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Uniting Baltimore Through One Connected ParkMonday, December 10, 2007Posted by Steve Ziger, Founding Partner and Design Principal of Ziger/Snead Architects, under Big Visions Post the next comment (15 so far) |
“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”
Daniel Burnham, 1846-1912, architect and urban visionary
Imagine a Baltimore where everyone lived within a few blocks of a park. Where you could walk easily throughout the city in a safe green network that connects school playgrounds, tree-lined boulevards, community gardens, college campuses, public golf courses, recreational areas and parks. As you walked, people would be commuting on bicycle trails or participating in marathons. Children would plant and care for trees as a part of their environmental curriculum. Neighbors would grow their own vegetables. Our extensive canopy of trees would provide shade, filter pollution, and help with rainwater.Baltimore would become known as a city in a park, attracting businesses, residents, and visitors.Tax revenues would increase along with property values. Communities would come together. The healthier environment would improve our public health, with cleaner air and water, and lots of great reasons to be outside.
This is the vision of ONE PARK, a concept of the Parks and People Foundation (www.parksandpeople.org) that unites our diverse neighborhoods in a network of enhanced and interconnected open spaces. The nature of these connections varies in each location, with specific designs coming from local communities and stakeholders.
Here’s one example of how ONE PARK can clarify and encourage policy:The Department of Public Works runs a large salt operation from an historic roundhouse along the Jones Falls. They would like to move and free the site for public use, but can find no appropriate alternative. Meanwhile, the West Side’s underused Route 40 “road to nowhere” offers a great opportunity. By framing a new park at street level above the sunken portions of the highway, we could heal the broken connections between neighborhoods and create large enclosed space below to consolidate many needed public services. The green space above could include a tree nursery to provide the city with trees and the community with jobs and training. Consolidation frees up key properties throughout the City for potential open space or income-generating development.
ONE PARK is no little plan. It is a simple vision to inspire and direct the future of our beloved Baltimore.
posts
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Steve
Several years ago you made a drawing of this idea. It was a vellum map on which you had depicted Baltimore not by roads or buildings but only green space. The shape of Baltimore was iconic and recognizeable and the existing ‘green spaces’ were ammended to reflect a comprehensive ONE PARK vision for the city. This drawing has left an indelible impression on me and I wondered if it could be posted.
Thanks
Gabriel
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Hi Steve, Sounds great. I love your ideas –always exciting, full of goodness and open to all.
Please post the next steps to move the salt and build the park, including cost and ways to make the building of the park in and of itself a fun opportunity for Baltimoreans and one that pays a wage to young people interested in the field.
take care,
Hathaway
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Clearly an expensive idea, but a good one. Anyone have any audacious ideas for the funding for land aquisition, building the park, and upkeep?
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Thanks for remembering the map, Gabriel. There is a good series of maps illustrating the concept on the Parks and People website. Go to http://www.parksandpeople.org/home_onepark.html and follow the directions on the left. Let me know what you think.
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Greetings to you as well, Hathaway.
It will certainly be expensive to frame a park over the sunken portions of Route 40. However,the benefits are great. Part of the costs can be offset by sale of land currently used by city services, and part would be offset by increased property values, development opportunities, and job growth along the newly-created park. This location is likely not significantly more costly than purchasing land elsewhere and creating the required infrastructure. For example, I understand that the sunken highway has its own storm-water management system, which is ideal to keep salts and other contaminants out of the bay. The structure is generally in place. It would be great if the city would prepare a feasibility study with associated costs and benefits.
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Parks and People and Steve—who sits on its board—and many others are right as rain about this idea.
While it scope and vision and many multiple benefits are easy to imagine, one wonders why a concept so relevant to today’s interests would not be under active, serious examination and consideration by our city’s leadership?
It is even addressed in the city’s new master plan.
Unlike some cities, like Atlanta, which is undertaking something very similar to what Steve has proposed here, the cost of doing something like this in Baltimore is way, way less than that in a city bursting at the seams.
Atlanta, swarming with people and problems associated associated with rapid growth, is going to take 25 years and spend 2.8 billion dollars to get its One Park accomplished.
It is called the Atlanta BeltLine. Check it out.
But Baltimore is in better position to execute a project like this than Atlanta. Pressures on land values, and those posed by rapid growth are far, far and away less than those down south. After all, Baltimore, only last year, experienced net growth, commencing its repopulation. Those pressures have yet to develop.
Atlanta is trying to keep up and catch up, rapidly—at great cost and much difficult. But Baltimore has the leisure to replan its city, striking a make over contemporaneous to the demographics now and emerging.
Also, Baltimore, unlike Atlanta, has many of the major pieces of landscape already in public ownership and waiting to be connected with a great green ribbon.
So our opportunity to execute something like One Park is right before us, like a bird’s nest on the ground.
Here is an idea that is really, really audacious: why doesn’t the Greater Baltimore Committee adopt this wonderful idea and make it its first, really major universal economic development project, one that touches the ordinary citizen and helps with the city’s recovery.
Isn’t this idea just as worthy of consideration as building a new city arena?
And the city has the money. In the past five years, including this fiscal year, 77 million dollars has been appropriated to the Department of Recreation and Parks for capital development.
Why not shift some of that funding stream in to a One Park project, taking our time and building it out over a ten year period, do it right, and have a wonderful resource—something grand and distinctive that sets Baltimore apart from most other cities in America.
After all every city has an arena.
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 4:53 pm
In response to Mr. Farkas, there clearly is expense. But much of ONE PARK is already in place. It is simply a new way of thinking of our public open space. Imagine for example a loop that starts at the Inner Harbor and connects clockwise through Otterbein, Gwynns Falls Trail, Coppin and other schools, Mondawmin, Druid Hill, Wyman Park, Hopkins Homewood, 33rd Street, Clifton Park, Broadway, the new East Baltimore redevelopment, Patterson Park, Canton, Fells Point, and back. A lot of this loop is already in place. We need to work on the connections. Some would not need to be new money; simply a reallocation of city capital improvement funds to strengthen the connections. The City is already committed to expanding the tree canopy, for example. Also, ONE PARK is not exactly an expansion of the city’s park system, but rather a way of leveraging both parks and non-park open space.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at 10:27 pm
If we can both imagine and finance an entire subway system under a fully built city, such as happened in the last thirty years in Washington, DC, we can implement a plan like Steve’s. We need to have the benefits of such a concept sold to us as Washington’s subway was. This time we will not be discussing economic benefits, however, better shopping, or more convenient access to business. We will be discussing their opposite: increased recreation opportunities, enhancement of neighborhoods, a better quality of life in the city, a deep quiet in many places new to quiet. With the emphasis on things green, this may be the moment for such a lovely and audacious idea!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Jo,
I agree completely that the benefits of thriving, interconnected greenspace need to be MUCH more widely shared and understood. The research that’s already been done is amazing, and selling a concept like One Park would be a snap if everyone knew how clear the case is.
A really stellar publication was put out by the Trust for Public Land in 2005 called The Benefits of Parks (you can find it here: http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cd.cfm?content_item_id=13843&folder_id=175). The TPL paper emphasizes all of the thing you talked about… quality of life, increased recreational opportunities, etc… but it also includes very compelling evidence that strong parks DO have major economic benefits for the neighborhoods that surround them. Worth a look!
Abby
Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 1:37 am
Hi Steve,
I’m sorry, I can’t applaud your idea. When I think of the poverty in Baltimore, the vacant homes that could house the homeless, the low to very low income populations, I can’t imagine that the park will become anything more than “Tent City”. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer! And even if we know there will always be poor, we have a responsibility to take care of each other! I’m saddened to think of the condominiums and community development exploding in Baltimore while the homeless are still wondering the streets. We have more than 3,000 turnaways from shelters! We have more than 45,000 offenders coming out of prison annually! We have crime and AIDS multiplying rapidly in Baltimore and the best idea you can come up with is a park. So what are the drug addicts, the mentally ill, the homeless now all going to live in the park? I’m sorry, I don’t think its audacious idea! I think it may be audacious for the rich, but what about the people who continue to suffer in Baltimore? What about the working poor? I pray that you would take this comment seriously and invest your money in saving a life instead of developing a park! I pray you consider developing a homeless shelter the size of the proposed park and get the homeless off the street! I pray that if can’t think of anything better to do with your investment that you give it to some non-profit organization who really cares about people!
Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 11:33 am
Excellent column in the Sun, we need this type of leadership in Baltimore.
A side tidbit, Mr. Zigler quotes Daniel Burnham, architect, among other things, of Chicago’s visionary plan to preserve it’s 17 mile long lakefront as a park “forever free and clear” for public use and enjoyment.
In the Sun column, Mr. Zigler writes Baltimore would become a “city in a park,” note that the City of Chicago’s motto is “Urbs en Horto” or City in a Garden. In a play on this, the Chicago Park District’s motto is “Horto en Urbs,” or garden in a city.
If you haven’t been to Chicago lately, or haven’t gotten farther then O’hare or the loop, take the chance to tour their spectacular network of parks. We were shocked upon arriving in Baltimore at the state of neglect of many things, not the least of which, our parks.
There is a wonderful presentation, available online, called “Revitalizing Chicago Through Parks and Public Spaces,” delivered by Mayor Daley in 2001, which outlines an comprehensive plan for great parks and a great city. http://www.pps.org/topics/whats_new/daley_speech
Kudos to all working on this type of vision for Baltimore.
Friday, December 14, 2007 at 6:49 pm
In response to Concerned Abolitionist’s comments, I don’t see how increasing the greenery in a city precludes housing for the homeless. Both are valuable in a livable city; both deserve funding. Lack of affordable housing is a bureacratic problem as well as a financial one. A more livable city would attract more residents and thus increase the tax base; perhaps improved quality of life would, in fact, help ameliorate other ills by increasing the City’s funds.
Saturday, December 15, 2007 at 11:24 am
What a beautiful idea! You define a very well articulated vision for Baltimore. I am already imagining myself engaging the One Park system during my daily routine of living in Baltimore. Commuting. Socializing. Exercising. Relaxing.
I grew up in a very pastoral setting in South Louisiana and can attest to the fact that parks do not solve issues related to wealth inequality, crime, and education. These problems exist in the greenest of communities all over the world and their cause is not the presence or lack of open space.
To me the issue is “quality of life.” In a “flat” globalized world, cities and regions must compete openly for all available resources, tangible and intangible. “Quality of life” attracts a human capital, a creative class, which directly feeds a vibrant local economy.
People do and will have the freedom to relocate to areas they feel are more habitable. Older east coast cities already have dense fabrics, history, and culture which make them attractive places. However, they also have harsh urban landscapes that are hard to escape and detract from their livability.
The One Park vision should be developed and funded because it will make Baltimore a wonderful city in which to live. People will visit and want to return. Residents will decide to stay and invest more of their energy into their community. Businesses will follow. Everyone will benefit.
Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 10:09 am
Here in leafy Roland Park we are engaged in a mortal battle to save what’s left of our green space. I refer to the 33a remaining of the Baltimore Country Club grounds along Falls Road. The Keswick Long-Term Care Corporation wants to build a sprawling facility on 17a of that land. To do it they will require a re-zoning which, we Roland Parkers believe, will be the death knell of our historic community. We are laboring to develop an alternative use plan for that land, a plan we hope the City leaders will take to heart as the right way for all of us. In order to save our little patch of green space we need to join with other Baltimore neighborhood groups facing the same kind of threat. The One Park plan seems the perfect blueprint. On the full map I can see how we could be plugged into an arc of green that would span the northern limits of Baltimore City, from Druid Hill Park through the Cylburn Arboretum, across I-83 and east to Stony Run, Herring Run and beyond. So what’s holding it up? What must we do to make One Park a reality?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 9:42 am
Why the long pause in this effort’s progression and comments?
What is happening of late?