Decades of planning and restoration have come to fruition that herald a new golden age for parks in the United States. NEW YORK – The greening of Seattle’s commercial waterfront could not happen until a blighting highway was ripped down and a crumbling seawall replaced. Impatient ice skaters await the replacement for the Lasker Rink and Pool in New York City’s Central Park, and its restored setting.
It is the largest restoration by the Central Park Conservancy. The venerable Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley has “reimagined” itself with a playfully swaying greenhouse rising from a shallow pool. This is a golden age for parks, with cities sprucing up waterfronts, transforming abandoned industrial sites and bringing green space to neighbourhoods where treeless cracked-asphalt sports courts are the rule.
1. Seattle’s Waterfront Park, a ‘new front porch’ The new Overlook Park and Seattle Aquarium Ocean Pavilion on the waterfront promenade to Pike Place Market in Seattle. PHOTO: NYTIMES Visitors and locals already swarm a new promenade hugging Seattle’s downtown commercial shoreline, where wood-framed wharves alternate with vistas across Elliott Bay.
They dodge construction fences and heavy equipment, as a line of trees and dense plantings come together, interwoven with bike lanes, quiet shaded paths, stormwater-filtering bioswales and public artwork. There is even a recreated natural beach, restoring the kind of gravelly shoreline where Coas.
