New golden age for parks as US cities spruce up waterfronts and industrial sites

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’

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 re-created natural beach, restoring the kind of gravelly shoreline where Coast Salish tribes harvested shellfish and salmon.

Mr James Corner, founder of Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm that designed Waterfront Park, calls it a “new front porch” for the city.

In part, the crowds are celebrating the waterfront’s emergence from the shadow of the fume- and noise-spewing Alaskan Way Viaduct, which formed a highway barrier that Seattleites had reviled since its construction in the 1950s. Its 2019 demolition made room for the promenade.

Though the full 8ha will not open until early spring, an acrobatic section of the park welcomed the public on Oct 4.

The Overlook Walk rises in a pair of curved stairways where the promenade takes a sharp turn inland around a new Ocean Pavilion serving the Seattle Aquarium.

As visitors ascend a 33m bluff, culminating at the city’s famous Pike Place Market, vistas of downtown skyscrapers and the cranes of the container port open up, as does a moody expanse of Puget Sound that offers views of mist-wrapped islands and mountains below a pewter plane of clouds.

Lifts serve the mobility-challenged and those who think only fitness fanatics would climb so many stairs.

2. An oval pool restores a lake in New York’s Central Park

The Loula D. Lasker skating rink and swimming pool was Central Park’s most jarring addition – a concrete flying saucer that looked as if it crash-landed in a ravine at the edge of the Harlem Meer, the picturesque lake that meanders across much of the park’s northern edge.

At its 1966 opening, The New York Times’ architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it “an oppressively jazzed-up military installation of sawtooth-trimmed concrete”. It also leaked from the beginning.

Now, a US$160 million (S$210 million) replacement, named the Gottesman Pool and Rink, is coming to completion and will open in 2025.

Ms Susan Rodriguez, who heads her own architecture firm, stretched the round pool into an oval and tucked it into the eastern slope of the ravine.

The new pool, with a shallow slope at one end to invite children and people with disabilities, can be covered with an artificial turf lid, and the rink goes on top. The lid extends the usefulness of the facility. Lasker was used for swimming only two months out of the year and skating four months a year.

The contractor has been placing several centimetres of soil atop the roof of the 30,000 sq ft Davis Centre, a building containing concessions, changing rooms and equipment. The soil supports plantings that will make the building largely invisible to the hordes of cyclists that whizz around it on the East Park Drive.

The conservancy’s landscape architects, led by Mr Christopher Nolan, have shaped sloping planted areas around the edge of the new rink so that it nestles near to – rather than bulges into – the meer.

“The goal was to emphasise the landscape experience” for visitors, “rather than using landscape to soften the impact of the building as an object”, Mr Nolan said in an e-mail.

As a bonus, the trimmer new footprint makes room for the restoration of a lost mini-estuary.

A stream flows north from the pool in a series of ponds and waterfalls braided with paths through the North Woods Ravine, then spills through stacked boulders. The Lasker rink, by damming the ravine and confronting path users with a high wall and untidy service area, had forced the stream into a pipe.

Now, the stream is reopened to daylight, with its boulder-strewn course running along the rink-pool. The view from the arch will unfold as the original designers – Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux – intended, with the spreading of the stream into the calm surface of the meer framed by trees.

The conservancy has delayed the rink-pool opening until April, when the full scope of the project – which includes the Meer Center and other park projects that cost a total of US$310 million – will begin revealing itself, as water-loving plants edging the meer invite turtles and egrets.

Largely native trees and shrubs will complete the softly Romantic landscape silhouette the designers intended.

3. Longwood Gardens reimagined under rippling glass in Pennsylvania

Inspired by the glass houses of Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition, American entrepreneur Pierre S. du Pont, long-time chairman of the company then called E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co, spared no expense when he founded Longwood Gardens in the 1920s.

It is an 80ha display garden that includes a conservatory complex, thematic exhibits, topiaries, a 600-jet water-fountain garden and a meadow inspired by Andrew Wyeth paintings. It lies within larger holdings totalling more than 400ha in the Brandywine Valley at the south-eastern corner of Pennsylvania.

The palatial formality of Longwood’s famous conservatories, where visitors walk around large, densely planted set pieces pierced by flowing water, contrasts with the immersive new West Conservatory that subtly dips, kinking a bit to one side, seeming almost to shimmy. It floats atop a reflecting pool. That is quite an act for a 32,000 sq ft greenhouse.

There is a method to the apparent oddness of this centrepiece of “Longwood Reimagined”, a US$250 million project that adds several new attractions to the greenhouse core as well as a restaurant that opens towards the fountain garden and its choreographed water spectacles.

The saw-toothed profile of the new conservatory shapes subtly warping bays that vary in height from 4.5m to 14m. Supporting columns rise, then curl like unfurling fronds, to support the glass roof.

The intention of this manipulation of the conventionally symmetrical botanic greenhouse, said Ms Marion Weiss, co-founder of architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi, is to “taper some perspectives and open others up”.

In the West Conservatory, visitors find themselves immersed in permanent and changing plantings native to Mediterranean climates worldwide, orchestrated by landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand.

“Creating beauty and bringing joy to people through the gardens we share – that’s what we do,” said Mr Paul Redman, Longwood’s chief executive.

Its expansion opens on Nov 22, past the time when outdoor gardens die back.

“It’s our slowest season,” Mr Redman said, “but now we offer almost 5 acres of gardens under glass.” NYTIMES