Posts about Parks

Danielle Pierce of Downtown DC Kids said that 6 months after NPS officials promised to help give the District jurisdiction over a small parcel so it could build a playground, and after Tommy Wells put money into the budget for such a playground, nothing has happened on the Park Service side.

The organizer of a youth sports league said that playing fields in Anacostia Park are in terrible shape. They'd be happy to fix the field themselves if they can become a partner for that park. Joe Sternlieb, the new head of the Georgetown BID, said they'd be happy to do more to remove graffiti at the C&O Canal but need NPS permission.

Rick Reinhard, Deputy Executive Director of the Downtown Business Improvement District, had a very cogent statement about the need for funding, its progress and challenges on partnerships, and its frustrations with rules that make it very difficult to program downtown parks.

He said,

In 1997, our buildings, our streets and sidewalks and our parks all were unexceptional-- a 3 to 4 on a scale of 1 to 10. Today, our buildings are an 8 or 9, our streets and sidewalks are a 6 or 7. Our parks are still a 3. Why? Mainly lack of investment. The NPS budget does not allow the [34 National Park Service parks and reservations in the one-square-mile Downtown BID] to be designed, built, maintained or programmed any of us would choose.

NPS is handcuffed to run its urban parks using the same rules they use to run Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Everglades. The same regulations that work so well to protect moose, redwoods and crocodiles work much less effectively to promote playgrounds, concerts and family picnics.

Permits are required for small, what should be spontaneous events. Sponsorship banners are so limited as to be practically prohibited. Food service is limited to the National Mall concessionaire, who finds it not profitable enough to operate a small food cart in, say, McPherson Square, when it is selling thousands of hot dogs on the Mall.

When the Downtown BID worked with the Willard Intercontinental Hotel to promote a simple art fair in Pershing Park, NPS red tape strangled it. One example: artists could sell only art that was materially connected to the theme of the park, like portraits of General Pershing.

Sidewalk cafes are next to impossible to site legally on NPS-controlled Pennsylvania Avenue. So while the number of sidewalk cafes within the BID area has grown over the past 15 years from zero to 147—with 4,400 seats—the number of sidewalk cafes on Pennsylvania Avenue—which should be one of America's greatest, liveliest streets—is only four.

Local NPS officials understand these problems and do not want to manage this way, but rules are rules.

If NPS is not appropriated enough money, and if NPS has inflexible rules, then the only way our parks ever will be what we deserve is through forging serious, meaningful partnerships.

We offer sincere compliments to Regional Director Steve Whitesell, Mall Superintendent Bob Vogel, Deputy Superintendents Steve Lorenzetti and Karen Cucurullo and their staffs. We have moved ahead on these important issues more in the past couple of years than we have in the decade before, because these men and women understand that these parks not only must respect history and serve our nation but also must be enjoyed day-to-day and serve our residents, workers and visitors.

The Downtown BID wholeheartedly endorses Secretary Salazar's call for a new way of managing NPS' urban space inventory, which includes all of Downtown DC's green spaces. Our hope is that our most recent experiences constitute a new way for DC to work with NPS going forward, and are not exceptions to the rule.

You can read the complete statement.

At the meeting, NPS regional head Steve Whitesell announced that the agency was planning its own town hall as well to hear from even more residents. That event will be Tuesday, November 13, 6:30-8:30 pm at the African-American Civil War Museum, 1925 Vermont Avenue NW, right by the east entrance to the U Street Metro.

5 area park superintendents will be there to talk with residents: Bob Vogel of National Mall and Memorial Parks (the Mall plus most nearby small parks), Alex Romero of National Capital Parks-East (generally everything east of the Capitol and also east of the Anacostia), Tara Morrison from Rock Creek (which includes small parks outside the L'Enfant city in Northwest), the C&O Canal's Kevin Brandt, and Ann Bowman Smith who works with the White House to manage "President's Park," the White House itself and surrounding grounds.

This is an important opportunity to bring important issues directly to the people in charge. NPS isn't going to make parks safer to walk and bike, or enjoyable for sitting and eating, or more active for daytime and evening activities, unless people personally ask them to. The more residents ask for these things, the more we will get them. Mark your calendars!

Completing this trail network is exciting for a lot of different reasons.

It connects DC and Maryland, uniting our communities. Once complete, the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail will connect 16 different waterfront communities in DC and Maryland.

Not only will the continuous trail create recreation opportunities, but it creates a potential bike commuter route. For example, if a cyclist wants to bike from the Sousa Bridge (at Pennsylvania Ave SE) to the Bladensburg Waterfront today it would require a daunting excursion through local roads, including biking on Bladensburg Road.

It advances local and regional transportation goals. In anticipation of the transportation challenges that come with the DC region's expected population and job growth, local and regional governments have developed aggressive goals to facilitate alternative modes of transportation. For example, the Region Forward Plan seeks to create a "transportation system that maximizes community connectivity and walkability, and minimizes ecological harm to the Region and world beyond." Completing the ART system creates a safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists, which moves the Region Forward Plan closer to fruition.

It gives some Ward 7 neighborhoods access to parkland. As exciting as it is to think that people from all over the metro area will rediscover the Anacostia River, one of the best outcomes of this new trail segment is the access it will provide for the Ward 7 communities east of the river, but west of DC-295, to park lands and the river. (Note: the Kingman Park neighborhood of Ward 7 is west of the river).

Ironically, the National Park Service ownership along the Anacostia effectively "walls off" the river for communities like Mayfair Mansions and Kenilworth-Parkside. The new trail will provide new access routes into the park lands from the communities that surround them. Residents who have suffered living along a polluted Anacostia should certainly be among the first to reap the rewards of a clean river.

One challenge that still remains is connecting the remaining local communities east of 295 to the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. Even once completed, 295 still cuts of access to the majority of residents living in Ward 7 and Ward 8.

It provides access to a beautiful section of the Anacostia River that is currently reachable only from the water. The biggest challenge facing the Anacostia River restoration is countering widely held beliefs that the river is a dirty place to avoid.

Make no mistake, there's a lot of work left to be done before we have an Anacostia River that is safe for swimming and fishing. But even now it is a place of surprising beauty where people can walk, see wildlife, and seek solace in the heart of the city. This final trail segment will make these recreational uses possible in the most natural and hardest to access portion of the river.

Right now, at most a few hundred people enjoy this section of the river in any given year—rowers, kayakers, and others who can access the river by water. The new trail segment will take the number of people exposed to the beauty of the Anacostia River to tens of thousands yearly. More people that see and know the river means more people who care about its restoration.

The last several years have been unprecedented in terms of restoration progress, and we can consolidate and build on that momentum. We'll need to if we are to reach DDOE's goal of a swimmable and fishable river by 2032.

David's GGW blog [http://www.greatergreaterwashington.com] is the main link to the Millennials, who the Pew Research Center brand as the "American teens and twenty-somethings currently making the passage into adulthood. Like other generations, they have begun to forge their personality: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat, and receptive to new ideas and ways of living."

The city's decision makers have turned to a blogger to help forge partnerships with this young group of followers, and to lead them in the direction of poor decision making. Gracious streets have become clogged with bike lanes, bus shelters are lit up with advertising, and national parkland is threatened with children's play equipment. David's followers, Oboe, Goldfish and Hogwash, to name a few, express themselves by routinely mocking anyone with differing opinions. And, even the City Paper's Housing Complex newbie, Aaron Wiener, has adopted his predecessor's disrespectful tone.

The city may awake one day and discover that the Millennials are no longer here. They've moved on to the sounds of a different piper, faraway places, and fun and games. They really didn't care about the future of Washington, they cared about good times and easy living for themselves.

Technically, I am probably not a Millennial, as the cutoff is usually set around 1980 to 1983 and I was born in 1978. But regardless of the definition, you can just substitute "kids these days" for "Millennials" in Karl Jeremy's letter. I am, regardless, a member of a younger generation of DC residents than the typical reader of themail.

Parks are for children, too

As a few people noted on Twitter, it's astounding to hear, among a list of complaints, that playground equipment "threatens" our national parkland. There are far too few playgrounds in our federally-controlled local parks, in fact. And if accommodating children is not one of the purposes of parkland, what is?

Yet an attitude has developed that sees our parks as all formal gardens, pieces of sculpture for people to look at (or drive past) but not really experience or enjoy. Perhaps that comes from the decades when many people saw the District as a place only to get away from, or from past National Park Service superintendents who found it easier and cheaper to maintain unused parks.

The historic visions for these parks don't support this view. The McMillan Commission, which largely defined today's National Mall, recommended playgrounds by the Washington Monument. Instead, the monument grounds ended up as a barren hilltop, and the area to the south is more a freeway interchange than any kind of common.

Karl Jeremy's statement suggests that Washington, DC should not be a place for children. For a long time, relatively few families with children stayed in the city. We heard the same sentiment from the man who claimed everyone moves to the suburbs as soon as they can, and stirred former Mayor Tony Williams to retort, "that's an old movie." (Perhaps that gentleman was Karl Jeremy, which might be a pseudonym, as Google searches for his name turn up nothing relevant besides themail).

Younger people are not leaving the city

Karl Jeremy writes, "The city may awake one day and discover that the Millennials are no longer here." This is the key sentence. Karl Jeremy thinks the young people who don't agree with him on planning and transportation will soon leave, as previous generations largely (but not entirely) did.

That's not happening. Greater Greater Wife and I plan to stay right here. So do many people we know. Sure, some have bought houses in Bethesda (which is itself urbanizing and changing), but many more have not even though they have a child or two. Many move in search of better schools, but in many of the wealthier neighborhoods and a growing number of other neighborhoods, the schools are good enough. Some more members of my generation will move out over time, but far fewer than in decades past.

Karl Jeremy talks about teens and twenty-somethings, but this might be where his slight misuse of the term "Millennials" is actually relevant, because a lot of the people he's complaining about are actually in their late 20s and 30s (I am 34). Once, young people right out of college might live in DC for their first jobs on Capitol Hill or in the federal government, but a second cohort, often with law or other graduate degrees, settled outside the District; now, the JDs are staying.

Neighborhood debates over change often do break down at least somewhat along age lines. "Disrespectful" Aaron Wiener wrote from the Babe's meeting about "a crowd, it must be said, consisting mostly of older white women; one woman—opposed to the project, naturally—was actually knitting throughout the meeting." (Knitting, by the way, has been picking up many younger adherents as well.)

I don't want to see a generation war, and lament every time the ridiculous term "war on cars" comes up. Karl Jeremy's words, though, are pushing a metaphorical war on young people. 1964's maxim "Don't trust anyone over 30" has turned into "Don't trust anyone under 50."

Baby boomers have contributed enormously to our society (and done some damage as well). Generation X and the Millennials will do the same. We don't need boomers to step aside and let young people run everything, but we are entitled to the same respect as other adults. Karl Jeremy can disagree about whether Smart Growth (a term and movement created by boomers) is good planning, but not about whether District officials ought to work with younger people.

That doesn't mean there isn't a lot more to do, and Norton is having another town hall hall on October 25. I'll be speaking on a panel, along with NPS Regional Director Steve Whitesell, Rich Bradley of the Downtown BID, Danielle Pierce of Downtown DC Kids (the group pushing for that playground), and Catherine Nagel of the City Parks Alliance, a national group that supports urban parks.

What should I talk about? Since there is no other person specifically devoted to pedestrian and bicycle issues, I'd like to raise the many ways that despite being parkland, rules make walkers and bikers feel less welcome than drivers.

On the Rock Creek and George Washington parkways, signs at off-ramps tell runners and bike riders they have to yield to cars. This is bizarre, since turning cars yield to pedestrians even on major city and suburban arterial roads; the only place with this kind of rule is a freeway, and that shouldn't be the standard for our roadways in parks, even ones that carry a lot of traffic.

The approaches to the 14th Street Bridge give bike riders really no safe or comfortable route to and from downtown, for instance. There is also no good way to cross the GW Parkway on foot or on a bike around the Memorial Bridge. (This area is actually inside the District's borders, even though it is across the Potomac.)

I hope Rich Bradley will talk about the ways public-private partnerships can better activate our downtown parks. Franklin Square should be a more inviting place to eat lunch, and Farragut host evening concerts. Strict concession contracts limit things like sponsorship of an event, and the food trucks can only operate next to the park because they are on the public street which NPS doesn't control. Yet these types of activities are good for urban parks, not bad.

How about retail on Pennsylvania Avenue? Vendors? Bike parking? Capital Bikeshare stations? The grand avenue of our capital city doesn't have to be barren and boring. Food options on the Mall don't need to be awful, either.

Then there are the memorials. DC's many small triangles and other shapes are reserved for future memorials, and it's appropriate to have sites of national or world importance in the American capital, but that doesn't mean the memorials can't also be successful public spaces, as the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue is.

I'm also concerned about a trend toward more fences in triangle parks, like at 21st and I, to "remedy social paths," or in other words, stop people from walking through the park the way they want to. Better to rearrange the walkways to be in the right places.

The Park Service is doing just that on Washington Circle, showing that they are now open to making parks work better for residents and visitors, people on foot and bicycles as well as in cars. We should hope that Steve Whitesell and his superintendents stick around for a while instead of moving to other parks elsewhere in the nation, so that we can all continue to make progress.

The town hall is Thursday, October 25, 6:30-8:30 pm at the Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Room 412.

What would you like me to talk about at the panel?

Arlington has all the trappings of a true urban area. There are high-rise office buildings, a walkable, mixed-use Metro corridor, tens of thousands of apartments, scores of exotic restaurants, active retail streets, even several live theaters and jazz bars. But it doesn't have a central park.

Arlington also has many green spaces, but they are essentially a collection of suburban fixtures. A mix of natural stream valley corridors, sports fields, school grounds, and Potomac River parkway frontage, Arlington's green spaces don't serve the same function as an urban city park.

A central park is the kind of community space that is nice to be in and share with others, regardless of use or purpose. It's a place with terrific curving paths, handsomely edged; pleasing benches and memorable light stanchions. A place with a mix of beautiful trees properly kept up; bushes, hedges and grassy areas, maybe even splashes of flowers; a pond and a bridge. And not a single chain-link fence. It's a place that's truly special to go for a picnic, to walk hand-in-hand, to show out-of-town visitors.

At a minimum, a central park for Arlington should look something like Lafayette Park, the ornamental square across from the White House. Arlington could do even better than that by evoking some of the great feeling of New York's Central Park on a smaller scale.

Fortunately, Arlington already has a great, central 12-acre location for this park, and it's already publicly owned: Quincy Park.

Bounded by N. Quincy Street, Washington Boulevard, N. Nelson Street, and 10th Street, and right between Ballston and Virginia Square, Quincy Park is home to the Central Library. The park is adjacent to dense residential neighborhoods with hundreds of yard-less residents, near thousands of daytime lunch-eating workers, flat without geological or hydrological constraints, close to Metro, and already has quite a few impressive trees.

What would it take to rebuild Quincy into a memorable, ornamental, walking city park?

A better boundary. The park needs a beautiful perimeter edge consisting of an appealing, wide sidewalk and an appropriate defining mixture of wall, fence, and hedge. As Frederick Law Olmsted pointed out 140 years ago when he designed New York's Central Park, a park's boundary and entrances set the tone for the visitor's entire experience.

Water. A central park should contain a generous water element. This could happen in a number of ways: a significant sized lake, or perhaps two ponds joined by a brook, or a non-flowing canalway traversed by a graceful bridge or two, or at the very least a fountain.

Fewer sports fields. The park could still contain a couple of tennis and basketball courts, a playground, and possibly even one ballfield, but only in a carefully designed, unobtrusive fashion. (And lets get rid of those junky storage buildings and utility boxes, too.) Elegant features for other users need to take precedence over sports facilities in a central park, while the county can satisfy the need for playing fields elsewhere.

Less parking. The entire gravel parking area in the northwest corner should go. And since the library has underground parking, perhaps half of its outdoor spaces could also be taken out to allow room for more natural features.

Could this vision become a reality? Yes, if enough people speak up for it.

Of course, it won't be easy. Crowded Arlington needs sports venues, and Quincy Park is well used for tennis, soccer, baseball, softball, volleyball, and more. But the school board just voted to construct a new softball field on the campus of nearby Washington-Lee High School, thus providing the opportunity to remove the existing softball field at Quincy. If Arlington pursues a central park, it can work to add other playing fields to replace any lost here.

Even redesigning the acre-sized southwest corner of the park into an appealing entrance way could revolutionize people's sense of the park and stimulate a conversation about what to do with the rest.

All kinds of parkland, from sports fields to wilderness corridors, deserve support. But an urban central park is something different, something unlike any of the 1300-plus acres of current open space in Arlington and it deserves support, too. Arlington won't be a true city until it happens.

Their plan includes a substantial park, a garage to replace an existing public parking lot, a new street, and an extension of Mayor's Promenade, a short walkway off of Georgia Avenue home to the bust of former "Mayor" Norman Lane.

They've offered to set aside 15% of all apartments as Moderately Priced Dwelling Units for low-income families, while half of the apartments would be set aside as Workforce Housing for middle-income families. The project will also seek LEED certification, a measure of efficient energy and material use.

Recently, Hillerson and Fairfield submitted more detailed plans to the Planning Board of the project's first phase, containing a 12-story building with 410 apartments and 10,000 square feet of retail, a parking garage, and the park. (They can be seen in this slideshow.) They've also swapped out their original architect, SK&I of Bethesda, for DC-based WDG Architects, who's designed other apartment buildings in downtown Silver Spring, like the Veridian and the Cameron. According to their website, the building was designed "with the animated and eclectic spirit of the Fenton Village area in mind."

Whether they've actually accomplished that is questionable. While the original design placed a building on either side of Mayor's Promenade, the current design has one big building with the promenade going through it. Instead of a pedestrian street celebrating the neighborhood's "quirky and unique character," there will be an underpass, part of which will be just one story high.

Complaints that new development in Silver Spring is "out of scale" are common, whether it's for townhouses or a much smaller apartment building. But a rendering of the building behind the two-story shopfronts on Georgia Avenue, shows that it really is oversized. Its height isn't the problem, as there are plenty of taller buildings nearby. It's that this building is 400 feet long.

Stretching the building out across the entire block defeats the purpose of breaking it up in the first place. The exterior is also very repetitive, with a few simple elements used over and over again. Good urban streets give pedestrians something new to look at every 5 seconds, or every 25 feet. That's why a block of identical 18-foot-wide rowhouses can still look and feel great, but on a building this size, excessive repetition just emphasizes how massive it is.

However, the public park, designed by Alexandria-based landscape architects ParkerRodriguez, is more promising. Approximately 16,000 square feet in size, it's bigger than most developer-provided public spaces in downtown Silver Spring. The same paving materials used in the park will be extended into the new street, making it feel even larger.

A raised terrace will run along the edges of the park, where several ground-floor apartments will have entrances and private patios, similar to those at the Silverton condominiums on East-West Highway. This will help make a very large building feel much more personal: instead of walking past anonymous windows, you'll pass front doors. That will make the park feel more like a neighborhood gathering place, as opposed to a space like Veterans Plaza, which is more of a regional destination.

That said, the bulbous shape and location of the green areas in the new site plan seem arbitrary, and it's unclear what they're meant to be used for.

How could Studio Plaza be better? For starters, the building could be broken up into two, which would bring it closer in scale with other high-rises in Silver Spring while providing more visual interest. Each half could use different materials or even have a different style, giving each its own distinct character. And while the building already steps down one story closer to low-rise Fenton Street, there may be more opportunities for other setbacks to make it look less bulky.

If a connection between the two buildings is necessary, it shouldn't be as deep as the rest of the building, and it should be higher off the ground, so Mayor's Promenade can still get light and air.

You can see a really good example of this in the Flats at Union Row, a condominium off of U Street in the District designed by SK&I. Like Studio Plaza, it bridges over a pedestrian street, but the opening is large enough that the building doesn't feel so massive and the street still feels like an outdoor space. (Not surprisingly, a bridge in the SK&I-designed 2009 proposal looks quite similar.)

Meanwhile, the park should have as big a lawn as possible. We've seen from the past success of "the Turf" and the current push for a park in South Silver Spring that downtown residents want green space, and this one is big enough to accommodate it. This is a great opportunity to provide a large grassy area, as proposed in the 2009 plan, that could be used for everything from picnics to recreation to even live performances.

Studio Plaza has the potential to make a big impact on downtown Silver Spring, but only if its designers and developers focus on the small stuff. By opening up Mayor's Promenade, making the park more usable, and putting more detail into the building's exterior, they can truly make this project a reflection of its neighborhood.

A lot of them mainly sit empty or accommodate homeless individuals, except maybe at lunch when office workers come out to patronize the food trucks and then sit on the sometimes awkwardly-placed benches. Lydia DePillis wrote last year:

Franklin Square and Mt. Vernon Square are unkempt and unwelcoming. Freedom Plaza is a desert, and Pershing Park a swampy thicket. Lafayette Park feels securitized and touristy, the National Mall more like an African savannah than your back yard. It's hard to even imagine a world where they could take on the character of London's Picadilly Circus or Rome's Piazza Navona, with their liveliness and 24-hour sensibility.

Not all parks are problematic. DePillis cites drum circles in McPherson Square, constant activity in Dupont Circle, and the great success of Columbia Heights' plaza.

The top, but not only, obstacle for these parks in the National Park Service. Most of the small circles, squares and triangles around DC, especially in the L'Enfant City, are federal parks. The Park Service's historic preservation rules prohibit changing the layout of parks, and burdensome concession rules restrict the potential to even have a little coffee kiosk.

Shouldn't Franklin Square be DC's equivalent of New York's Bryant Park or Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square? There have been many discussions between the Downtown Business Improvement District, DC's Office of Planning, and the Park Service over the course of years about renovating Franklin, Chinatown Park and others. The projects move forward very slowly, and make at most very modest changes. That's better than nothing, but it's not a lot.

The best urban parks have things like moveable furniture, so that groups of people can sit and talk together instead of having to all face the same direction on a bolted-down bench along a path. They have concerts and other events in the evenings, often funded with some commercial sponsorship.

Jacqueline Dupree pointed out on Twitter that the amazing Yards Park in Near Southeast came about only after the federal government transferred the land to the District and private entities entered a partnership with the city to get the park built.

DC is talking about an 11th Street Recreation Bridge when there is a huge amount of parkland right by the bridge, on the banks of the Anacostia. But DC probably couldn't put the mix of recreation, vending, and arts, including commercial ventures like the trapeze school and establishments serving food and drink, on any of that land.

Food trucks have brought a lot of life to DC parks. Ironically, NPS rules don't allow the food trucks, but since they are in District parking spaces, they can operate. They can't operate on streets like 7th and 4th through the Mall, though. Peter May from NPS said at a National Capital Planning Commission meeting that the agency believes it has complete jurisdiction over streets with NPS property on both sides.

NPS has actually been making great strides lately. They ended some particularly restrictive concession contracts, and new contracts won't be as exclusive. They're building a relationship with Dupont Festival, the organization that brings soccer watching, theater, and community events to Dupont Circle. They're open to a downtown playground and put Capital Bikeshare on the Mall.

Nor are DC-controlled parks a panacea. The Department of Parks and Recreation isn't any better funded than the Park Service, and often under-maintains its parks while giving more attention to rec centers. The September 11 memorial grove in Langdon Park got funding from a number of organizations but little follow-up attention from those groups, says @Sept1GroveW5DC on Twitter.

New York activated its parks with substantial private money and public-private partnerships. It's been willing to bring a little commerce into the parks in exchange for making them truly great places. Working with the BIDs is the best hope for DC public spaces.

None of this is to say Park(ing) Day isn't still quite valuable here. It's a great opportunity for councilmembers to try giving up their prime parking spaces for something better, and one very tiny reminder that this space they get for free isn't entirely free. It's also a great chance for organizations like Casey Trees and Washington Parks and People to show off what they do.

Ironically, Tommy Wells can do more in his park in the Pennsylvania Avenue roadway than the District could on the adjacent sidewalk. NPS controls those sidewalks, too, which is why there are very few cafes and no Capital Bikeshare stations along the avenue. Wells put bicycle parking in the street, but DDOT wouldn't be able to put it on the (very wide) sidewalk.

A lot of people don't know that Dupont, McPherson, Franklin, Stanton, and the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalks are federal, or the little triangle by Dupont Circle Metro, or the triangle that will now be the Ukranian Manmade Famine memorial. Many federal employees and hill staffers don't know (though many do).

Could we use some sort of guerrilla activity to call attention to these issues? Any ideas?