Features

Photos and story by Tom Bamberger

Spend a few hours walking through Washington or Grant or Jackson parks and it may suddenly dawn on you: These parks are, well, boring.

That was not always true. They once embodied a radical concept conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted 150 years ago, when he mapped out New York’s Central Park, the first landscaped public park in America.

At the time, cities were cesspools of raw sewage and rotting carcasses, choked with every conceivable human pollutant and depravity. Olmsted maintained that the lack of nature in cities led to depression and mental illness. Urban parks were a moral force that would make us healthier citizens. We were very bad and nature was very good.

In Milwaukee, Olmsted provided the plan for Lake, Riverside and Washington parks and Newberry Boulevard. But his influence is much greater. Olmsted’s grammar of curvilinear paths and ponds and soothing swaths of lawns defined by walls of trees became the template for industrial and office parks, the suburbs, and just about every kind of green space in America that is not rural.

The Milwaukee County Parks system is still our sacred Olmsted text. On the first page of its Web site, a 1909 quote from the famous landscape architect John Nolen echoes Olmsted: “Who questions nowadays that simple recreation in the open air amid beautiful natural surroundings contributes to physical and moral health, to a saner and happier life?”

But in the decades since then, America changed in ways that make some of Olmsted’s ideas seem almost quaint. Cities cleaned up their act, with sanitation systems and measures to reduce pollution. Meanwhile, middle-class Americans began to create parks right in their backyards. Last year, we spent an average of $428 per household on our lawns and gardens. In Milwaukee County, that comes to about $162 million – about seven times the annual budget of the county parks.

Today, we want a park for something we can’t do in our backyard. There are more athletic fields, playgrounds and bike paths. Dog parks are a new trend. But how badly do we need Milwaukee’s “emerald necklace” (as it was once touted), this endless string of vacant rounded lawns surrounded by fences of weedy third-growth trees? After 100 years of increasingly watered-down and anonymous Olmstedian landscapes, ask yourself this question: Are our parks more like a Sears or an Apple store?

While I wouldn’t put them in the Apple category, linear spaces like Lake Park or South Shore Park are successful because the park land is so connected to the urban fabric that it all works together. By contrast, visit one of the big square parks like Washington on a weekend and count the number of people: It has an empty Sears warehouse feel to it.

Advocacy groups like Preserve Our Parks or The Park People have valiantly fought any violation of our Olmstedian green. “We are all the beneficiaries of a public trust of parkland which was first created by visionary community leaders more than 100 years ago,” The Park People Web site declares. The goal is to preserve “native plants and wildlife that once covered southeast Wisconsin ... the last remnants of the natural heritage of Milwaukee County.”

But what’s native and natural depends on how you look at it. Milwaukee was once the home of Native Americans. You couldn’t walk 10 feet without bumping into a tree. Or a swamp.

However green our parks, they aren’t purely natural, but actually a cultural artifact, Olmsted’s artful replacement of nature. It took 166 tons of gunpowder to shape Central Park. Then Olmsted moved 3 million cubic yards of soil, much of it brought in from New Jersey. Ten million cartloads of stuff were taken out. Half a million trees and shrubs were added.

So deftly did Olmsted conceal his artifice that we failed to notice it’s a very large sculpture. Olmsted claimed Central Park could not be tampered with because it was a “single work of art.” He had recomposed nature into a series of picturesque, 19th-century pastoral views.

Now I love bucolic paintings like the Hudson River School, as did Olmsted. But perhaps it’s time to add a few rooms to that outdoor museum. There is more than one way to reshape nature.

Millennium Park in Chicago, which opened in 2004, takes everything we think is a park and turns it on its head. The lines are straight and the edges sharp.

Videos of faces on a pair of 50-foot LED video screens spray water through their lips into a large reflecting pool. Piet Oudolf’s perennial meadowland is defined by walls of green shrubs framed in rectilinear steel and set in a grid of concrete. A grid with speakers extends from Frank Gehry’s bandshell over a large, oval lawn.

Millennium Park is an ebullient man-made place that affirms the rationality of the city rather than denying it. It declares that we are nature, too. And people love it.

“Stately public spaces, with their ladies in parasols, were never this much fun,” the Chicago Tribune exclaimed. Go to Flickr and you’ll find more than 7,000 pictures of Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain, created by artist Jaume Plensa. That’s twice as many as any fountain in Central Park.

Oudolf’s contrarian and avant-garde meadowland is nothing like Olmsted’s parks, but just as revelatory about nature. Oudolf is more interested in texture, form and time than blooming color. The test of

Oudolf might even be as morally uplifting as Olmsted. “He’s gotten away from the soft pornography of the flower,” said Charles Waldheim, the director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Toronto.

While Millennium Park looks forward, our parks system mostly looks backward. Its central administration is in a historic building on a hill on the county grounds in Wauwatosa. Walls are lined with reproductions of old photographs, reminiscences of when the parks were the center of public life, each image more astonishing than the last.

But the building feels forlorn, the victim of hapless cost-cutting rehabs. Original hardwood floors are covered with institutional carpeting that conceals dirt because it looks like mud. Like most of our Olmsted-designed parks, and those he inspired, the building seems like a forgotten idea of its former self.

Parks advocates inevitably point their fingers at the cost-cutting measures of County Executive Scott Walker. But the budget for the parks has been declining for at least 25 years while piling up $500 million of deferred maintenance. There are many reasons for this neglect – a complex, political history – but is it possible we don’t value the parks as much as we think we should?

Unlike Chicago, Milwaukee hasn’t re-imagined any of its parks. In 2001, the Herzfeld Foundation commissioned designer Cy Paumier to do a new plan for Juneau Park. It was approved by the county parks committee, then languished for lack of funds. Small wonder. It’s a modest, preservationist proposal that upgrades paths, makes patios around the two figurative sculptures and adds a coffee shop.

Who wants to sit in a park and look at a statue of Solomon Juneau? If the visionaries who first created our parks thought like this, they never would have hired Olmsted. Lake Park would be a farm field with a few ravines and paths.

Paumier and the Herzfeld Foundation were decorating a corpse – adding a few courtly refinements to a park that has long been staid and stale. Juneau Park is a pass-through corridor that takes people somewhere else.

At best, the park is a pleasing remnant from another time. It was probably the place to be in Milwaukee before the railroad tracks along the shoreline were turned into a bike path. Before the famed Northwestern Railway Depot to the south was built and torn down. Before Lincoln Memorial Drive and the lagoon was filled in. Before Saarinen’s War Memorial, Calatrava’s Art Museum addition, Kiley’s Cudahy Gardens and the di Suvero sculpture at O’Donnell Park. Before the new towers of condominiums defined the western edge.

In short, everything around Juneau Park has changed, yet the park itself has not. It’s surrounded by the densest concentration of residential, corporate and cultural real estate in Wisconsin, yet remarkably, neither connects nor responds to its contemporary context.

It might well be the most sublime vantage point in Milwaukee. But you wouldn’t know it because two-thirds of the park blocks the view of the lake with an inevitable wall of trees.

Nor does the park offer any direct access to the lakefront. There are hazardous paths twisting down the wooded eastern bluff that foot traffic has created, trampling the native plantings (much to the frustration of Kevin Haley, the county’s senior park designer, who planted them). Anyone who wasn’t blinded by Olmsted’s vision would see these trails as evidence of where people want to go.

Imagine how a great landscape designer might approach the issue of connecting the park and lakefront. Or how Piet Oudolf might respond to the western wall of high-rises: his Millennium Park meadowland allows plants to align and contrast with the surrounding skyline in countless interesting ways. His gardens are also designed to retain their splendor after freezing, which would bring suburban gardeners to visit Juneau Park in spring, summer, winter and fall.

There’s a whole new generation of landscape architects influenced by Dan Kiley, the architect of the linear fountain in front of the Milwaukee Art Museum. They could work wonders with a site like Juneau Park. Imagine a 21st-century fountain. Imagine a way for water and people to flow down to the lakefront. Imagine making this space more vertical, with gardens growing up the bluff in a riot of color.

The pleasure of urban parks is social. In their day, the great parks of Milwaukee were packed with people. What would it take to get everyone who looks down on the park, people who live and work nearby, to linger in Juneau Park? We won’t know until we blow it up and start all over.

If this sounds radical, so was the original idea behind our parks. When Olmsted created his urban parks, cemeteries were the only green spaces in American cities. He was a fierce visionary in his day and Central Park is still a startling masterpiece. Like every great artist, Olmsted started a conversation with a question that doesn’t have one solution, but that every generation must answer anew.

We have to start dreaming new dreams rather than preserving those of our great grandfathers. Our parks need more than our money. They need our curiosity and wonder and ambition. The only way to save our parks is to make something fiercely, beautifully new.