January 6, 2025

Parks that deliver, parks that don't

Judging small parks by the stakes they set

Reading suggestions first! Links that get you out of this silly place!

I enjoyed the refreshingly honest look back on last year’s reading and writing from Jaime Green at TBD. I’m feeling similarly about my output this year, and Jaime has some great observations about unexpected gifts in a year with less publishing. And for the first of probably many times I’ll encourage you to subscribe to An Irritable Métis, the newsletter from Chris La Tray. He’s a member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians and the current poet laureate of Montana. His newsletters are full of wry humor and fiercely independent reflections that I find reliably worthwhile. He’s helping lead and organize many some wonderful projects that focus on Indigenous people, especially young writers and artists, and this recent post goes into more detail on those projects and what they mean.

Parks that deliver, parks that don’t

There’s a park near my in-laws’ house that, when I tell people its name, they’re usually surprised it has a name. It begins as a gap in the trees at the edge of the neighborhood. That gap continues downhill, bordered by forest on both sides. When it snows, this linear clearing becomes a narrow, curved sledding slope that can only be ridden with great courage and skill. The day after this past Christmas, it was fifty degrees and damp. I rode a borrowed bike down the edge of the clearing. By the time I got to the bottom, the wheels were caked in mud.

I don’t take as many solitary trips out for walking or biking compared to when I began this newsletter in 2020. At that time, as a remote worker during COVID, a daily mental health fast-walk and a weekend hike or two were routine, even obligatory. Those walks, and later bike rides, were the fuel that this kind of writing ran on. Now with a toddler and an in-person job, I don’t do that kind of thing as much. Not to say woe is me: short walks around the neighborhood with our kid are becoming more fun as he gains more awareness of the outside world and his legs get longer. (And it’s a good workout when he gives up by saying “big hill!” and puts his arms up to be carried.) But for a long time, I wrote mostly about little adventures I’d have by myself, trips that let me focus on my surroundings for 15-60 minutes and usually got me thinking about something or other. So that’s part of the formula that results in this newsletter not coming out very often. It’s okay, I’m doing other kinds of writing and other things I value. I do imagine I’ll eventually learn to metabolize other experiences into narrative nonfiction. Right now I’m mostly just doing the experiencing.

But on this Christmas visit, with family around to help keep an eye on the toddler, I got to take a quick bike ride around the neighborhood and down to this park, which shall remain functionally nameless. The unauthorized sledding/biking slope ends in a sizable grassy meadow full of blackbirds most of the year. At this time there were distant doves and a few sparrows in evidence. The trail continues straight across (even more mud now) down into riparian woods and terminates on a sandy stream bank. One year, during a heavy snowfall we didn’t bring proper clothes for, we found a way to cross the stream on a fallen log. I was wearing sneakers and two pairs of wool socks in lieu of boots, stepping carefully and vaguely recalling Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” But this year there was shallow green water under a classic Midwestern winter gloomy sky, which seems even gloomier on these wet, lukewarm days.

Walking the bike around the deepest mud back to the road, I tried to scrape the wheels with a stick as I went. (Don’t worry, the bike got a full bath at home before I returned it.) I dodged multiflora rose thorns and wondered how many coyotes might live around here.

I found myself thinking about this park again when I read (by way of Jim Santel’s newsletter Less Wrong) James Andrew Billingsley’s killer essay on Little Island, a newly-concocted offshore park for Manhattan costing $330 million. It’s a highly artificial place. Artificial meaning not just human-made, but high artifice. Willy Wonka, things of that nature. Per Jim, it makes a visitor feel a bit like a zoo animal in a manicured habitat. The essay posed this question to me: if we know what mades a designed park bad and disappointing, then what does make a small park worth it? Like Less Wrong, I will encourage you to just read the whole essay, which contains phrases such as “immersive Skyrizi commercial” and “passing under the park’s shadow, I always feel like a morsel from the perspective of a hungry lobster.” But for the purposes of this newsletter, I’ll say the crux of Billingsley’s argument is that Little Island and over-designed neo-urbanist parks like it are created from an ethos of control, while parks he enjoys, such as big and boisterous Rockaway Beach, give people a link to organic chaos, as there are no realistic ways the authorities can put a stop to the anarchic ways people interact with those places.

I’m not using anarchy as it’s sometimes used in popular media to mean “random violence,” but instead a lack of formal control where people informally organize a shared resource as they see fit. For an illustration of how this works: fragile sand dunes continue to exist next to busy beaches because of popular goodwill and recognition of their value, not because an armed guard stands by turning away would-be bushwhackers. Even the most convincing signage is undone by popular consensus that an area should be used for something else, something which to that specific populace is better and more valuable. For examples of people using a place for something other than its official role, see “desire path” trails across quads and lawns, bridges across reservoirs used as high-density fishing piers, or neighborhood parks that accumulate teenagers’ beer cans in out-of-the way spots. It doesn’t really matter if you’re for or against these anarchic uses of landscapes. They are and always will be. In the urban parks I’m thinking of just now, the beer can pickup brigades are spontaneous and informal, too.

As Billingsley observes, Manhattan’s current crop of landscape architects trend toward parks that are unavailable to anarchic uses. They are peninsulas or linear strips with strategic chokepoints. I’ve only had passing acquaintance and secondhand knowledge of NYC’s parks. The trends there are interesting to us folks in the provinces, though, because their designs are sure to be exported here. So, with Little Island on one side of the control-to-chaos continuum, what do we put on the other end? I could go through all the pocket-sized green spaces in Boston and Providence that I’ve enjoyed, but honestly that park at the edge of my in-laws’ neighborhood, functionally nameless, is what comes to mind first.

Of course space in central Illinois is less in demand than in Manhattan, and it’s different to protect a remnant forest rather than build a savannah from scratch on the Hudson. So I’m not saying these places are equivalent. But one way a park can succeed or fail is by its stakes. Little Island sets massive stakes: like nothing you’ve ever seen! A park on champagne flutes! The neatest selfie you’ll post this week! And then fails at being anything other than a bit of offshore green space (apparently doesn’t do too well at that.) The parks I return to have modest stakes: 3rd-rate pebble beach, former quarry, neighborhood green space/dog park/informal youth hangout zone. Then they overdeliver on those stakes. Surprising numbers of bird species use them, some of them badly in need of such habitats. A combination of just-okay maintenance and organic regrowth leads to meadows, birch groves, riparian vegetal-mania. Fog or snow transforms a familiar place into something strange.

Another point of departure: unlimited entry and exit points, no surveillance, just vibes. If you want, they offer a place you can feel hidden in for 15-60 minutes. Sometimes the vibes are off and you have to get two or three neighbors together to pick up the trash. But with seamless links to the adjacent ecosystem — be that a water body, forest or grassland — the park connects you to a larger reality that demands respect.

On the other hand, you have Little Island, which goes to the trouble of putting visitors on a literal pedestal above the river, like a factory loft apartment, to look down their noses at it, rather than just staying basically at water level. I’m sure there’s a nicer way you can read that symbology. It raises questions, that’s all I’m saying.

I guess this leads me to think about experiences that are designed for you vs. the sandbox model where you have the raw materials and figure out something interesting to do with them. And also the way that people sometimes complain there’s “nothing to do” in the Midwest. Surely that’s thinking only of designed experiences — Jim aptly groups Little Island along with “cocktail bars, rooftop decks, those ‘immersive’ plays where you choose your own plot—are ‘neat’ or ‘fun’: they don’t create any real, lasting feelings, just a series of mental clicks designed to reassure you that you are having a Real Experience.” I’m sure there are times when it’s nice to do a preordained activity. I just wonder if a public green space is ever quite going to work that way, or if it’s better to just let them be mostly raw material. And maybe it just boils down to a difference in what I think of as fun. I am, at this point, a 32 year old dad, after all. I don’t mean to condescend to the hard-working cocktail bars of the world or become a trope myself. Maybe this wouldn’t matter as much if we weren’t talking about how to spend $330 million, and if I didn’t think Midwestern city governments might be taking notes on spots like this. If not for that, I guess I’d just say “not for me” and move on.

To sum up: a place capable of surprise vs. a place wound up like a jack-in-the-box for a specified use case. And from what I understand, those places capable of surprise are not in short supply in NYC. Here are nice things people have told me about Central Park, Morningside Park, Washington Square Park and more. (It’s not mentioned specifically in this episode but Haley Scott mentions Pelham Bay Park as a good place to visit. Old-growth forest in the 5 Boroughs and 3 times the size of Central Park! See the Feminist Bird Club for more info and birding events in these places.)