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I love Seattle's parks. Seward and Discovery Parks were my favorite and even little pocket parks like Interlaken Park near where I lived on Capital Hill made it possible to walk a few blocks away and drop out of the city under the canopy of a PNW forest. SAM's Sculpture Park & Myrtle Edwards by the waterfront are interesting with nice water and mountain views. But what Seattle is missing is a grand park in the center of the city or on the edge of downtown (Volunteer Park, Seattle Center, and Freeway Park don't cut the mustard).
This is where I always thought cities like Portland (Washington Park) and Vancouver (Stanley Park) shine and bring it next level where they took the best real estate in the city and created world class parks. That's something I always felt was missing in the core of Seattle. When I did trips up to Vancouver, I could plan on spending a whole day of activity around Stanley Park.
The land of Stanley Park wasn't owned or controlled by the city. It wasn't built on because it was a military reserve. Some squatters lived there until 1931 when the last one left.
In other words, it was and technically still is federal land. With incredible foresight, one of the first things the city did after being incorporated in 1886, was to ask the federal government to lease the land for a park.
This was granted with the $1.00 per yer fee.
It opened in 1888, when most of the city was still forest.
From this point on, the management of the park was and still is done by the city.
Even though it was a city park, the federal government still was able to use parts of it for military needs.
Why do this every year?
Adding substantial park land is a rare event, so I'd expect this year's rankings
to be the same as last year's rankings, and the year before's rankings, etc.
Location: northern Vermont - previously NM, WA, & MA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Natnasci
The land of Stanley Park wasn't owned or controlled by the city. It wasn't built on because it was a military reserve. Some squatters lived there until 1931 when the last one left.
In other words, it was and technically still is federal land. With incredible foresight, one of the first things the city did after being incorporated in 1886, was to ask the federal government to lease the land for a park.
This was granted with the $1.00 per yer fee.
It opened in 1888, when most of the city was still forest.
From this point on, the management of the park was and still is done by the city.
Even though it was a city park, the federal government still was able to use parts of it for military needs.
There still is a military presence, with HMCS Discovery being located on Deadman's Island, connected to the park.
in 1988 it became a National Historic Site.
The indigenous history of the area is also interesting to look up.
That is interesting. It reminds me of being somewhat similar to the Presidio in San Francisco as the nautical gateways of the city (Golden Gate and Lions Gate) used for military fortification purposes. I was using "best real estate in the city" under metaphorical terms having nearly half of the downtown peninsula with beaches, harbor, city, and mountain views all in the same panorama. Does it get any better than that for a major city on this continent? It's my favorite park in North America.
I also liked visiting Washington Park in Portland having all its thick forest up on the West Hills and the iconic view of Mt Hood on the horizon with the city in the foreground near the Rose Gardens. Being a river city it doesn't have as much of a scenic edge with the water views that Seattle and Vancouver have, but it does have very good city planning in terms of park space around the city with some beautiful landscapes.
That is interesting. It reminds me of being somewhat similar to the Presidio in San Francisco as the nautical gateways of the city (Golden Gate and Lions Gate) used for military fortification purposes. I was using "best real estate in the city" under metaphorical terms having nearly half of the downtown peninsula with beaches, harbor, city, and mountain views all in the same panorama. Does it get any better than that for a major city on this continent? It's my favorite park in North America.
I also liked visiting Washington Park in Portland having all its thick forest up on the West Hills and the iconic view of Mt Hood on the horizon with the city in the foreground near the Rose Gardens. Being a river city it doesn't have as much of a scenic edge with the water views that Seattle and Vancouver have, but it does have very good city planning in terms of park space around the city with some beautiful landscapes.
Washington Park is definitely the best urban park in the PNW I have been to. That said, I have yet to visit Vancouver and I expect Stanley Park to give it a run for its money or exceed it.
Point Defiance in Tacoma is also very similar to Stanley Park in layout and function. There’s an excellent Five Mile road of old growth forest too with good hiking as well as beach access. A nice zoo/aquarium too. We visit pretty often from Seattle.
I disagree. Irvine Regional Park and Irvine Lake are nice and the new Great Park is huge and in the middle of the city.
And it's not built in a way that most would recognize as traditionally urban, but it has a higher population of people and jobs than many cities that we might think of as more traditionally urban. It compares especially well to most sunbelt cities.
Neither Irvine Regional Park nor Irvine Park are in Irvine.
Great Park is at least within Irvine, and that's as very active greenspace with a lot of ball fields. A tiny part of it abuts residential areas that's laid out poorly so it's not really accessible by walking for more than a handful of people though that may change with further, not very dense development. So with that means a good portion of the park is actually surface parking lots.
I'm not impressed with a lot of other sunbelt cities either. Irvine's not the worst and there are some nice features to it*, but I generally am not a fan.
*Among the nice features are the small parklets that are often in the middle of the various closed-off, usually quite segregated subdivisions like theseparkletshere which keeps most residences within walking distance of at least a small parklet. The walk itself is generally pretty featureless and dull though.
Another poster upthread noted the small land areas of the cities in the top 10.
I suspect that if my hometown of Kansas City, Mo., were still confined to the 61 square miles it covered in 1945, before it began its nearly 40-year-long annexation spree, it would rank in the top ten. As it is, the city has 221 parks and 135 miles of boulevards and parkways. But since the city now covers 312 square miles of land, that still works out to a pretty low ratio, I guess.
At least the city Parks and Recreation Department has done a decent job of adding parks in the annexed areas since I left in 1976. I remember there being an exit off Interstate 29 for a then completely nonexistent boulevard called Tiffany Springs Parkway. That boulevard now exists, but it doesn't extend to the park that used to bear that name or the neighborhood of the same name to its south.
Looking at the metric "equity" I immediately dismissed the methodology on how this study was conducted. That metric was applied equally in the study, further bastardizing the findings. St. Louis comes in at number 24, and has the largest city park in the country in terms of acreage. Albquerque is 23rd. I've lived in St. Louis and have been to Albuquerque, a lot. There's no way in hell Albuquerque should score higher than St. Louis.
Location: northern Vermont - previously NM, WA, & MA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mike0421
Looking at the metric "equity" I immediately dismissed the methodology on how this study was conducted. That metric was applied equally in the study, further bastardizing the findings. St. Louis comes in at number 24, and has the largest city park in the country in terms of acreage. Albquerque is 23rd. I've lived in St. Louis and have been to Albuquerque, a lot. There's no way in hell Albuquerque should score higher than St. Louis.
In Albuquerque its more about open spaces left in their natural state like up in the Sandia foothills where you get high desert shrubbery and trails. Or the Rio Grande bosque, basically a narrow strip of cottonwood groves on the banks of the river. They're nice enough, but not grand city parks in the traditional sense and not much in the way of landscaping. There are neighborhood pocket parks, but nothing remarkable for city parks in general. I have visited Forest Park in St. Louis, which is in the league of nation's best for city parks, so on that point I'd have to agree.
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