Preserving the beauty of our parks
While you were working, driving, lounging or whatever else Thursday afternoon, the sanctity of your parks was preserved.
A commercial threat was turned aside, an attack on our serenity was rebuffed, Corporate America was denied access to perhaps our last public oasis. The ghost of Frederick Law Olmsted is breathing a sigh of relief. He and all of us owe a debt to the city preservation board.
As the rest of us went about our business, our right to bike, jog, picnic, daydream, sunbathe and otherwise escape the thump and clang of daily life in our parks without corporate intrusion was preserved.
It may not rank, on the civic scale, with a Super Bowl win or the coming of a Fortune NikeXXX 500 company. But like sunsets or a day at the beach it something you can put a price on.
In a head scratching move, Olmsted Parks Conservancy officials wanted to post corporate sponsorship banners in the parks. If anyone should know that the ads contradict all that Olmsted America iconic landscape architect stood for, it should be the guardians of his legacy. Perhaps Thomas Herrera Mishler, president of the nonprofit conservancy, was blinded by fund raising pressures into offering lightpost banners as a corporate lure.
Olmsted envisioned parks as urban refuges offering poetic and tranquilizing influence on people . through a contemplation of natural scenery. Somehow, I don think that view includes signs brought to you by corporate behemoths, however worthy their support.
viewscape is the coin of the realm for Olmsted, said Terry Robinson of the preservation board. you get into advertising and commercialization, you opening the genie bottle. next? Billboards at Hoyt Lake? Neon signs on the banks of Cazenovia Creek? Ads for concrete repair at MLK Park splash pad? While we at it, we might as well put a real casino in Marcy Casino and a This Space for Rent sign at the base of Delaware Park great white oak.
a slippery slope, noted the preservation board Dick Lippes. The proposal was first beaten up, then voted down, by the nine member board. At the root, however, is a real need.
trying to expand the donor pool, Herrera Mishler told me. need to attract more support. conservancy and its volunteer army do good work. Herrera Mishler faces the annual headache of raising half of a $3.6 million budget. The corporate banner idea carried the scent of desperation a compromising of Olmsted pristine vision in the service of a scarce dollars reality.
The six park Olmsted system (Delaware, Cazenovia, MLK, Riverside, South, Front) lost a hefty $600,000 in public funding when the city took back its parks from the county four years ago. The county given the Olmsted parks regional appeal should pony up the 600 grand, or the city should funnel into the parks some of that budget surplus Mayor Byron Brown brags about.
It would, among other things, spare Herrera Mishler the corporate genuflections that have Olmsted spinning in his grave. And it would preserve the view for the rest of us.
