Tags: parks

Two projects in San Francisco are turning underused and unsightly public spaces into green urban gardens and meeting places.  Pavement to Parks, a program run by the city’s Planning Department, converts wasted street space and rights-of-way into plazas and parks. 

Spencer Finch’s The River That Flows Both Ways–the first public art commission on the High Line–is an installation of 700 panes of colored glass on the Chelsea Market building, between 15th and 16th Streets on the elevated park at 10th Avenue. 

Choreographer/performer Jill Sigman and composer/vocalist Kristin Norderval have collaborated to produce Our Lady of Detritus, a performance piece focused on “trash and transcendence” that has been making its way through various outdoor New York City sites for the past month.

Infrastructurist has posted its list of the ten greatest large urban parks.  It’s interesting to see them all viewed from above at roughly the same scale, and to see how they interact at that scale with the form of the urban fabric around them. 

Nature Find is an online tool provided by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) to aid in finding local nature or nature-related amenities.   Users plug-in a zip code, and the software locates nearby events, city parks, science centers, zoos and other wildlife-related happenings.

The Trust for Public Land, a national, non-profit land conservation organization, has released its annual city park survey, revealing some interesting statistics about the nation’s urban parkland.  Some notable facts from the survey:

• New York City has the most parkland as a percentage of city land–19.6%–of high-density cities in the US. 

The Guinness Book’s record holder for World’s Largest Photograph was created at the site of the Orange County Great Park, a brownfield-to-park project in Orange County, California.  The Great Picture is a gelatin silver print measuring 10 x 30 meters, or roughly three stories high and eleven stories long. 

The Hudson River Park Trust has selected a winning design for its reimagining of Pier 57, near Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.  LOT-EK‘s design makes use of disused shipping containers in the construction of a mixed-use community facility on the 375,000 square-foot pier. 

[vimeo vimeo.com/2802531]

Before PBS Thirteen’s online series The City Concealed featured Freshkills Park, it featured another unusual Staten Island park happening, at Mt. Loretto Unique Area, a state preserve on the island’s southern tip.  Artist Doug  Schwartz has been building pyramids of thousands of rocks, spanning nearly half a mile of beach at Mt.

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  

The National Parks Conservation Association has drafted a 53-page report describing “a potentially catastrophic loss of animal and plant life” in national parks due to climate change. The report urges the National Park Service to develop an overarching plan to better manage habitat and population shifts.

Transportation Alternatives is requesting submissions for POP.Park, a competition to design a pop-up park for Park(ing) Day in New York City. Since its inception in 2005 by art and design collective Rebar, Park(ing) Day has celebrated pedestrians by transforming parking spaces all over the city into temporary parks.

Another poster child for the reclamation of disturbed lands: AMD&ART Park in Vintondale, PA.  By the mid-’90s, coal mining in this part of Appalachia had resulted in severe acid mine drainage (AMD) into waterways and general public resignation to a major environmental hazard. 

The WRT/Marpillero Pollak-designed infrastructure and public space project that we wrote about in June has broken ground in Long Island City, Queens.

A number of new technology-based parks applications have come online recently: Park Scan allows San Francisco park visitors to report maintenance issues to relevant city officials and to track prior reports; Off Leash is an iPhone app that directs users to the nearest off-leash dog park; The Hidden Park, also for the iPhone, leads kids through site-wide scavenger hunts of ten major world parks, including Central Park. 

People Make Parks is a joint effort of Partnerships for Parks and the Hester Street Collaborative that aims to involve ordinary citizens in the design of public parks.  The project helps citizens compile local knowledge to develop a vision for a park, educates them about the capital development process for building or renovating a park and helps connect them and their vision to the Department of Parks & Recreation at opportune moments in that process. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV–sIEM7bU&w=507&h=370]

Ken Burns’ most recent documentary series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, will air on PBS in September.  Burns on National Parks:

You’d be hard pressed to find something that was a purer expression of the democratic impulse, in setting aside land, not for the privileged, not for the kings and nobility, but for everybody.

We recently discovered that our neighbors at the New Jersey Meadowlands keep a nature blog full of amazing photos of the bird and insect life that lives within its 8,400 acres of wetlands and open space.  Lots of these photos have been taken at the 110-acre Richard W.

It’s increasingly rare to come across new, untouched land for park development in cities. In the May issue of Landscape Architecture, Peter Harnik explains how “squeezing innovative green spaces into crowded cities requires looking for land in unexpected places.”  He outlines the potential of a variety of urban spaces to function as parkland: cemeteries, school yards, rooftops, community gardens, reservoir lands, stormwater channels, closed streets and reclaimed parking areas.  

Anne Schwartz’s recent column in the Gotham Gazette lays out some pretty impressive figures identifying city parks as economic assets: Central Park contributed $1 billion to the city’s economy in 2007; the High Line is expected to generate $4 billion in private investment and $900 million in revenues to the city over the next 30 years; the 2008 completion of the Greenwich Village section of the Hudson River Park raised real estate prices in the adjacent two blocks by 20 percent.