Role of Parks: Cedar Rapids

Riverside Park (Google screen capture)

(A faithful reader recently found himself, lunch in hand, in a local park with no place to sit, and practically demanded I channel Jane Jacobs and condemn this omission.)

The success or failure of a city park success has mostly to do with its surroundings, somewhat to do with its features, and nothing to do with someone deciding a park needed to go there. That's the detailed argument of Jane Jacobs, who surveys urban parks in a long chapter--chapter 5, to be precise--of her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961).

Jacobs essays a few generalizations about successful vs. failed parks, though she cautions that "In certain specifics of its behavior, every city park is a case unto itself and defies generalizations" (p. 117), and even individual large parks may be too complex for a single characterization. The most successful parks are those surrounded by a diverse, mixed-use neighborhood that "directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times" (p. 125). A park in Philadelphia, drawing on its diverse rim, sees during the course of an average day a sequence of walkers-for-exercise, commuters out, commuters in, errand-runners, mothers with small children, shoppers, office workers eating lunch, and so on, concluding with people stopping before or after dining out, and couples on dates. Another park, not too far away, is surrounded by office towers; on nice days there will be workers eating lunch, but most of the day its clientele consists of a few ne'er-do-wells.

Redmond Park

Redmond Park in Cedar Rapids draws children from the surrounding neighborhood to its splash pad and playground, and adults from nearby businesses to lunch at its picnic tables. It is also a prime route for foot traffic to the nearby HyVee Food and Drug Store.

Large parks can contribute to their own problems when they feature problematic "border vacuums" between activities and the surrounding street. (See Jacobs, ch. 14.) These can be dangerous or at least uninviting, as opposed to connections between the park and the city, potentially as explicit as "a park skating rink brought immediately up to a park border, and across the street, on the city side, a cafe where the skaters could get refreshments and where watchers could observe the skating across the way from enclosed or open raised terraces (p. 348).

 Tomahawk Park

Most park facilities in Cedar Rapids are readily accessible from the street, though in the more suburban areas Cherry Hill and Noelridge Parks arguably have some border vacuums. The playground at Monroe Park, on the southeast side next to the former Monroe School, is accessible from that building but far from 28th Street.

Secondly, successful parks draw people because they don't "have much competition from other spaces... Greatly loved neighborhood parks benefit from a certain rarity value" (p. 133). The only park in an area is likely to be a neighborhood center, and to draw a variety of users if there's a variety of people around. The Garden City-type plans, which Jacobs regularly beat up on, provided so much green space that none attracted attachment, and moreover served to crowd out people from the district.

Site of the Percy and Lileah Harris Public Health Building, 2016 (Google screen capture)

This block, left vacant after the 2008 flood, proved attractive to residents of the Oakhill Jackson neighborhood even without amenities, because of "rarity value;" that is, there is not much nearby in the way of alternative play areas. Now, it is the construction site of the Linn County Health Building, scheduled to open in fall 2019. The county has promised the neighborhood access to some part of the property for recreational purposes, though how good it will be, and thus how well-used, remains to be seen.

Design elements help to attract the desirable variety of users (pp. 134ff.). Intricacy means there is a variety of places in the park facilitating a variety of uses. Centering means there is one identifiable place in the park that serves as "climax" to which the other parts of the park relate. There should be the right amount of sun, enough to be bright but also shade in summer. Surrounding buildings should provide a sense of enclosure, much as they do on a successful street.

Bever Park

Bever Park (1904), my favorite park in Cedar Rapids, certainly has intricacy, with several through routes, ridiculous topography, and a variety of facilities and settings, ranging from the main playground (pictured above) to woody trails at the north end. It's surrounded by single-family homes, but gets its enclosure from plenteous old trees in and around the park, which also help provide the right balance of sun and shade. But does it have a center? The open space in the picture above was once a wading pool that attracted young children and was ringed by the playground, the swimming pool, and the biggest picnic shelter. Decades ago, there was a concession stand on the spot where I took the picture, which might have been the park's center back then.

Parks that provide "demand goods" (p. 140) are something of an exception to the above rules: a popular swimming pool, ice rink, concert series or outdoor theater can draw people to a park even if it might be abandoned or derelict most of the time. Most of Noelridge Park is rather featureless, but the swimming pool might be the most popular in town, and August jazz concerts are huge draws.

Demand good: Skating area at Riverside Park

Incidentally, Jacobs excoriates two common rationales for parks. The environmental benefits of green space are marginal, and probably counterbalanced by spacing out housing and thus causing people to drive greater distances. Parks do not stabilize communities or enhance property values, unless they're good parks: Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood and though it be almost scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space. More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings? Or for ordinary people to use and enjoy? But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would (p. 117).

Which brings us to Riverside Park, which started this line of questioning (along with Bottleworks Park, which is on private land though the public is not prevented from entering). It's bounded by a factory on the north, the river on the east, and the 16th Avenue bridge to the south, so it's not getting much help from its surroundings. Its only real feature is the skate area, which is a big draw among teenagers; beyond that there's a small playground in a rather remote area, and as my friend noted, no place to sit and/or eat. It definitely needs some working on, which it will doubtless get as the riverside greenway is developed over the next several years. Will the lengthy greenway attract enough visitors from near and far to make it successful? They could start with some picnic benches!