On Friday morning I returned from a breakfast meeting to find "She Who Must Not Be Named" in the living room, peering intently through a telescope at something going on just across the street."What's up?"
"Mayor O'Malley is going to dedicate a new park and some of our friends are over there listening to him talk. You should go over and take some pictures for your blog."
Sounded reasonable to me, so I hied myself across the street to check out O'Malley's latest enterprise.
At this point I should reveal to you that back in the 1970's I worked for an urban planning research center so this crap was familiar to me -- hell, for a while back then I even believed it, but then I'm a slow learner.
One after another city officials and project directors took their turns extolling the greatness of their vision for Baltimore of which this park was a small part. It would introduce to the center city a "green space" where people could loiter and enjoy themselves, a well-lit zone of safety where people could gather for communal celebration, a haven where workers in downtown offices could find relief from the urban milieu, a design that would unify the new visitor's center and the space around it and draw visitors naturally toward the science center, the ticket agency, etc.
A constant theme running through the planners' remarks was the ignorance and incompetence of everyone else involved. City officials and citizen advisory committees, they said time and again, just didn't understand the function of urban parks in the twenty-first century. They were mired in old twentieth or even nineteenth century concepts. They should think of what their children and grandchildren would want in a park. In other words, the opinions and preferences of the people who would have to live with the park, neighbors who would see it and walk by it every day, the businessmen and employees who worked in offices just north of Pratt Street, were completely discounted while the planners' vision prevailed.
Crap!
At last it was over. They cut the ribbon. Then Mayor O'Malley found a high place to stand for photographs showing him staring proudly out over his park. I wandered around, talking with friends and members of various advisory groups. Then I went home to consider what I had seen.
*****
The park, which reportedly cost more than five million dollars to construct, is hardly an improvement over the field it replaced and in many ways is worse.
First of all the "green space" concept is valid, but this park hardly serves it. It was constructed on an open grassy area and in the process about half the grass was paved over. The green space at the Harbor was thus dramatically reduced. I pointed this out to one of the board members and she responded "but this is usable space."
Oh really? For years the grassy field on which it was built was used by the city and citizens for a number of purposes. Along Light Street were dozens of metered parking spaces that provided easy access to the harbor and a small, but constant stream of revenue for the city. Most of those are now gone, diminishing both access and revenues.
People used to picnic on the grass there, or they would just spread out a blanket and sit or sunbathe. This was particularly true when there were organized celebrations taking place at the harbor. On nights when there were fireworks displays the field was filled with families. At other times a stage would be set up and people would sprawl across the grass watching whatever presentation was current.
At other times display booths and tents would line the field and people would wander through them. You could see kids playing with frisbees, couples cuddling, people sitting in a circle having earnest discussions..., you name it. The point is, before the construction of the park the field was already a large green space that was used by people and the city for a lot of different activities. It was, in other words, eminently usable space. It can still be used that way, but on a smaller scale.
Recently the Jamestown foundation held a series of presentations at the Harbor celebrating, somewhat early, America's 400th birthday. Booths and tents were erected on what remained of the grassy area, but there wasn't enough room for them all and some had to be moved down to Rash field on the south of the Harbor. "She" and I went to the celebration and the inconvenience of having to move back and forth between the two locations was noticable. It can be argued that the space is still usable, even if paved, but it lacks the flexibility of the open field. The scope for utilizing the space has thus been diminished rather than enhanced.
One of the things the planners included was a series of low walls where people can sit, presumably to rest and interact. One of the walls, the one that runs along the edge of the pedestrian walkway from the Science Center to the Shopping Pavilions, is useful in that regard. You can always use more places to sit. But these walls all face outward, forcing people to sit side by side, looking away from one another, toward the passing pedestrians, and inhibiting social interaction.
Way back in the Sixties when I was studying this stuff we already knew that was bad design. You want people to be able to face each other comfortably. To be sure there are a spaces with tables and chairs set aside for such interaction, but there are too few of these, and the chairs and tables are made of metal and exposed to direct sunlight, and on a hot day nobody is going to use them. (And, if the Jamestown celebration sets the precedent, they will be blocked off from public access and reserved for the exhibitors.) And, be it noted, the walls also restrict access to what remains of the green spaces by forcing people to either crawl over barriers or to walk the length of the field to find an access point. [Sorry for all the "ands" but I am upset by this boondoggle.]
The area will still draw people if you put attractions on it. During the recent Volvo race festivities people flocked to sit on foldable chairs in front of the stage set up at the south end of the field, or to lounge on the grass, but nobody used the sitting walls. Why? Because the wall seats face away from the field and whatever attraction it holds. The walls are great for sitting quietly in the hot sunlight and watching pedestrians stroll by, but that's not what draws people to the Harbor.
And then there's the safety issue. The new space is certainly well lit. There are light poles all around the periphery, and that is an improvement. There used to be a police station at the south end of the field -- a reassuring sight for visitors after dark, and an effective deterrent to unsafe practices -- but that has now been converted into a glorified ticket booth and the police have been moved down to the other end of the Harbor. Hardly an improvement, I would say. Nobody in their right mind is going to loiter in that part after dark.
And what about the "unifying effect" the park will supposedly have with the new Visitor's Center?" Well, on a diagram it probably looks nice, and for those of us who have aerial views that's a plus. But for the groundlings who are supposed to actually use the park, the paved area between it and the Visitor's Center discourages use. Today I walked past the Visitor's Center in the middle of the afternoon. There were lots of people sitting in the shady grass around the Visitor's Center. Not one crossed the paved area to sit in the park.
I have also noted that few people from the business district north of Pratt Street ever use the park. Once they cross Pratt Street and enter the Harbor area they head straight for the air conditioned shops and restaurants in the pavilions. They certainly aren't interested in spending their lunch hours sitting on concrete walls looking at pedestrians. In that sense the park has had negligable influence on weekday usage patterns.
A couple of pictures will illustrate the problems with O'Malley's new park.
Here is an older grassy area along Pratt Street on the north side of the Harbor as it looked yesterday afternoon. There are no restraining walls, no lines of seating, no attempts to control people. This is the old, late Twentieth Century idea of allowing people to make of open spaces what they want, not what planners want. It is a conveniently located open space [halfway between the Power Plant shops and the Pratt Street shopping pavilion, and adjoining the National Aquarium], with some nice flowers and sculptures [including a huge ship's propeller that kids love to climb on and use as a slide] and it is shaded by the World Trade Center. People congregate there on a hot afternoon and sit in interactive clusters. Nice, isn't it. This is a useful, safe, green space. One that people actually and naturally use.Now look at this.
This is a picture of Mayor O'Malley's new park taken just five minutes after the previous one. There are the sitting walls, the ticket agency, the paved pedestrian walkways. What's missing? Other than those standing in line for tickets, the missing element is people dammit!
The whole enterprise is a testament to the determination of planners and city officials to attempt to control people and to force them into unnatural patterns of behavior. It would have been far better, and much cheaper, to simply keep the open space that was already there, provide police protection, and allow people to make of it what they wanted. That had been the successful pattern for decades. But now Mayor O'Malley has put his stamp on the west side of the Harbor, and I am afraid that the city is worse off for that fact.
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