and the park now features lush green lawns, colorful flowering shrubs and plants, World’s Fair-style benches, a restored fountain, a contemporary reflecting pool, new gateways, new paving, and ornamental lighting.  Another major accomplishment included the reinstallation of the 1920s-era Eternal Light Star (commemorating the end of World War I) with financial support from ConEdison, New York City Parks and Recreation, and Sentry Lighting.  Additional amenities in the park include six statues/monuments, a playground (with a Playground Associate during the summer), Star of Hope, a temporary outdoor art installation, and the Shake Shack food stand.

The “Friends” group was renamed the Madison Square Park Conservancy in 2004 to move from general advocacy for the park to more long-term care and maintenance. In addition to its annual budget, the Conservancy has raised over $10 million for capital improvements and for a permanent fund to support park maintenance.  (Any surplus revenues from operations go into the capital budget.)  Donor companies have included Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, New York Life Insurance Company, Credit Suisse First Boston, Rudin Management, and Union Square Hospitality Group.

The Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, financed and built by the Conservancy for $750,000 in 2004 (and operated by a third-party) was an instant success and is one of the highlights of current restaurant concessions in New York City parks.  It usually features long lines of customers waiting for frozen custard, shakes, concretes, Shack burgers, Chicago hotdogs, and “shroom burgers.”

A dense mix of office buildings, retail establishments and restaurants border Madison Square Park.  Restoration has also spurred new residential development, including approximately twenty luxury condominium buildings in the surrounding area over the past five years, with two more coming in 2012-13.  New hotels have also opened in the neighborhood.

A Business Improvement District surrounds Madison Square Park Conservancy, but there is no formal connection to the Conservancy.  There is more business retail than residential development surrounding the park, so visitation counts fluctuate throughout the year.  After two surveys of users last summer, the Conservancy estimates 1.25 million visitors during peak months (May through September).

The Civic Center Conservancy, Civic Center, Denver

Colorado tribute to Veterans Monument and the City and County Building in Civic Center Park, Denver. Credit: Cliff (Flickr Feed)

Civic Center Park fills the grand space between Denver’s two most important civic buildings – Denver’s City and County Building and the Colorado State Capitol. Accented with tree groves, its structures include the Greek Theater and its Colonnade of Civic Benefactors, the Voorhies Memorial and adjacent “Seal Pond,” a historic balustrade wall and historic Carnegie Library turned municipal building. With the Pioneer Monument nearby, the park itself contains three bronze sculptures: “Broncho Buster,” “On the War Trail,” and the Columbus Monument. It has an illustrious history, including designs by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., but in recent decades the 12-acre park was largely empty, lacking amenities, programming, and connectivity. With the City’s operational and capital budgets shrinking, there was a backlog of deferred maintenance.

In response, a group of private citizens passionate about revitalizing Civic Center Park – including Elaine Asarch (founding Conservancy board chair and current board member), Dennis Humphries (architect and recent chair of Denver’s Landmark Preservation Commission), Chris Frampton (current board chair and local real estate developer) and others – founded the Civic Center Conservancy in 2004. “We wanted to reintroduce people to this historic urban oasis and engage the community in its future,” said Conservancy Executive Director Lindy Eichenbaum Lent, who came to the job from the Denver Mayor’s office in 2009.

The Conservancy partners with the City and County of Denver to restore, enhance, and activate Civic Center Park, with efforts focusing on four key areas:  advocacy around design/infrastructure/policy; events and programming to activate the space; marketing and public engagement; and fundraising for capital improvements/activities/initiatives to support Civic Center’s ongoing revitalization.

Some major accomplishments of the Conservancy include advocating for Civic Center’s inclusion in the 2007 Better Denver bond initiative (which voters approved, resulting in almost $9.5 million for restoration), and providing input into the 2009 design guidelines for the park.

In its quest to elevate and sustain Civic Center as the vibrant cultural and community hub its founders envisioned more than a century ago, the Conservancy hosts a variety of arts and cultural programs, including the twice-weekly summer Civic Center EATS Outdoor Café (with 20+ food trucks, bistro-style seating and live music), an annual Independence Eve Celebration (featuring a free Colorado Symphony concert and a fireworks/light display that attracted more than 100,000 people in its second year and was broadcast live throughout Colorado), and a new Bike-In Movie Series on summer evenings. With these new programs, combined with longstanding annual festivals and general traffic resulting from the surrounding cultural and civic attractions, the park attracts over a million visitors a year.

New parks can be fashioned out of old garbage dumps. It’s not as bad as it sounds.

Fresh Kills Park, New York. The soon-to-open park will be New York's largest city park at 2,200 acres, more than double the size of Central Park. Credit: Garrett Ziegler (Flickr Feed).

Balloon Park in Albuquerque, Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, McAlpine Creek Soccer Complex in Charlotte, Red Rock Canyon Open Space in Colorado Springs, Rogers Park Golf Course in Tampa, and hundreds of others, both famous and obscure, have been created from landfills. And in a few more years New York City’s 2,200-acre Fresh Kills Landfill will have settled in to become that city’s largest park.

Landfill parks go back to at least 1916 (many years before the word “landfill” was coined) when the old Rainier Dump in Seattle was turned into the Rainier Playfield. In 1935 in that same city a more momentous conversion transformed the 62-acre Miller Street Dump into a portion of the now-famous Washington Park Arboretum. The following year, New York City closed the putrid Corona Dumps–famously called the “Valley of Ashes” by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby–and began preparing the land for construction of the 1939 World’s Fair. Following World War II, as the volume of trash in America mushroomed, so did the number of landfills. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that as many as 3,500 landfills have closed since 1991; the number from earlier years is anyone’s guess.

In an ideal world all trash would be recycled and there would be no landfills. But in a time of severe urban space and resource constraints, closed landfills represent excellent locales for three big reasons: size, location, and cost. A former dump is usually one of the few large, open locations within a dense metro area. There is also the opportunity to correct what may have been a longstanding environmental injustice to the surrounding residents. Finally, there’s a good chance that the landfill–which may be as small as dozens of acres or as large as 1,000 or more–is free or inexpensive to buy or possibly that it even comes with its own supporting funds.

While a capped landfill is not necessarily a park director’s first choice for a parcel of land, it’s impressive and instructive that so many perfectly adequate–or even better than adequate–city parks started out as dumps. Communities from coast to coast have been jumping at the chance to use them. Based on a survey, the Center for City Park Excellence estimates that there may already be as many as 4,500 acres of landfill parks in major U.S. cities.

Mount Trashmore, Virginia Beach. The city's highest point and its largest non-wetland park was constructed in 1974 over an 800-foot-high mound of municipal refuse, and became the best known of the nation's early landfill parks. Credit: Backus Aerial.

In Portland, Oregon, the park department is getting a free 25-acre park. All closure and conversion costs for Cully Park were paid by the solid waste department, which built up a reserve for exactly that purpose by charging a per-ton fee on garbage disposed there. (The park department coordinates closely in habitat development and vegetation management.) In Virginia Beach, where Mount Trashmore required multiple fixes over the decades, the original 1974 capping and the 1986 recapping were paid for by the public works department; the 2003 recapping–hopefully the last–was financed by the park department through its capital improvement budget. In Fresno, California, the landfill isn’t even being officially transferred over; the public utilities department will own it in perpetuity but will sign a management agreement with the parks and recreation department.

Frankly, a cheap purchase price is important because preparation costs can be significant. Depending on the age and contents of the landfill, the amount of groundwater or soil contamination, and the planned recreational use, construction costs have ranged from $500,000 for a 2-acre site to $30 million for a regional park of more than 100 acres. Expenses depend on such factors as topography, availability of materials, cover design, and much more. A calculation by the Center for City Park Excellence puts the average at around $300,000 per acre. Financial responsibility for these and other costs may lie solely with the park developer or be shared by the landfill owner/operator.

The construction of municipal solid waste landfills has been regulated since 1991 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Today an owner/operator must install a 24-inch earthen cover within six months of closure to minimize water infiltration and erosion. The cover usually also has a gas venting layer and a stone or synthetic biotic layer to keep out burrowing animals. The EPA requires groundwater monitoring and leachate collection for thirty years after the landfill is closed.

Technically, the two big challenges to using a former landfill are gas production and ground settlement. Landfill gases, including methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide, are created when buried waste decomposes. Methane may be released for thirty or more years after closure, and EPA requires gas collection systems. (In parks built on pre-1991 landfills there were occasional stories of picnickers being stunned to see a column of flame surrounding a barbeque grill.) Happily, methane collected from landfills can be sold by park departments to generate revenue. In Portland, Oregon, St. Johns Landfill, a former disposal site within the 2,000-acre Smith-Bybee Wetlands Natural Area, earns more than $100,000 a year from methane that is piped 2 miles to heat the lime kiln of a cement company. The revenue helps pay for closure operations as the site transitions from landfill to park.

Settlement is a bit tougher. Like cereal in a box, municipal landfills gradually slump as much as 20 percent over a two- or three-decade period. That much settlement would cause foundations to break and sink, utility and irrigation pipes to burst, roads and paths to crack and heave, light poles to tilt, and sports fields to crumple. Obviously, if the ultimate reuse of a landfill is as a natural wild land, none of this matters. But most recreational reuses require the construction of at least trails if not fields and buildings of various types. Fortunately, waste sits only in “cells” in certain areas of a landfill, and park facilities can be safely constructed over undisturbed areas, leaving the settling sections to support grass and shrubbery. Therefore, structural foundations can be protected through detailed research and careful planning; the key is to know exactly where the waste is. At New York’s Fresh Kills only about 45 percent of the land area was actually used for waste disposal.

Despite the many successful individual examples, there is not yet a seamless landfills-to-parks movement in the United States. Numerous challenges remain–technological, political, and legal–all of which drive up costs. Back when land was more easily available, the impediments were generally not worth taking on. Now in many cases they are. With a three-pronged effort to design safer waste dumps, to work more closely with community activists, and to ensure protection from legal liabilities, cities will be able to gain much new parkland from abandoned landfills.

For more information about landfill parks, read an article published in Places journal here.

The “Plaza Movil Street Park” was one of three winners of the Philips Livable Cities Award, a global initiative designed to generate innovative, meaningful and achievable ideas to improve the health and wellbeing of city-dwellers across the world. The creator of the Plaza Movil Street Park received a grant of €25,000 to help translate his concept into reality.

Also worth viewing is the video of one of the five finalists, who brings a plan a little closer to home. The “Design Your Own Park Competition” in Binghamton, NY would turn neglected, urban spaces into parks by having neighborhood residents and groups submit designs in a contest, with the winning vision ultimately created and maintained as a public park.

Boston Women's Memorial along Commonwealth Avenue. Credit: Swampyank (Wikipedia Creative Commons)

When the parkway was first invented by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvin Vaux in the 1860s, it was much more a “park” and less a “way” than it is today. Of course, that was before the automobile. Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway, both in Brooklyn, New York, were wide boulevards with a center carriageway, narrow access roadways on each margin, and two attractive, maple-, oak-, ash- and shrub-filled median malls for promenading, sitting, seeing, and being seen. The malls had a cinder equestrian trail. In 1894, the walkway on Ocean Parkway was split to form a bicycle path–the nation’s first. There is also memorable paving-work and even chess tables.

The concept was enticing for reasons of both beauty and economics: parkways were not only pleasing to users but also provided a maximum amount of park edge upon which developers could construct homes. Many cities, from Buffalo to Chicago to Kansas City to Denver eagerly followed suit. Over time, though, most urban parkways and boulevards have been chipped away by transportation engineers and modified by new regulations and insurance requirements so that they do more for cars and less for people.

Some, like the Grand Concourse in New York, essentially lost all vestiges of their original human element. Lanes were widened and speed limits raised. Trees were severely pruned or removed and not replanted; muscular guardrails were installed; and intrusive directional and regulatory signs erected. Meanwhile, on some older boulevards benches have been removed; on new ones they were never even contemplated. By the time of the automobile era, almost every aspect of parkway design was for windshield pleasure, not actual use.

According to researchers at the University of Minnesota, making parkways into something more than just pretty roads requires that they be treated as places. “Parkways become places,” they write, “by creating outdoor rooms that are shared by a broad community, not just the automobile….The integration of sidewalks, bike paths, adjacent civic institutions, and other important cultural amenities with the road support the image of place. The orientation of buildings to the street also strongly influences the character of parkways.”

Back in the nineteenth century, Eastern Parkway and Ocean Parkway served many different users, and even today they accommodate far more than just drivers. The 6-mile-long, 210-foot-wide Ocean Parkway contains about 110 acres of non-car space. Kansas City’s Ward Parkway has spectacular fountains with benches, community-tended flower gardens, and Mirror Pool, which is used for ice skating in mid-winter. Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue features a center walkway that has benches, public art, and monuments, along with majestic shade trees, bushes, and gardens.  In contrast, the median on Pennsylvania Avenue in southeast Washington, D.C., contains only small cherry trees and is designed solely as visual relief for drivers – it has no walkway, seating, or any other pedestrian-oriented amenity.

Beyond squeezing more value out of existing parkways and boulevards, it may be possible to create new ones. Most cities have one or more streets that are extraordinarily and unnecessarily wide and that could be reconstructed as parkways with planted medians. This might be particularly effective in an old industrial area that formerly handled trucks or railcars but is now transforming into a residential or office district. Even urban highways are fair game for reconsideration. In many cities, the widest “streets” are the interstates that were bulldozed through preexisting neighborhoods and are now being reevaluated. Unlike expressways, which serve as noisy, blighting barriers in cities, parkways are known to add substantial value to nearby residences, often resulting in enough additional tax revenue to cover the cost of their creation and maintenance.

Minneapolis is now in the forefront of the parkway retrofit movement. While the city and the Park Board are justifiably proud of the Grand Rounds, that famous route is in fact also a bit of an embarrassment due to a 3-mile gap through the northeast quadrant of the city. The gap, and the decline of the area, has lasted for more than a century while real estate values (and social capital) in other sections of the city have flourished. After drawing up plans yet failing to fill the missing link in 1910, 1918, 1930, and 1939, the effort went dormant until 2007 when the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board listed it among the top priorities in its comprehensive plan. A route has been selected that mostly involves using and redesigning existing roadways. There are formidable land acquisition challenges and a projected price tag in excess of $100 million, but the Park Board, under the slogan “Keeping the Promise,” seems determined to achieve success. If and when it does, it will serve as an influential example that great parkways and boulevards are not only a memento from the past but can link recreation with transportation in the 21st century, too.

St. Mary's Square, San Francisco. Credit: BrokenSphere (Wikimedia Commons)

New York landscape architect Thomas Balsley delights in promising to show friends what he calls “the greatest untapped open space opportunity in America.” He then takes them to the top of the Empire State Building and points to the ocean of rooftops visible to the horizon in every direction.

A city receives exactly as much sunlight and rainfall as it did before development when the area was a virgin forest or grassland, but now much of the meteorological action is off the ground on top of structures. Although most individual houses have sloping roofs that are perhaps better suited for solar collectors or conduits for rain barrels, most large institutional or residential buildings have flat ones that could potentially be used for parks. Rooftops represent the rare resource that is increasing. Most are private, but a significant number are publicly owned. And some of those are large–the tops of schools, libraries, government office buildings, post offices, concert halls, convention centers, parking ramps, and bus stations can all extend to well over an acre. Moreover, large private rooftops, such as those on shopping centers, big box stores, and warehouses, are purchasable or leasable, just like any other private property.

The green roof movement, still in its infancy, is mushrooming in popularity along with the green building movement in general. But merely being green does not make a roof a park. That oft-cited Chicago City Hall green roof is a marvelous creation but it isn’t a park, just as the much older green roof on the Time-Life Building in New York City isn’t a park–neither is freely open to the public. There are already thousands of rooftop gardens, pools, and recreational facilities on top of luxury condominiums, apartment buildings, office buildings, and hotels across the country, but they are private facilities for residents, workers, guests, and members only. They are the vertical equivalent of parks inside gated communities.

At present the majority of rooftop parks are ones at ground level built over subsurface parking garages–places like Millennium Park in Chicago, Hudlin Park in St. Louis, and Yerba Buena Garden in San Francisco. This wonderful urban solution is referred to, at Boston’s Post Office Square, as “Park Above, Park Below.” Older facilities are of relatively conventional ornamental design; new ones increasingly incorporate more ecological features. Both Nashville’s new Public Square and Austin’s new City Hall collect all the gathered rain for later use as pumped irrigation water.

Putting parks on rooftops higher than street level is, thus far, much rarer. For one thing, keeping the plant material alive is a challenge because of more extreme conditions of wind, sunlight, thin soil, and lack of trees. For another, there are concerns about the structural strength of buildings and potential water leakage as well as issues of human access and security. Also, what park uses are appropriate on rooftops? Flower gardens, lawns, benches, and pathways? Courts (surrounded by cages) for basketball, tennis, and volleyball? Community gardens? Playgrounds? Dog parks? Miniature golf?

These are complex questions that require a good deal of research–both into the issue of “rooftops” and of “parks.” Some of the investigation is generic, some of it needs to be highly specific, on a city-by-city basis. How many flat rooftops does, say, Miami have? What is the total combined acreage? How many are on public buildings and what is that combined acreage? How many of them are large, say, an acre or more? How many of those large ones are relatively uncluttered with air conditioning units and other paraphernalia? How many are accessible by the public? How many happen to be in areas underserved by parks? This entire field of inquiry is so new that there are almost no data available, although there will be breathtakingly quick progress now that aerial photography is so widely available through Internet programs.

One of the most famous, and one of the oldest, rooftop parks is NCNB Plaza (also called Kiley Garden) in Tampa, Florida. Rarely known for urban innovation, Tampa backed into its moment of leadership as a result of authentic civic outrage over the sale and destruction of its historic rose garden for the erection of a 33-story bank tower. In a creative (and expensive) gesture of repair, North Carolina National Bank agreed to restore the lost green space by putting a park on top of the new tower’s parking deck. Designed by (and named after) prominent landscape architect Dan Kiley and opened in 1988, the plaza is 8 feet above ground level.

Kiley Garden represents all that is great and all that is problematical about rooftop parks. On the positive side, it provides outstanding views of Tampa’s downtown and of the Hillsborough River and its riverwalk. It came into being in a high-land-value location which, under other circumstances, would never have yielded a public park. On the other hand, there were design and construction shortcomings that ultimately–nineteen years later–forced a total and complete renovation, including the removal of every tree, shrub, and blade of grass, as well as the many architectural elements. Of course, almost every aspect of technology has evolved in the past two decades, and the lessons of Kiley Garden can be used to help make rooftop parks more successful in the future.

The two places that have taken rooftop parks the furthest are New York and San Francisco–not surprisingly, since they are the two most crowded big cities in the country.

At 28 acres, New York’s Riverbank State Park is so large that it contains a pool, a skating rink, a theater, four tennis courts, four basketball courts, a wading pool, a softball field, a football field, four handball courts, a running track, two playgrounds, a weight room, a boat dock, and a restaurant. It was built on the roof of a new sewage treatment plant on the Hudson River and provides an exciting template of how large public buildings can be constructed to do double duty.

San Francisco has St. Mary’s Square, a full-fledged, off-the-ground, up-in-the-air park amid the high rises in the Financial District. Moreover, St. Mary’s Square will soon be getting an addition (on another rooftop) thanks to a far-reaching law–Proposition K, The Sunlight Ordinance–passed by voters in 1989. That ordinance, aimed at preventing the proliferation of shadows in already-chilly San Francisco, restricts any new construction that would block sunlight on a public park. (Among other things, the law gave birth to a unit of measurement that has probably never existed anywhere else in history: the “solar-year square-foot-hour of new shade.”) St. Mary’s is the place where the irresistible force of San Francisco’s development pressure met the immovable object of the arc of solar radiation.

Because of its location and open-space importance to workers and residents, St. Mary’s was given the most stringent designation under Proposition K: zero tolerance. The square could not have a single additional square-foot-hour of sunlight taken away. An office tower was proposed that would have blocked a small amount of sunlight–only in the early morning, four months out of the year–but that was enough to kill the proposal, until a wonderful solution was proposed. The developer offered to create a public park on the second-floor roof of the building’s garage. The 5,000-square-foot roof was located in such a way that it received much more sunlight; in fact, the developer calculated that the amount of sunlight hitting the rooftop park addition would be 40 times greater than the sunlight lost to the old park by the building’s shadow. And, because of the steepness of the site, the second-story location actually intersected with the ground plane of a portion of St. Mary’s Square, removing the need for steps or handicap accessible designs.

Overcoming the hurdles of rooftop park technology and getting people up off the ground can be challenging. But rooftop parks could make a big difference when it comes to urban beauty, livability, and recreation. This abundant resource beckons, particularly in extremely dense communities that are very short of parkland.

According to Sadik-Khan, there are 356,000 pedestrians each and every day in Times Square, and although there is a 10:1 ratio of pedestrians to cars, 90% of the space was allocated to cars.  By removing Broadway from the road system, the city created 1.8 acres of new pedestrian space, which has led to a 63% reduction in injuries.  In addition to the decrease in accidents, there has also been a substantial reduction in noise levels.

We’ve written before about the effects of road closures in cities.  For a more in-dept discussion on this topic, please visit our earlier post.

The article provides valuable insight into how or if park redesigns should be undertaken in such a situation, but also reveals how much parks can mean to residents of densely populated communities. With little private yard space, parks are the front and back lawns of residents. And residents have a shared ownership of these spaces. The article notes:

We all want to write our desires on New York. But in a metropolis of eight million overlapping voices, that is rarely possible. Public spaces like parks are a particular battleground, equally prized as green oases and places for personal expression.

In cities that are becoming more densely populated, where residents may be giving up their private yards for more public ones in parks, it is more likely that the concern over the form and character of the city’s parks will increase also.

NY Parks Dept. playground designer Alexander Hart using his creation.

A new playground opened recently in New York City’s Morningside Park that attempts to provide lower play spaces that won’t hurt children when they fall while still providing challenge and fun. Here’s an excerpt from the NY Times article describing it:

The jungle gym itself sprawls over a chunk of a block, with the younger and the older children’s play areas connected by a three-rung ladder toddlers couldn’t climb. The play space has wheels at various heights that children can drive to nowhere, a small climbing wall, and an endless number of stairs to satisfy the urge that small people inevitably have to gain serious height.

The article goes on to describe that the sightlines of the $2 million playground aren’t the greatest — kids can become hidden in its large area — but that parents have seemed to adjust and learned to like it. The spot is popular, as one babysitter noted, “This is one of the more elaborate playgrounds I’ve seen, in a challenging way. But it’s fun — it’s a workout.”

Some additional background. The pool is 82 feet long and four feet deep with seven lanes. Capacity is 175 for the docked facility, which spent the 2007 summer adjacent to Brooklyn Bridge Park and this past summer at Barretto Point Park at Hunter’s Point in the Bronx. A New York Times article indicated back in July, 2007 that Buttenwieser started a nonprofit group, the Neptune Foundation, to finance her pool project — raising over $5 million in donations and loans. It is being operated in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

An NPR segment with Buttenwieser is an interesting listen here. For cities with water, but not swimmable water for either environmental or safety reasons, floating pools could be a great way to keep the populace cooled off in the summer while enlivening waterfronts.