Читать книгу Discovering Portland Parks - Owen Wozniak - Страница 11

Visit Pittock Mansion for a glimpse of nineteenth-century upper crust life.

A Brief History of Portland Parks

The little clearing on the Willamette River’s left bank made a convenient spot to camp while paddling from Willamette Falls to the Columbia River. Native peoples, fur traders, and the earliest settlers all used it. In 1843, two Oregon City businessmen, William Overton and Asa Lovejoy, staked a claim to it. Overton promptly sold out to Francis Pettygrove. Both men—Lovejoy and Pettygrove—fancied naming a town after their home cities: Boston, Massachusetts, for Lovejoy; Portland, Maine, for Pettygrove. They tossed a coin on November 1, 1846. You can visit the room where it happened, at the Francis Ermatinger House across from the Oregon City Library.

Thus was Portland born. The little town spent its first few decades mired in mud as the small clearing grew into a landscape of stumps, shacks, and rutted roads. Early Portlanders were pragmatic, mostly merchants looking to grow trade up and down the rivers. They congregated at the Plaza Blocks, Portland’s first public space, to do business and debate governance. Few saw a need for formal parks or open space, though. After all, just beyond the clearing’s edge was trackless wilderness.

Soon, though, new ideas about the value of parks in cities reached Portland from the East. In 1852—a year before the New York Legislature established what would become Manhattan’s Central Park—Portland landowner Daniel Lownsdale platted a series of city blocks at the edge of town as a public park. These would become the South Park Blocks.

From this promising beginning followed . . . not much. For decades, the South Park Blocks were little more than a muddy parkway. In 1871, after stiff debate, the city acquired forty acres of brushy second-growth timber up Burnside Street to create City Park (later renamed Washington Park), with no clear sense of what to put there. In 1877, someone finally planted trees along the South Park Blocks. In 1885, the city hired a “park keeper,” Portland’s first park employee.

By then, the new ideas from the East were coalescing into a movement that would become known as City Beautiful. Social reformers, appalled at living conditions in the tenements filling America’s ballooning cities, found common cause with urban elites anxious to blunt the growing power of immigrant underclasses. Both groups—elites and reformers—fixated on beautification projects and urban planning. These would, they believed, increase the quality of proletarian life while promoting respect for the social order. Their vision took shape in the famous “White City” at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.

Portland was paying attention. In 1899, city leaders established a board of park commissioners. Voters approved a levy to acquire park properties. With leadership and funding, Portland could at last create a park system. But what should the system look like?

The answer came thanks to another fair. Hoping to boost Portland’s profile, as the Columbian Exposition had done for Chicago, civic leaders announced the Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair, to be held in 1905. Eager to top the White City’s grandeur, they brought in the nation’s most prestigious name in landscape design: the Olmsted Brothers, sons of famed Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted.

The new parks board was anxious to benefit from the gilded Olmsted name and to repurpose exposition land as parks when the fair ended. Accordingly, they too hired the Olmsteds to make recommendations for a city park system although they lacked the funds for a full-blown plan. John Charles Olmsted journeyed to Portland in 1903. The park commission’s tight budget afforded him precious little time to explore, yet he managed to produce a dazzlingly ambitious vision.

Olmsted proposed Portland create a comprehensive and interconnected system of parks, parkways, and natural areas; that it preserve hilltops and river islands; that it create a vast meadow park on the Columbia Slough; that it transform Guilds Lake, site of the exposition, into a park; that it create a forest reserve in the Tualatin Mountains north of town; and much more. Of equal importance, Olmsted urged Portland to create a plan for maintaining its parks and to hire park professionals. Perhaps most significantly, he recommended the parks board be funded independently of the city budget and be led by qualified, volunteer officials.

Olmsted’s report landed with a thud. Funding and leadership were in short supply. His top recommendation—creation of Forest Park—was ignored for a generation. Guilds Lake and the Columbia Slough were sacrificed to industry.

And yet, Olmsted’s work proved remarkably durable. His vision set the framework for much of the parks advocacy and conservation that has happened since.

Though many of Olmsted’s proposals languished, his work did prompt the parks board to hire a former Olmsted employee named Emanuel Mische as the parks superintendent. The previous two occupants of the job had been, respectively, corrupt and incompetent. Mische was neither. He was instead the rare parks professional with a genius for both design and administration. To him we owe some of our best parks, including Laurelhurst, Mount Tabor, Kenilworth, and the rose gardens at Peninsula Park and Ladds Circle.

The Mische era was the first golden age of Portland parks. It ended around 1913, when Portland’s switch to a commission form of government curtailed the parks board’s independence by transforming it into the Portland Parks Bureau. Mische briefly led the bureau, but chafed against city politics and departed the following year.

More significant than these changes, however, was the arrival of the automobile in the city. Cars remade Portland, including its parks, in their image. Parks Superintendent Charles Paul Keyser bowed to the new reality and spent precious funds to repave Terwilliger Parkway at the behest of auto enthusiasts. In the 1920s, the Parks Bureau developed auto campgrounds and other car-centric attractions. As more people took to driving out of town to re-create, investment in inner-city parks slowed.

A second golden age began, somewhat paradoxically, in the depths of the Great Depression. Though the bureau was broke, lacking money for basic park maintenance and upkeep, federal stimulus from the New Deal poured in money and manpower to expand the park system.

In 1936, Keyser oversaw a “Plan for a System of Public Recreation Areas,” which updated the Olmsted vision to include play areas, community centers, neighborhood parks, and “pleasureways”—scenic driving routes like Fairmount Boulevard in the West Hills below Council Crest. It also called for tripling the city’s park acreage.

The Second World War brought this expansion to a halt. Instead, public concern about newly unsupervised kids, with their parents serving abroad or in the domestic war economy, prompted new investments in recreation programs. These programs reached many more Portlanders than before, even the Japanese American citizens held, in violation of their constitutional rights, at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Pavilion awaiting removal to wartime internment camps.

Following the war, the park system resumed its expansion, notably with acquisition of much of Vanport, the wartime-era public housing development that catastrophically flooded in 1948. Portland also, at long last, created Forest Park from the tax delinquent parcels Multnomah County had acquired over decades. Investment in community centers and recreation programs again surged as the baby boom brought a new wave of kids into the system.

In the 1970s, the Parks Bureau returned yet again to Olmsted’s proposal, with Superintendent Douglas Bridges working to revive the 40-Mile Loop, Olmsted’s vision of parkways circling the city. In the 1980s, the bureau rediscovered an interest in natural areas and launched its first naturalist programs. At the same time, though, a deep recession early in the decade gutted the bureau’s budget and created a structural funding deficit that persists to this day.

Polished basalt boulders celebrate neighborhood history at Dawson Park.

The bureau formally changed its name to Portland Parks and Recreation (PP&R) in 1991 and renewed its push for resources—from the city council, donors, corporate sponsors, and voters. A successful 1994 bond measure gave the system a huge boost, supporting new and renovated facilities across the city. As the millennium drew to a close, PP&R engaged in a deep round of public engagement to create its Parks 2020 Vision, which prioritized park equity, natural areas, and solutions to the structural deficit.

Now the page is set to turn again as PP&R works to renew its vision amid another funding crisis, a public health crisis, renewed attention to racial injustice, and anxieties around public order. Never has the park system been so vital to our health, our sanity, and even our survival.

This pocket history does not do justice to the many other park stories across the region, like Gresham’s legacy of acquiring parkland on its volcanic buttes, or the Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation District’s dramatic postwar growth and exemplary professionalism. It fails to tell the twisted tale of how Clark County in Washington and its main city, Vancouver, each with strong park systems, joined in an innovative partnership and then landed in a messy divorce.

There’s a larger story, as well, about the role of regional collaboration in the development of the parks we enjoy today. Following limited but crucial efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s, in 1978 regional leaders referred a measure to voters to create a directly elected regional government, called Metro. It’s the only such body in the United States.

Among its many duties, Metro owns the Oregon Zoo, oversees the solid waste system, establishes the urban growth boundary, and—since the 1990s—operates regional parks and natural areas. Working with greenspace advocates, in 1992 Metro created the Metropolitan Greenspaces Master Plan. This set the stage for further collaboration among Metro, local governments, and community partners to secure open space. Nearly thirty years and several major funding measures later, Metro owns over seventeen thousand acres of parks and natural areas and has supported acquisition and restoration of many more by other park agencies. Thanks to a successful measure in 2019, this essential work is set to continue.

These accomplishments depend on citizens voting to fund land acquisition as well as parks development, maintenance, and restoration. Much of the needed coordination has come thanks to tireless efforts among parks advocates working with committed professionals in the alphabet soup of local, regional, state, and federal agencies.

The legacy of success to date is impressive—but so are the challenges. Like society as a whole, our parks experience the impacts of gross economic and racial inequality, climate change, and public health and safety challenges. These issues don’t respect jurisdictional boundaries, making it more important than ever for everyone to work together.

One of the most innovative venues for collaboration is the Intertwine Alliance, a network of governmental, nonprofit, and business partners working around the region to improve and expand access to nature. They do so in large part by facilitating coordination across organizations and sectors. As a longtime volunteer, I wholeheartedly urge you to visit www.theintertwine.org to learn more. While you’re there, you might also get some good ideas for parks to visit!