The Livable City: Parks & Rec

My second book, a collection of essays intended to deliver the insights generated by the social sciences to students and practitioners of the design professions, had on its cover a photograph of a popular Manhattan minipark, part of a program originally proposed in the mid-60s by Thomas Hoving when he was briefly New York City's parks commissioner. In the years since, with no small effort by neighborhood residents and community activists from coast to coast, miniparks, pocket parks and public gardens have helped to ameliorate the urban landscape.

Pocket parks — also known as miniparks and vest-pocket parks — are small patches of landscaped nature generally built on vacant building lots or scraps of city land that fall between the cracks of real estate interests.

Jacob Riis, the urban reformer, is credited with inventing the pocket-park concept in 1897, when he served as the secretary of a city committee on small parks. The committee issued a statement declaring that “any unused corner, triangle or vacant lot kept off the market by litigation or otherwise may serve this purpose well.” Though turn-of-the-last-century New York was filled with spaces that fit the bill, Riis’s idea went largely unrealized until after World War II, when bombed-out building sites in European cities provided opportunities to create small parks at less cost than reconstruction would have entailed.

Hoving may have seen parallels between New York’s crumbling urban landscape and Europe’s war-ravaged capitals when he started his micro-park effort in 1966. That year, he identified 378 vacant lots and 346 abandoned buildings in Bedford-Stuyvesant alone.

“Utopia would mean a park — some large, some small — every four or five blocks,” he declared. These micro-oases could spring up in the middle of dense, socially fractious neighborhoods where, he believed, they had the potential to “create wider ripples of reform.” One thousand new pocket parks would mean adding only 140 acres to the city’s park acreage. Two hundred could be acquired and developed for less than 10 percent of his department’s annual budget.

The rest of the story: City of Earthy Delights by George Prochnik (New York Times 2009-12-12)

See, also: Turn Yards Into Parks by John Gabree (Impractical Proposals 2004-06)
Urban Oases: New York's Great Pocket Parks & Secret Gardens by Jacquelin Carnegie (Frommer's 2009-06-18)
Shocking Video Shows Los Angeles City Bulldozing Community Gardens Into the Dirt by Mike Adams (Natural News 2009-02-15)
Showdown at South Central Farm by Robert Gottlieb (Next American City)

Resources: Pocket Parks - StreetWiki (LivableStreets Initiative)
Pocket Parks gallery (Project for Public Spaces)
Los Angeles Community Garden Council
Los Angeles County Common Ground Garden Program

Dogs Gone

Most troubling about the campaign to unleash dogs upon the beach in Santa Monica is its disingenuousness. To bolster her case, for example, Santa Monica Daily press columnist Carole Orlin cites the safety record of pet visitations at nursing homes and hospitals, while failing to mention that these programs are motivated by hoped-for therapeutic benefits and are limited to a very small number of carefully monitored animals in highly controlled environments that are cleaned by professional staffs and protected by extensive liability insurance.

Do we really want to worry about the risk from additional semi-curbed canines on our crowded strand? Statistics show that nearly 2% of the population is bitten by a dog each year, the great majority of and most severe bites and attacks being suffered by children under 12 years old. If the mutt mavens are successful in their designs, some personal injury attorney can save everybody a lot of time by opening a kiosk right at the beach. Along those lines, I have a question: given the inevitability of dog bites if a large number of animals is introduced into a crowded venue, especially one heavily populated by casually supervised children (and with full appreciation that most severe dog attacks involve kids), won't the city and state governments be on the hook for potentially millions of dineros in damages if they knowingly create an inherently unsafe situation? Just asking.

Orlin also anecdotally points to her experience at the "completely open and dog friendly beach" in Carmel, from whence she returned "amazed at how beautiful and clean it was." Well, maybe. I remember the Carmel beach as sparsely attended, certainly when compared to ours, which is as heavily trafficked as Times Square. Closer to home, I myself am "amazed" at the amount of dogtritus already at the beach, especially on the sidewalks and bike path where dog owners can't fall back on the excuse that they lost it in the dunes.

Speaking of the sidewalks and bike path, isn't it also disingenuous to describe the off-leash proposal as being limited to "a 1/10-mile area of beach?" How are the pups going to get there? Dropped by helicopter? Catapulted from the palisades? No, they're going to walk there, depositing packages in the sand and on the byways as they go. And how are the animals going to be confined to the off-leash zone? Do the dogafiles propose barricading the beach at each end of the dog pound with fences? And, by the way, 1/10 of a mile doesn't sound like much, but if the fenced-in area extends from the street to the water line, what's being discussed is privatizing 50-60 acres of public beach.

The most disingenuous argument of the dog people Orlin puts this way: "Dog owners appear to want the same access to recreational opportunities as do tennis players, soccer players, volleyball players, surfers, sunbathers and others." As things stand now, though, everyone already has equal right to use to the beach. Including dog owners. It's the pooch park promoters who want to make some residents of Animal Farm more equal than others.

If dog owners are comparable to anyone, it is smokers, who are also welcome at the beach but have been asked to leave their filthy habit at home. Besides whatever messes are left by dogs that fail to reach the designated area before letting go, Orlin can't seriously think that dog owners, enough of whom already can't be bothered to pick up after their animals on sidewalks and streets and in neighbors' yards, will be able locate their pets' droppings in acres of sand, even if they want to.

Make no mistake: if the fidolators get their way, the beach will be dirtier. Parents of small children, to take one interested group, should ask themselves if they truly want to have more dogs at the beach (you haven't enjoyed the full, rich experience of parenthood until you've watched your little one pop a sand-encrusted "tootsie roll" he's found into his mouth). Turds aside, don't forget that many canines urinate copiously, and there is nothing much even the most conscientious dog owner can do about that. If you're already afraid to let your children play freely on your urine-soaked front lawn, do you really want the same concern on your treks to the beach? For that matter, does any of us look forward to spreading our blanket in a giant box of doggie litter that isn't even odor-absorbing and pine-scented?

Cleaning our beach is already a formidable job. We shouldn't be entertaining proposals that will make it harder. Some boosters of the canine corral seemed determined to press the issue, though, and they are organizing others to hound public officials about it. The rest of us may want to let the city council and the coastal commission know we think about it, too.