Some Favorite Urban Oases

In a post yesterday about the community-minded priorities, adjustments and sacrifices of oft-derided urbanites, I mentioned Central Park, but I didn’t really get into its greatness. And I won’t here, because I’ve neither the time nor the space. I’d need weeks, months, years. And I’d need hundreds of thousands of words, so infinite are the park’s glories and so big is my love for it. A blog post can’t accommodate that.

But I did want to follow up with just a short cheer for great urban parks in general. And with a mention of a few of my favorites. And with an invitation for you to name some of the ones that most delight you and to direct those of us who haven’t visited them to make their acquaintance.

I was just in Budapest, and it has one of my favorite parks, Margaret Island, simply because of its situation. It’s in the middle of the Danube River, surrounded wholly by water and accessed by bridge. And it’s technically not one big park but a cluster of parkland, along with gardens and other attractions, that feels more or less like one big park, and can certainly be used for lounging, running, etc. From the end of it that’s closest to the city center, you can see some of the grand buildings hugging the water and up on Castle Hill.

When I was in Vancouver a number of years ago, I was blown away by Stanley Park. It, too, has the virtue of wateriness, a noun I wasn’t wholly sure existed until I just typed it. (I was sure of watery as an adjective, but had minor doubts about the –ness option. And it turns out I’m actually misusing the noun. It means the state of actually being watery, as in diluted. But let’s not quibble!)

Much of Stanley Park is rimmed by a sea wall, over which you can behold the vast blue expanse of the Vancouver Harbor and take in both the tall buildings in this splendid city’s center and the taller mountains, sometimes snow-capped, on its outskirts. It’s a magical, magical place.

And then there’s Detroit’s great park. Yes, Detroit. I lived there for five years, and people unfamiliar with the city always arch an eyebrow when I tell them that one of best arguments for it and one of the nicest parks I know is its analogue to Central Park, which is really a relative of Central Park, since the initial (though not fully executed) design for the park, Belle Isle, was by Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of both Central Park and Prospect Park, in Brooklyn.

Belle Isle is a bit larger than Central Park and, like Margaret Island, it occupies the center of a river and is accessed by a bridge. What’s more, it hovers between two countries. Windsor, Canada, and its very modest skyline (if you can even call it that) is visible in one direction; downtown Detroit, with a more impressive skyline, is visible in the other. You can reach Belle Isle only from the Detroit side.

When I used it frequently, between 1990 and 1993, I often despaired over the mediocre job the city did with its upkeep. Detroit always seemed to be strapped for cash and wasn’t such a smoothly run civic enterprise to boot. But still I was crazy for Belle Isle, with its fields and forests—there were deer there, I recall—and even its beach. I don’t know how it’s faring today; I’d welcome any reports. Whatever the case, it’s a sublimely situated piece of real estate.

Yesterday, by the way, was Olmsted’s birthday. He was born on April 26, 1822. (He died on August 28, 1903, at the age of 81.)

One last note: as I was mulling parks and checking some information on the ones mentioned in this post, I tripped across an interesting web site for lovers of parks and open spaces. It’s run by the Project for Public Spaces, and it lists and describes and gives progress reports about parks, squares, markets and waterfronts around the world. Definitely worth checking out.