Urban National Parks—For People or for Plants?

Perhaps no question has been so debated within the National Park Service as that of the appropriateness of urban parks in the National Park System. Aside from the use-versus-preservation question, no issue has been its equal in forcing the agency to ask itself questions about its basic mission or in involving it in controversy. Moreover, it is a policy area in which definitive commitments, rather than settling things, seem only to launch new rounds of dissension and indecision.

Although the agency's assumption of urban responsibilities is commonly viewed as very recent, the Park Service has been involved with parks in and near cities for a long time. In 1933 it was given responsibility of managing the parks of Washington, D.C., and the following years saw historic sites in several cities added to the National Park System. For example, the agency took over responsibility for managing Federal Hall in lower Manhattan in 1939. Independence National Historical Park in center city Philadelphia was established in 1948, and Jefferson National Expansion Monument, located on the waterfront in downtown Saint Louis, was authorized in 1954.

Federal interest in open space in and near major urban places quickened in the late 1950s and began to gather momentum in the next decade. By the mid-1960s, several things—the New Conservation, the Urban Crisis, and the Great Society—had come together to place urban open space high on the federal agenda. This immediately made a previously neglected policy area an attractive piece of bureaucratic real estate, one which promised great benefits to agencies that could claim a part of it. However, for the Park Service, there were serious drawbacks to an urban commitment on a large scale, and agency leadership was well aware of them.

First was the question of its ability to assume the role of lead agency in any urban open-space policy thrust by the federal government. Its western, nature-oriented image, which had served it so well in the past, made the Park Service seem to many an inappropriate and unqualified agency for an urban mission. There undoubtedly was something to this: large urban parks would present the agency with management problems, constituents, and demands it had not previously encountered.

Moreover, the agency had no proven criteria for selecting urban parks. It did not have a clear idea of which parks would be good ones from the standpoints of ease of management or political support, nor even which ones would be able to meet their stated objectives. One thing was certain, however; urban parks would require large staffs, large development outlays, and large budgets, perhaps large enough to starve the other parks in the system. This meant that a major urban commitment would be a very big gamble at unknown odds.

It also was clear that an urban commitment would mean an infusion of new kinds of professionals into the agency—sociologists, psychologists, urban recreation and design specialists, and so on. Urban parks therefore would mean that the traditional rangers and managers would have to share their agency—and its rewards—with persons having very different skills and values.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1970s the National Park Service was deeply and directly involved in urban recreation. The Gateway and Golden Gate National Recreation Areas had been authorized in New York and San Francisco, along with other NRAs in the Cuyahoga Valley of Ohio, along the Chattahoochee River in Georgia, and in the Santa Monica Mountains of California.

Incompatible purposes

Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel, speaking in support of urban national parks, said, "We have got to bring the natural world back to the people, rather than have them live in an environment where everything is paved over with concrete and loaded with frustration and violence."

Of course, there is a very good reason why urban areas are paved over with concrete: the natural environment will not stand the intensity of use that urban life subjects it to. Historically, permanent concentrations of people have meant intensely altered environments. Places of concentrated urban leisure must be modified considerably to serve their function. Hickel could ignore this fact because he did not have to face the hard realities of implementation that park managers and planners would have to confront.

The preservation of nature and indigenous landscapes is incompatible with mass recreation. No amount of artful design will cover this fact. A million people cannot walk in solitude through unspoiled nature. At a national seashore, for example, they have to have toilets and places to change and throw their litter. If such places are not provided, people will improvise. A million people also will need lifeguards to protect them, police to restrain and sometimes remove the inevitable law-breakers, and sanitation workers to clean up the mess they leave when they go home.

Without these services and facilities, a beach is not capable of fulfilling the mass access goals that figure in the rhetoric justifying it. Yet, if they are provided, the resource's unspoiled quality is destroyed. Compromise is possible, but a compromise is just that—forsaking the complete attainment of one goal for the partial attainment of another.

A contradiction thus lurks in the very heart of the urban national park concept. The park is to be an agent of the improvement of urban life, and it is also to be an agent of preservation in the face of altered natural resources and their integration into the modem urban system. Out of this central contradiction came the ideational crosscurrents and conflicting political interests that have formed the context of the Park Service's urban park policies.

Deterrents to mass access

For those who lived on the periphery of the metropolis, the arrival of the urban public in search of recreation always has been viewed with horror. In the 1920s and 1930s, the estate owners on the north shore of Long Island and the farmers and fishermen on the south shore fought Robert Moses's recreation plans with equal vigor (and, in the end, with equal lack of success).

To those in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods near the proposed Gateway National Recreation Area, who had watched as the city's shifting racial pattern and sequence of housing changed white neighborhoods into minority ones all around them, the prospect of being out-flanked by a massively used, multiracial national recreation area was not pleasant. Fearing that a general public would bring with it high levels of litter, violence, and vandalism, they fiercely fought the development of Gateway as a truly regional facility because, to them, the very survival of their neighborhoods was at stake. In other cities, white neighborhoods came to feel similar paranoia as they saw the political power of minorities increase, while city hall, sometimes under black mayors, came to be viewed as unsympathetic to their needs.

Because they had such a stake in park development, the local organizations that were active in the establishment of the urban parks usually remained active in overseeing their development. In some cases, important battles were won in the early days of park planning. In others, the ability of the Park Service to resort to condemnation was severely curtailed when Congress, prompted by the wishes of park neighbors, imposed low limits on the amount of land the Service could acquire or on the amount of money it could spend to develop recreation facilities.

Large-scale socioeconomic trends also worked in favor of local wishes and against the development of urban parks into facilities for the public en masse. First, the days of cavalierly running expressways through city and country were over by the time the first urban parks were established. The local opposition to, and a political disaffection with, road building as it was practiced in the 1950s and 1960s, plus the general impoverishment of the public fisc, meant that it was no longer possible to plan a facility for a metropolitan public and assume that once the facility was established, the means of getting there would follow. If anything, the reverse was now the case; the availability of roads, bridges, and public transportation was a severe limiting factor in recreation planning. By the 1970s planners were asking themselves if it was wise to plan regional recreation facilities if regional access did not already exist. They had the example of Fire Island: more than a decade after the establishment of the national seashore as a metropolitan facility, getting to it was still an ordeal of delay and expense.

A second trend over which the agency had little control that encouraged the development of the urban parks along local, neighborhood lines was the rise of participatory, or open, planning. The citizens who took advantage of participatory planning usually were those who felt they had the largest personal stake in the parks—those who lived close to them and wanted to see their development produce as few changes and disturbances in their lives as possible. Those who already used the areas in their present form and who, therefore, did not favor changes that would threaten their enjoyment, also were likely to take advantage of direct public participation.

The mandated public meetings on the general management plan turned into raucous, hostile encounters between the Park Service and citizens who accused it of wanting to destroy their neighborhoods. The other side of the argument—that inconvenience for a few might greatly improve recreation opportunities for the many—was not well articulated through this process. Citizens who might have benefited from ambitious planning for urban parks lived far away, were scattered throughout the metropolitan area, and undoubtedly had other things closer to home to worry about.

There were, however, several voices that spoke for including more than local considerations in park planning. For example, some metropolitan political interests had designs for urban national parks that ran counter to those of the local community groups; these interests wanted to see park access made as wide as possible. In the case of New York, two organizations in particular played this role—the Regional Plan Association, a venerable organization that had promoted integrated regional planning for almost fifty years and that indeed had first proposed Gateway in the early 1960s; and the Gateway Citizens Committee, a "citizens" organization with individual and corporate members, a decidedly upper-class cast, and a philanthropic interest in seeing that the park was made available to the city's poor.

Staying with the New York example, organizations representing minority groups and politicians from minority districts insisted that the park should serve their members and constituents, and this meant increased access to, and expanded facilities in, the units that made up Gateway. Thus arose what has been called the Manhattan Alliance, a coalition of the unquestionably poor and the clearly privileged, both putting their weight behind Gateway in the service of the entire region. There were similar alliances in Cleveland, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Los Angeles speaking for increased access to their cities' urban national parks. The voices speaking for broad access and large-scale development were not always well articulated, however, and by and large they were ineffectual.

Conflicting guidelines

In the face of this contest of political power and points of view, agency tradition offered conflicting guides. Traditions could be used to support either a mass recreation or a preservation role, either a policy which the Park Service tried to incorporate its parks in or near cities into the metropolitan systems, or one in which the Park Service actively resisted such incorporation.

Out of these traditions, two general positions emerged among those who dealt with urban parks. One agency planner, discussing urban parks, told the author that "there are two kinds of people in the Service, the resource types and the people types. The former say manage the people to preserve the resource, and the latter say manage the resource to serve the people. The Service looks at some of its parks, and it can't figure out whether it ought to be preserving resources or serving people.

The view held by the "people types" was considered the traditional one among agency managers and planners. It was the metropolitan view that emphasized mass large-scale facilities, and fee-simple acquisition of parkland. Implicit in this view was the notion that the Park Service should be an instrument of the expansion and rationalization of the metropolitan system, and, through it, of progress as it is conventionally considered. A corollary to this view was that the preservation of the indigenous landscape and its human and natural characteristics was clearly secondary to popular access and service to the entire region.

This metropolitan view identified the national interest with the interests of the entire metropolis and tended to see opposition to what it interpreted as metropolitan ends as selfish and narrow-minded.

The complement of the metropolitan view was the localist view. Whereas the former was considered traditional, the latter was considered modern. It was associated with the dynamic younger planners and it tended to be far more local in its sympathies. It stressed preserving the indigenous landscape for the high value it had to those relatively few people whose lives were lived on it, or who took special enjoyment from it. The localist views of the younger planners reflected a sensitivity to the political realities of urban park planning. Indeed, the younger planners of a localist persuasion in the Park Service stressed their realism as frequently as their idealism. According to one, "Listening to [a park's neighbors] is simple common sense. They can stop you dead in your tracks, so what are you going to do? When they talk, you listen." Another planner, who had successfully handled several politically sensitive park-planning assignments, usually proceeded by listening carefully to what those living close to the parks said they did or did not want.

There was clearly an affinity between planners who had to confront strong local power and ideas that justified acceding to that power. A moral position that emphasized their sensitivity to local demands and stressed the Park Service's role in preserving indigenous nature, the local community, or the traditional landscape allowed Park Service personnel to respect local demands without feeling that they had sold out their agency's principles. If it could be argued that the Service's true responsibilities in urban areas were largely local, then there was no hypocritical set of double messages; upholding Service principles and not arousing the locals were confluent, not conflicting, goals. The stronger the local power, the more useful to managers and planners was a localist view of the role of the urban national parks.

Gateway National Recreation Area

The degree to which local pressure and the localist view have shaped the development and management of the urban national parks can be seen in the agency's plans for these open spaces. Gateway National Recreation Area is one of the two oldest urban parks, and the largest in terms of staffing and annual budget. In the original 1969 plan, Breezy Point was to be the recreation center for the park. Mass recreation was clearly to be the unit's primary goal, and the Breezy Point landscape of prior structures and use was to be wiped clean. Obsolete Fort Tilden was to be removed, and so was the Breezy Point Co-op, a mixed enclave of vacation and all-year houses. Existing roads were to be obliterated. In their places were to be ferry terminals and broad promenades leading directly across the narrow peninsula to the large public swimming beaches. Behind the beaches the agency planned golf courses, playing fields, parking lots, an amphitheater, an environmental education complex, and areas of what it called creative open space. At the tip of the point was going to be a "walk-and-wander" nature area. The facilities would be designed to accommodate 300,000 people on a summer weekend day and 27 million visitors a year.

The changes made in response to local pressures are great and obvious in the 1979 plan for the unit. The slate is no longer to be wiped clean of prior structures. The two sections of the Breezy Point Co-op are still there, and so are the roads connecting them to the rest of New York City. The residential enclaves proved politically immovable after they enlisted the support of both the city government and the local congressmen. U.S. Army and Coast Guard facilities also remain; they too proved immovable in the face of demands that they stay. Fort Tilden has been declared an historic district and its ammunition storage magazines, Nike missile sites and radar tracking stations have been declared historically significant, and the Park Service is to restore and interpret many of these features. The plan for what remains is one of conceptual and physical clutter, with very different goals than those originally planned.

Change in emphasis

Accommodation of mass recreation and ease of public access have been deemphasized . The two centrally placed ferry terminals on the original plan have been reduced to one, and it has been shifted far west of the best beaches. The promenades to take people directly across the peninsula from the ferry terminal on the bay side to the beaches on the ocean side are gone now, and so are the playing fields and the walk-and-wander area. The large swimming beaches are greatly reduced, while access to most of the point relies on a Rube Goldberg arrangement of inter-connected shuttle bus routes. The exact degree to which mass recreation has been deemphasized can be seen in the number of visitors now being planned for. Whereas peak-day planning initially aimed at accommodating 300,000 people, that number is reduced in the current plan to 90,000. A large percentage of this will be local use, and the number represents little, if any, increase over the area's recreational use before Gateway was established.

This decreased emphasis on mass accommodation has been accompanied by an increased concern for low-density use. The plan envisions maximum densities of one person for each 575 square feet of beach. Since most recreation standards recommend between 50 and 100 square feet per person as an acceptable minimum for an urban beach, Breezy Point's tip will indeed offer a high-quality recreation experience to those who can get there.

While the importance of recreation has been played down, the preservation of nature has been emphasized. Terns were found nesting at the western tip of Breezy Point, and so the walk-and-wander nature area was turned into a restricted access area. Small patches of "locally unique" woodland were discovered, and they too were afforded the protection of restricted public access. In fact, the impulse for nature preservation is so strong that where natural resources worthy of protection do not exist, they will be created. The beach in front of the Breezy Point Co-op, identified as "the widest and best" on Breezy Point in the first plan, is to be the site of extensive dune building. Once the dunes are built, in the words of the current plan, they will be "managed as protection zone lands and protected from random access by means of boardwalks, designated routes to the beach, or other operational methods."

Overall, the current plan leaves very little of Breezy Point available for unrestricted use. On the other hand, plans for groups of visitors now figure large. There are to be youth hostels in the Fort Tilden area, and supervised group campsites are planned for the area east of the Breezy Point Co-op. Much of the park is now to be accessible only by special permit, which for all practical purposes closes it to public uses except for preplanned and supervised group activity. There are now plans for large charter bus parking lots near the West Beach, Tilden Beach, and the group campsites, and for a special program center to accommodate groups. Much environmental education is to take place in three "gateway villages," which are envisioned as "major educational centers" and as "object lessons in the relationship of man and his environment."

All of these goal shifts served to bring planning into line with political reality. By reducing mass access to Breezy Point, the agency brought its plans into conformity with the wishes of the Breezy Point Co-op, whose continued existence attested to its political potency, and with the wishes of the park's neighbors in Brooklyn, who feared that mass access to Breezy Point would increase traffic congestion on their streets. The emphasis on "quality" recreation experiences covered the retreat from mass accommodation and it served well as a cover. By stressing a quality park experience rather than the total number of park visits, the agency did appear to bring one of the qualities of the great national parks—spaciousness—to Gateway.

Likewise, the emphasis on resource preservation at Breezy Point counterbalanced Gateway's failure to live up to its promise as a truly metropolitan recreation facility. While Gateway was being condemned by the current plan to remain a collection of local parks in terms of access and use, the designation of so many of its features as nationally significant historic resources justified keeping the Park Service involved. In addition, the shift of emphasis to resource preservation brought Gateway planning in line with planning trends throughout the Park System. At Gateway, however, the intrinsic qualities of the resources to be protected were of little importance. It was the strategic advantages of preservation that mattered. Even invented resources, such as the reconstructed dunes in front of the co-op, seemed adequate for this purpose.

The shift in emphasis to group accommodations also served strategic ends. It allowed the agency to promote some non-local park use and, by so doing, to accommodate those few pressures for wider use that did exist. It was wider use in a form, more palatable to Breezy Point's neighbors than unstructured recreation would have been, however. In the current plan, group campsites and group activities are consistently referred to as supervised. By stressing organized group visits, the Service also gave itself control over the timing of many park visits. It could discourage the visit it did not want, the one on a summer weekend, and encourage the one it did want, the off-season visit, which increased annual visitor counts without increasing the political (and staffing) problems associated with high peak-day usage.

Thus, we see that at Gateway, emphasis on preservation and education allowed the agency to shift planning away from mass access while emphasis on group accommodation allowed it to channel what little public access remained into the most politically acceptable and managerially convenient forms. Such shifts of emphasis were by no means limited to Gateway; they occurred in different degrees and in different mixes in most of the urban national parks. Although all of the urban parks initially were justified by their mass recreation potential, little of their actual development planning reflected this.

Before the Gateways were established, there was considerable uncertainty over the wisdom of establishing urban national parks. Neither the problems those parks brought with them nor the solutions worked out for them have done much to silence disagreement. In the cities, the Service hoped to find large, appreciative new constituencies, and a new role in keeping with the spirit of the times. In short, the agency was to find a part of its lost relevance in an urban commitment. Instead it found dilemmas, internal dissension, and severe political constraints. The agency found that, having committed itself to urban parks, it could neither control their authorization, nor gain the initiative in planning for their use.

The entire urban wing of the National Park System was an experiment. It was also a gamble; commitments were made in the hope that circumstances would support them. For a public agency, there is nothing inherently wrong with experimentation, with shifting resources from one area of social concern to another or from policies in accord with one perspective to those in accord with another.

However, an agency must also be willing to evaluate such experiments realistically—and this has not been the case with the urban national parks. Perhaps because many traditions and aspirations have been brought to the urban national parks, the Park Service can fabricate justifications for any stance it takes, decisions it makes, and choices forced on it. Perhaps because its planning skills are so good, the temptation to cover failures with virtuoso planning and call them successes has been too great to resist. Rationalizations, however, can get only so convoluted and artful before they collapse of their own weight. The agency must be willing to establish criteria for success and write off ventures that fail to live up to these criteria.

Perhaps what makes the urban parks most troublesome for the policy analyst is that they cannot be written off as unambiguous failures. Clearly, Gateway has fallen far short of its original goals, but it is not obvious that those goals are unattainable. Here the agency is facing a basic problem in uncertainty. The park's ultimate success will depend on circumstances over which the Park Service has no more than minimal control and very little capacity to predict—future attitudes toward our cities, the urban policy of the next administration, and even future transportation innovations (or the lack of them). There is no way of knowing now whether future events will continue to make it increasingly difficult for the Park Service to attain its goals in its urban parks or whether the tide will turn. The latter seems unlikely, but it is by no means impossible. Given this uncertainty, the Park Service should not forget why it is in the urban park business in the first place; that is, to provide access to the special recreation resources of the region. It would be easy to lose sight of this; all the agency has to do is start believing that protecting the modest natural and historic resources found in the urban national parks justifies its continued presence. It does not. The only thing that justifies its continued presence in the urban parks it currently manages is a reasonable hope that it can someday turn them into what they were meant to be. Only if the Park Service keeps this in mind and at the very center of its urban presence will it be willing to continually assess its urban parks and decide whether the borderline cases are moving toward more complete success or are becoming irredeemable failures. The jury is still out on many of the urban national parks, but when it returns, the agency must be willing to listen to the verdict, understand it, and act accordingly.