Posts about Parks

Here is the full spreadsheet of data (XLS). We mainly lose points on average park size, where our median of 0.7 acres is the smallest among the cities due to the many small federal circles, squares and triangles. 96% of residents live within ½ mile of at least one park, putting DC near the top on that metric, but for many that park is just a small federal square or triangle without many amenities.

DC also ranks low in playgrounds, with only 1.68 per 10,000 residents, which comes out to about 100 playgrounds. Downtown residents have been asking for a playground, and other neighborhoods could benefit from them as well.

Meanwhile, we score near the top on the other metrics. 19.1% of DC's land area is parkland, second only to San Diego and New York. This ranking unfortunately includes things like parkways and, in DC, the parking lots around RFK stadium. But that still doesn't diminish our robust amount of actual parkland, most in the large federal spaces like the Mall, Rock Creek, the Arboretum, the Anacostia and Potomac waterfronts, the Fort Circle, and more.

DC spends and the federal government spend $303.45 per capita on parks, the most of any city thanks to the Mall's role as a major national tourist destination.

In the press release, Peter Harnik, director of The Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence, notes that residents in Wards 1 and 5 especially need better park access, and there are not enough sports playing fields.

Global Solutions President and CEO Dr. Maya Rockeymore, speaking at a panel after the screening, responded to the stark numbers presented in the film. In Baltimore, residents of the Inner Harbor have a life expectancy of 62 years while residents of North Baltimore have a life expectancy of 82 years. "Context controls choice," she said. People need access to parks, transit, safe walking and bicycle routes, and full-service grocery stores to even have the choice to be healthy.

Low-income communities and communities of color have higher rates of obesity and chronic disease. The physical neighborhood of the Inner Harbor contributes to the health disparity in life expectancy. While designed as a walkable community, the neighborhood suffers from vacant houses, streets in need of maintenance and lack of destinations to meet basic needs such as a grocery store. When the physical environment deteriorates, safety becomes an additional issue in neighborhoods.

In the United States, 66% of adults are overweight or obese and nearly 20% of children are obese. Being overweight or obese increases the risk of chronic diseases such as hypertension, high cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, and asthma in both adults and children.

Pamela Creekmur, the Acting Health Officer and Director of the Prince George's County Health Department, explained that Prince George's obesity and physical inactivity rates are higher than other jurisdictions in the greater Washington region. Though Prince George's faces a bigger challenge, all the region's communities have seen a rise in obesity rates, which range between 18 to 34 percent for adults throughout the region.

Part of the cause of this obesity epidemic is physical inactivity. There has been a 300 percent increase in driving to work since 1960. As the documentary explains, in 1969 almost 50 percent of kids walked or biked to school while today only 13 percent of kids do the same.

The lack of exercise by children extends beyond just commuting to and from school. The documentary shows a mom who takes her children to a parking lot because it is the only open space they have to play. This environment isn't hospitable to the kind of physical activity a good park encourages.

Whether it's questions of commuting or questions of parks, transportation and planning professionals make decisions that affect travel and open spaces every day. These decisions need to be viewed as public health decisions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the federal agency charged with health promotion and disease prevention, agrees. It has recognized that transportation policy, street-scale improvements, and access to places suitable for physical activity matter to our health. Among the CDC's recommendations is to participate in Safe Routes to School initiatives and adopt Complete Streets policies.

The Guide to Community Prevention Services, written by an independent group of public health and prevention professionals appointed by the CDC director, outlines several more environmental and policy approaches to provide opportunities for people to be physically active. These include the connectivity of sidewalks and streets, providing places for physical activity such as trails, and street-scale improvement such as street lighting and traffic calming. Such urban design features have been shown to improve some aspect of physical activity by 35 percent, not to mention the accompanying benefits of reduced crime and stress.

Of course, these improvements do not come overnight. After the screening, an elected official and audience members noted that such changes are not easy. After all, parks do not generate tax dollars.

But that does not mean that our environments must stagnate while our health deteriorates. Local communities can bring about change even when the federal government or state government seems stuck. Port Towns Youth Council President Erick Vargas talked about how his group took matters into their own hands by doing an audit of the streets and reporting the problems.

Prince George's County is taking action through a partnership of towns within the county. The Port Towns Community Health Partnership has a policy development team focused specifically on the built environment and nutrition policy to improve options for active living and healthy eating.

The group, which includes the towns of Bladensburg, Colmar Manor, Cottage City, and Edmonston, included a community health and wellness section in the Port Towns sector plan with the goals of providing safe places to walk and exercise and access to nutritious foods. The group is following through on sector plan recommendations to formalize a wellness opportunity zone as part of the zoning code. This would include changes in the built environment, access to healthier foods, and improved environmental stewardship.

Across the Potomac, the Fairfax County Health Department established the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax, a group of community members and organizations concerned with public health. The Partnership created an environment and infrastructure strategic issues team as one of five teams who will make recommendations for improving health in Fairfax County. The first focus is a on local policy. The team is doing a scan of policies, including transportation and land use, that could be modified to promote a healthier and safer physical environment.

In the Washington region, better transportation and planning decisions can improve our health by increasing our access to efficient transit and space to run, bike, and play. We also create a healthier context for our environment—and as Dr. Rockeymore said, context controls choice. Throughout the region, local groups are working to give more of their neighbors the choice to live healthier lives.

In addition, parents pushing for a children's playground downtown are a lot closer to getting their wish. The new budget allocates $500,000 to plan and build a playground, which should be enough to get it built. The National Park Service still has to select a site and give DC jurisdiction to build the playground.

For many years, few to no people lived downtown, so DC's many downtown parks only served office workers eating lunch, the homeless, and otherwise little more than decorative backgrounds to drivers on major thoroughfares. Now, more people want to use the parks at all times of the day.

NCPC just released a a video about an effort by federal and DC agencies to renovate Edmund Burke Park, where 10th and L Streets NW meet Massachusetts Avenue.

Franklin Square represents the largest opportunity for downtown parks. It covers an entire city block, yet doesn't see the kind of use and programming as similar spaces in other cities, like New York's Bryant Park. DPR will get $300,000 to work with the Office of Planning to plan a renovation for Frankline. Since NPS controls this park as well, they will need to give DC jurisdiction here as well before any actual changes can come.

Most of the money for these priorities comes out of a $16 million project ($8 million in the next fiscal year) to create a new DPR and DYRS headquarters at Gibbs School. The committee doesn't think that's such an urgent need, as DPR just moved into offices on U Street. The budget retains $550,000 for them to continue planning for their office needs. The 4 staff working on parks will come out of 60 existing vacant positions at DPR.

The committee also assigned $500,000 out of $5 million which Mayor Gray had set aside to implement the sustainability plan. Parks and recreation are a key part of the sustainability plan, so this money will still contribute to fulfilling the plan, only in a specific way the Council chose.

Kenilworth-Parkside residents are hanging in limbo after DC tore down their old recreation center only to find out that contamination on the site prevents building a new one. It'll likely take 7-10 years, say committee staff, for NPS to finish its environmental study, for DC and NPS to negotiate over who has to pay for remediation, and then design and build a facility. The Council instructed DPR to use some of the money it already has budgeted for Kenilworth-Parkside to find a short-term option for residents.

It's an interesting idea, and definitely worth exploring, but it's also going to be difficult to pull off successfully. If the city simply plops a couple of rock climbing walls on the old asphalt, the new park will be a failure.

The problem is that there is no built-in user base. The bridge is difficult to access from nearby neighborhoods, so it won't likely get many casual walk-through users. Most of the nearby neighborhoods also aren't very dense.

Instead, the park would rely on people who specifically go there as a destination. That means it will have to offer specific reasons for people to visit. If there aren't enough reasons, the park will remain mostly empty. The bridge is also long, meaning there's a lot of space to fill.

So the park will need an anchor, or several anchors. And it will need transportation facilities to accommodate users, since there won't be enough walkers to populate it fully.

If the District wants to fill the long span of 11th Street Bridge with enough people to give it a lively and safe feeling, it will need to do more:

Program it heavily. The more stuff there is in the park, the more reason people will have to visit. So fill the thing up with activities. Attach a boat house, put in a mini golf course, whatever. Give people a reason to travel across the city and come to this place.

Make it mixed use. Putting large office or residential buildings on the bridge is probably not realistic, but there is no reason why it shouldn't include some small shops and food stands. And for goodness sake, keep them open. That perpetually closed pavilion at Pershing Park isn't doing anyone any favors.

Be inclusive. Provide space for food trucks, sidewalk vendors, street artists, performers, anybody. Let them in, and let them sell. This is actually one advantage this park has over nearby space in Anacostia Park: The National Park Service controls that, and prohibits any vending, but a city bridge-turned-park wouldn't suffer under the same restrictions.

Don't cheap out on landscaping. Nobody wants to visit a concrete expanse. Obviously the range of plantings available on a hard surface with no soil is somewhat limited, but go to the expense and trouble of doing as much as you can.

Provide transportation. People will need a means of getting to this park. There must be parking for cars and bikes (on-street is fine), bike sharing, and the streetcar should actually stop in the center of the bridge.

With enough planning and strong management, this idea could be a winner. Without, it will fail, and will ultimately be abandoned.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

After the meeting, Peter May, Associate Regional Director for Lands, Resources, and Planning with the National Capital Region of NPS, approached us with his business card offering to join us on a walking tour to look at the property. We had already been talking with Councilmember Tommy Wells, who chairs the DC Council's commitee overseeing parks, and organized a group tour to see how NPS and the District could work together to build the much-needed playground.

The early December walking tour was an amazing show of cooperation on all fronts. Besides downtown playground advocates, May, and Wells, we had Bob Vogel, Superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks; Steve Lorenzetti, Deputy Director of National Mall and Memorial Parks; Daniel Connor, Deputy Director, DC Council Committee on Libraries, Parks, Recreation and Planning; and, members of the Washington Interfaith Network.

As a group, we spent over two hours walking around the neighborhood identifying potential sites for playgrounds and figuring out how to work together to make them happen. Almost all of the sites visited will require participation by both DC and federal officials, and in this meeting, we saw that such cooperation is possible.

Our walking tour included the four small pocket parks surrounding Carnegie Library; Milian Park, on the northeast corner of Massachusetts Avenue and 5th Street; Franklin Square, between 13th, 14th, I and K; and Pershing Park, on Pennsylvania Avenue between 14th and 15th.

Mt. Vernon Square pocket parks are best immediate opportunity

NPS officials felt that the 4 pocket parks surrounding Carnegie Library ought to have already been transferred to the District along with Mt. Vernon Square. Peter May said that the NPS would be willing to turn the land over to the DC government to accommodate play areas in those currently-empty spaces.

The small parks have a lot of potential for varied use and would be a great way to enliven the overall space. They could become an attraction and leave the open lawn of Carnegie Library as a place to gather for picnics or other activities.

To make that happen, Mayor Gray needs to send NPS a letter requesting the land. Tommy Wells promised to ask the mayor for such a document. This will start the process of creating what will, with any luck, become a world-class play space near the Convention Center.

Why downtown needs a playground

Right now, there are absolutely no playgrounds in the downtown DC area. Since the area is only newly residential, there was little need for playgrounds years ago. As more and more children move in to the neighborhood, they need space to play where parents needn't fear they will run into the streets.

The problem affects more than just downtown DC residents. School children from the surrounding areas lack sufficient play space, too. It is ironic that the closest public elementary school to the White House, Thomson Elementary, has absolutely no outside space to play.

First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move Campaign has, as one of its primary goals, to get kids outside and active. Yet, these kids have absolutely no opportunity to do so. Moreover, the children in this school are at high risk of suffering from obesity, as over 75% of the students qualify for free and reduced price lunch. It is unacceptable that these children get absolutely no opportunity to play outside.

To appreciate the severity of this problem, all you have to do is walk around the downtown area in the mid-morning on any weekday. You are sure to see some of the hundreds of toddlers and preschoolers being walked around on ropes by daycare supervisors. Much of the time, those children are not headed for any particular location, because there is nowhere for them to go. Instead, the caregivers are simply walking them around the block, strung together for safety, day in and day out.

Regulations require that the children spend this time outside, but neither the District nor the federal government (which controls most of the open space in the area) is providing a place for them to go to play. Those kids who are lucky enough to be in government daycare do have access to playgrounds, but those are fenced in and closed to the public. As a result, many children spend much of their childhoods holding onto a rope instead of learning to run and jump.

Until our parks catch up with the rest of the world-class development taking place in our capital's downtown, we will never have a truly healthy neighborhood. It will benefit all of us to reprogram our park spaces to be useful and beneficial to all.

Although the need is clear, it has proved difficult to meet because many different entities control the park space in downtown DC. Much of the property is federal land. Some is District land, some is private land, some is federal land leased to the District, and some is federal land turned over to the District which in turn leases it to private entities.

As a result, Congressional oversight, historical considerations, and the need to reserve space for future memorials all complicate considering any change to downtown green space. In short, it will take a lot of cooperation among numerous entities in order to bring play space to the neighborhood.

We are very thankful to everyone for the time and effort that they have already put into this project and that which will be necessary to fully realize our goals. Every child needs access to a playground, and we are very happy that NPS and the District government are willing to work together to meet this need.

If you are interested in helping us move forward on any of these initiatives or have other ideas for play spaces in downtown, please join us for our meeting Wednesday, March 14th, 6 pm at Calvary Baptist Church.

For a neighborhood that has been the recipient of two of the Obama Administration's most celebrated community development efforts, there's been little fanfare in the city outside this small patch of Ward 7. Fortunately, that's not holding the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) back.

DCPNI is a new 501(c)3 organization led by Irasema Salcido, founder and CEO of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy, which has a Parkside campus. DCPNI organized a permanent Board of Directors in October 2011 and has been working since to pursue its goals for 2012. A January 2012 report by the Urban Institute outlines in great detail how DCPNI plans to transform the neighborhood.

Kenilworth-Parkside sits squeezed between the Anacostia River and DC-295 to the east and west, and a sprawling decommissioned Pepco plant and the District border to its north and south. The disadvantageous geography and years of disinvestment left Kenilworth-Parkside sinking further and further into disrepair.

Despite having Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens and its acres of green space in the neighborhood, Kenilworth-Parkside still shows all of the typical indicators of urban blight.

Statistics on the residents in the DCPNI footprint are dire. Median household incomes are barely half of the city's median. Rates of teenage births are some of the highest in the nation. Single females head 90% of families.

Yet, at least until now, it's lacked any kind of investment which many of DC's now "up-and-coming" neighborhoods have received.

Enter DCPNI. In 2008, Salcido launched the Initiative based on the principles of Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone. DCPNI launched their efforts after winning funding from the US Department of Education.

The 2012 plan is ambitious. DCPNI is proposing home visits to pregnant women and mothers of young children. They want to build a community library of children's books. For the neighborhood's school children, they will launching an experiential learning program to visits to local museums and monuments with directed classroom instruction.

DCPNI, which holds tours of the neighborhood on the fourth Thursday of every month, is perhaps the city's foremost example of a place-making initiative. They are taking all of the most current research on comprehensive, services-based community development and applying it to one unique geographic area.

DC should keep its eye on Kenilworth-Parkside. Stakeholders of the Choice planning grant will inevitably apply for implementation funding when it becomes available in an effort to revitalize more than 300 units of dilapidated public housing. In June, Educare, a brand-new early childhood education center serving 175 Headstart-eligible children, will open its doors.

Victory Square, a new senior affordable apartment building built by Victory Housing, began accepting applications this week and will open in the spring. And all the while, DCPNI continues to establish partnerships with local businesses and organizations and organize programs that aim to strike at the core of Kenilworth-Parkside's ills in just the way that Canada tackled a swath of Harlem.

Over the next few years, as the 21 Promise Neighborhoods get to work across the country, community development advocates will learn whether or not federal money can be applied to local community development initiatives successfully and efficiently to improve public health, housing and education outcomes.

Lucky for the DC region, there's a site right in our backyard to follow, support, and learn more about. You just have to know where to look.

Each design team is charged with coming up with innovative ways to revitalize 3 zones: Constitution Gardens (the area containing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), the area encompassing the base of the Washington Monument and Sylvan Theater, and Union Square (the Mall's eastern third). The winners of the 8-month competition, now in its final stage, will be announced in a ceremony on May 3. A group of 12 finalists has been selected, 4 for each section.

Three individuals with extensive public space design experience, though not all planners or designers by profession, shared their insights as to what makes a great public space in a January 11 panel talk at the National Archives. They agreed that great spaces must be able to sustain a high level of use over time yet retain the surrounding community's sense of ownership and stewardship.

The challenge at the heart of the treatment of the Mall is that it must be a national symbol, a green space for area residents, and the locus of expressions of the national public mood (celebrations, remembrances, protests) all at the same time. Theaster Gates, a Chicago-based artist and cultural developer, spoke eloquently to this conflict: "America is a very complex place with lots of different people and lots of different interests that would like to see themselves present on the Mall."

An "evolving monument," Gates said, isn't a permanent manifestation of one historical person or event, but rather a constant symbol of the community's mood that is "a carrier of whatever the moment is" and "accumulate[s] multiple stories." Public art or architecture that changes with the times would carry more meaning for people than a statue of, for example, Civil War commander John Logan, whose significance is lost on most who pass through Logan Circle.

The idea of public parks as staging grounds for cultural movements has been tested by the presence of Occupy DC in the city's central public squares. Gates insisted that there is no way to plan a space to accommodate certain types of First Amendment expression, as the very act of planning for them takes away their spontaneity, and thus much of their power.

"No matter how much planning and designing we do, people have the ability to remake spaces," Gates said, as Occupy has done. "Public space has to be able to cradle movements," added Tupper Thomas. "Spaces are defined by how people choose to use them. I don't think you can design niches for resistance," said John Bela.

Three specific precedents for innovations in public parks were discussed: the restoration of Brooklyn's Prospect Park as a popular gathering place, the transformation of Manhattan's High Line from an elevated railroad to a mile-long green space, and the annual observance of Park[ing] Day when on-street parking spaces are turned into temporary parks.

30 years ago, Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (whose hand is also seen in parts of the Mall, Rock Creek Park, and on Gallaudet University's campus), had become "totally unused" because people were afraid to go on. Tupper Thomas's Prospect Park Alliance engaged in a grassroots dialogue, beginning with door-to-door canvassing, with the goal of getting Brooklynites, some of the country's most diverse citizenry, to love the park again. The park now has more visitors than it can handle, and the Alliance's new challenge is raising enough money to maintain it.

Park[ing] Day mastermind John Bela of San Francisco's Rebar Art and Design Studio spoke to the idea of planning for the sustainability of public spaces as a constantly evolving process. Park[ing] Day relies on a how-to manual with a few guidelines, but beyond that each group can make what they want of it. The most important aspect of the temporary parks, however, is that they have a truly public feel, and are not just extensions of the commercial spaces in front of which many of them are created.

Manhattan's High Line has accelerated the surrounding neighborhood's redevelopment and, because of this, has sparked the interest of other cities seeking to emulate it.

The fact that it took two entrepreneurs to take on the task of remaking the High Line, with initially no help from the city bureaucracy, shows that the traditional planning process is broken, said Bela. Consultants and activists with their own agendas, he noted, too often come to dominate "open" planning processes, essentially drowning out other community voices. To counter this tendency, planners should offer many affected people different levels of engagement in a process to give them more ownership.

It is good that cities are seeking to be noticed for good public spaces, added Gates, but each city should decide what kind of re-use of abandoned urban infrastructure is appropriate to its own context. Thomas cautioned those seeking to emulate the High Line to pay as much attention to community development as to economic development.

"Cities are being determined by what the public realm is," Trust for the National Mall President Caroline Cunningham summarized. In the Mall's case, local residents' desires for a certain type of public realm must be balanced with the nation's need for a place that is "both grand and personal" and evokes the country's history and future, while allowing the people to help shape that future through collective action.

Just go and strike up a conversation. Start with the staff. Most of them don't bite, and welcome having new residents show an interest. If you have kids, talk to the other parents; even if they don't look just the same as you, they have the same desire for a safe neighborhood with lots for kids to do.

If you see crime, like drugs or weapons or vandalism, make sure to call MPD. Rec center staff don't have badges or guns. They need community members to help them report problems so the city can keep these places clean and safe for families and residents. Well cared-for recreation facilities improve the neighborhood and encourage people to stay instead of moving out as their families grow.

Now, it's December. The weather is only getting worse and the days are getting shorter, but there are plenty of indoor options, like basketball and swimming. Some have workout equipment.

DC residents can find community parks and recreation facilities at DPR's interactive map.

Have you been to your local rec center? What was your experience?