Branding and not branding a city park.

From Malmo, Sweden ...

... to New Albany, Indiana.

For the sequel, "How Not to Brand A City Park," we're trying to hire James Crutchfield. Surely the Foundation can foot us some money for that. Until then: Design: How To Brand A City Park, by Jeroen Beekmans (Pop Up City)

Bicentennial caption contest, Harvest Homecoming edition: Rent Boy Park dedicated, consecrated and crenulated.

Insert your caption in the comments, or at FB.

Photo courtesy of the 'Bune

Design, condescension and movable furniture.

Last week, as it pertains to the design of New Albany's Bicentennial Park by stealth, NAC's Jeff Gillenwater asked Pete Andriot of Rundell Ernstberger Associates a simple, reasonable question:

"When did the public input process into this park's location, imagined functions, design, and construction occur?"

We continue to impatiently tap our feet awaiting Andriot's reply, if any, and Jeff will be posting again on this topic on Tuesday, but in the meantime, I'd like to return to a comment of Andriot's that grates more jarringly with each passing day.

"New Albany isn’t ready for movable tables and chairs yet."

My response:

In the absence of substantive input from New Albany's citizenry, exactly how do you know this?

Did Bob Caesar and Shelle England assure you that the simple, guileless folks in New Albany cannot ever grasp such concepts, or absent any apparent desire to query the general populace, did you even go so far as to ask the tiny non-representative membership of the bicentennial committee itself?

Or, rather, did you glance at the history of the park site and conclude that any city so ineptly willing to decimate a historic post office building and permit the devastated footprint to go perpetually to seed over a period of almost 50 years afterward does not deserve to be considered capable of grasping movable furniture?

At this point, I thought it wise to search "movable furniture," and the very first hit reveals a factoid with which Andriot and his firm might readily (and unfortunately) agree: New York City is the sort of place where they're actually ready for movable furniture (see below).

There, but not here ... okay, so why?

Are we that much dumber, and New Yorkers that much smarter, that we can't even be asked by the designer?

Ahh, but maybe it isn't because ordinary New Albanians don't get it.

Maybe it's because the cadre of top-downers, those same suspects, self-appointed to spoon feed us their conventional white bread wisdom without sharing what passes for reasoning, don't understand movable furniture themselves, and the designer has wisely chosen not to offend his somewhat paymasters (a frightened, hands-off city council ensures they operate sans accountability) by instead casually offending those of us in the general populace: after all, if the powers that be were not going to solicit public input for a $750K project, why the hell would the landscape architect care to do so, either?

I suppose that in this sense, the Bicentennial already has become wonderfully and delightfully New Albany, which is to say, the same tired, congenital, wearisome song and dance.

The Battery Conservancy Americas Design Competition 2012 Invites You to Draw Up Chair

The Battery Conservancy invites students and professionals from the Americas (Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), to design an iconic moveable outdoor seating element. The winning design will be fabricated for use at The Battery, the 25-acre park at the tip of Manhattan which annually welcomes six million visitors.

Why a Moveable Chair?
As the great urban theorist William Holly Whyte discovered: “Chairs enlarge choice: to move into the sun, out of it, to make room for groups, move away from them. If you know you can move if you want to, you feel more comfortable staying put.” The Battery’s movable chairs will delight while they invite, animating the park and making it Downtown’s central meeting place.

A little comparative park shopping in North Carolina.

Below is 230 N. Tryon Street in Charlotte, North Carolina-- a decrepit, city-owned parking lot next to a long defunct 85-year-old theater. Look familiar? It's only slightly smaller than the corner of Spring and Pearl.

Its neighbor, the Foundation for the Carolinas, has been negotiating with city government to purchase and renovate the theater for some time. In preparation for the then upcoming Democratic National Convention in September, the City decided in mid-July to allow the foundation to turn the lot into a pocket park while it decides on the possible sale. The whole real estate and rehabilitation deal will take several years anyway. The work was completed in less than two months with $150,000 in foundation funds and community donations.

(photos from Charlotte Magazine and the Charlotte Observer)

The Week That Was: Parks and highways we don't need, and a festival we need to evolve -- in 10,000 words or less.

It was a busy week at NAC. When Councilman CeeSaw showed up in a second-hand Paul Bunyan costume while chainsaws revved and Rent Boy Park began taking shape, social media drove the story.

Meanwhile, having intended the week to serve as Harvest Homecoming preview, column inches were devoted to speculation as to when, if ever, New Albany's signature event plans on changing with new times downtown.

Harvest Homecoming: Do the evolution, don't fear the competition.

Harvest Homecoming: Not what downtown is about.

Harvest Homecoming: When the tail wags the dog, we pause.

REWIND: Revisiting the Swill Walk (2007).

But there was another important story, perhaps trumping them all:

"Does Louisville Need More Highways?"

Ideas. Why is our vicinity of residence so opposed to them?

Nash: "Trees here in New Albany have had a little harder time of it."

Matt offers the coda to this week's latest outbreak of the dreaded New Albany Syndrome, followed by links to NAC's coverage.

NASH: I think that I shall never see ..., by Matt Nash (News and Tribune)

... One of my friends stated that “only in New Albany do you cut down trees in order to build a park.” The sentiment may ring true but it is not entirely accurate. In 2010 the city of Jeffersonville cleared 15 acres of mature trees in order to build a park. With both the city of New Albany and Jeffersonville’s decisions to cut down trees in order to build parks, the question of transparency has been raised. New Albany has a tree board that should have been consulted, but from the reports I have heard this was not the case.

Is there room in there for a shuffleboard table?

ON THE AVENUES: Saw Through City, redux.

Breaking: In response to TimberGate ...

Acorns may be nuts, too, but at least they produce trees.

Caesaring trees to build a park: What (unfortunately) downtown IS about.

And so the Bicentennial begins at Spring and Pearl...

Is there room in there for a shuffleboard table?

Photo credits: M. Nash/Google Earth.

ON THE AVENUES: Saw Through City, redux.

ON THE AVENUES: Saw Through City, redux.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

On Monday morning, we awoke to a familiar phenomenon in the annals of New Albany.

Without fanfare, a timbering operation suddenly began spewing sawdust downtown. In the absence of advance discussion as to why this was happening, it appeared that mature trees were being felled in order to build … a park? Among the victims: An evergreen tree once planted as a veteran's memorial, an early warning sign that hereabouts, institutional memory is a safeguard best erased, lest conscience intrude.

Unsurprisingly, an overdue public conversation began.

Was it true that what will amount to a pocket park the size of many back yards was going to cost $750,000 to construct, when all was said and spent?

Could it be that the city’s only recently re-animated Tree Board was entirely unaware of the logging, even though two of its members also sit on the Bicentennial Junta promoting the boondoggle park scheme?

Exactly why does councilman Bob Caesar persist in believing that three-quarter-million dollar pocket parks across from this business, $2 million dollar multiple road rebuilds leading to his house on Silver Hills, and $200 dollar bicentennial “fundraising” tomes that were his brainchild somehow constitute fiscal rectitude, even as he screams poverty in response to other more worthy aims, such as a complete streets program?

And: Did they really think we’re so eager for Harvest Homecoming’s elephant ear of a sugar buzz to begin that we’d refrain from asking these questions?

---

By Tuesday morning, city government was in full scattershot reactive mode, and the press releases began flying – except that none of these typically belated explanations landed where the clear-cutting story actually originated on blogs and in social media, because the impetus for the civic dialogue that our elected officials had imperially judged unnecessary clearly came first from the grassroots, and only afterward was picked up by traditional media.

By Wednesday, the saga was being reported in the main local newspapers, and the city was hastening to explain that the trees in question were diseased, or perhaps just unhealthy, or unsightly, something like that; oddly, the diagnosis apparently was proffered not by the city’s own arborist, but one in the employ of the engineers chosen to design the over-priced Caesar’s Folly park project.

As the criticism continued, yet another talking point emerged: The bad condition of the felled trees owed to chronic trimming butchery on the part of Duke Energy.

(We pause here for an announcement from the blog’s founder: NATIONALIZE THE UTILITIES NOW)

All the while, the city’s own social media outlets exuded a serene, oblivious and detached calm, sticking with their daily output of public service announcements and links.

Just like Pravda during Chernobyl.

---

In 2013, the city of New Albany will celebrate its 200th birthday, and it’s impossible to imagine a more symbolic bicentennial chapter than this week’s muddled events.

But one must begin the story in the 1960’s, as the presumed Greatest Generation stepped up to the task of remaking its downtown sandbox in its own triumphant image.

Accordingly, an architecturally magnificent post office building was destroyed to create a parking lot and drive-thru window for a bank, itself constructed where the architecturally magnificent court house building stood until it was bulldozed.

When the bank was able to level yet another aging marvel to bring its parking lot a few feet closer to the vault, the post office lot became a perennial afterthought, housing a cement block Harvest Homecoming reviewing stand used variously as skateboard ramp, graffiti easel and homeless shelter, before eventually being purchased by a slumlord intent on extracting parking rentals from nearby business employees.

The parking lot was chronically neglected, the scraps tossed to other slumlords, until finally the providential moment arrived for the last slumlord standing to deal his ilk out of the shell game by flipping the parking lot a final time, to the city, and of course for far more than it was worth, because by now the stated imperative had become the city’s birthday party – and golly, we need to move fast seeing as we’ve waited so long!.

Assembling the usual upstanding citizens, those habitually populating every known committee in town (remember the Howard Johnson scene in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles”?), a commission was formed, and soon it was solemnly decreed that we must celebrate the bicentennial in the “proper” white-bread way, or more succinctly, just as those community pillars from the 1960’s – the ones who demolished the post office in the first place – would themselves have enthusiastically endorsed:

By designing a tea and crumpets pocket park, sailing it through a disinterested, exurban-minded council eager for nothing more than to be left alone, leveraging the Horseshoe Foundation into tithing a few dollars to make the deal appear cooperative, felling the trees already there without any notice, and then reacting with dazed confusion when residents voiced their concerns.

Anyone else care to join me in wondering how much of this story appears in the mercenary Crutchfield’s “official” $200 coffee table book?

---

It is not my aim today to savage or malign hard-working, well-intentioned, civic-minded people. After all, I’m one, too.

Rather, it is what they do when banded together as committees that I find worrisome.

Allow me to advance the notion that in this numbingly predictable bicentennial miasma – the absence of transparency, the indefensible expenditures, the clique-driven picking of favorites who “know best”, and their ensuing “official” party line about the city’s past – we’re once again perpetuating the dysfunctional aspect of our municipal history in the direst need of invasive, corrective therapy.

And, lastly: Well-intentioned or otherwise, none of them seem to be able to grasp the irony of it. What we really need most to mark our bicentennial is city-wide psychiatric help, and a new marketing slogan: City On The Couch.

Unfortunately, we can’t pay a shrink because the money’s all spent on a book, a park and the same old scene.

Breaking: In response to TimberGate ...

equestrianCeesaw.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">equestrianCeesaw.jpg" width="320" />

 ... we get another 600K design feature for Rent Boy Park.

Acorns may be nuts, too, but at least they produce trees.

How heartened I was to learn that, due to "irrevocable damage", the numerous Pin Oak trees at the corner of Spring and Pearl (which, unlike other city property, in just the past few years survived a hurricane and a tornado) would be replaced with "regionally appropriate" trees, say, like... Pin Oaks.

 

"Pin oak is among the most widely planted native oaks in the urban landscape and the third most common street tree in New York City. It tolerates drought, poor soils and is easy to transplant. The tree is naturally found throughout the Ohio River Basin..." - Steve Nix, professional forester, Society of American Foresters

"Pin oak (Quercus palustris), also called swamp oak, water oak, and swamp Spanish oak, is a fast-growing, moderately large tree found on bottom lands or moist uplands, often on poorly drained clay soils. Best development is in the Ohio Valley. The wood is hard and heavy and is used in general construction and for firewood. Pin oak transplants well and is tolerant of the many stresses of the urban environment, so has become a favored tree for streets and landscapes."  - Robert A. McQuilkin, USDA Forest Service

Or are we to believe that native hardwood trees of the sort specifically selected across the country for their urban durability are not the "proper species" for our overpriced, under produced, and now permanently damaged little city pocket park (which just happens to be located in an urban area in the Ohio Valley)?

 

Caesaring trees to build a park: What (unfortunately) downtown IS about.

The pillage has resumed at the future site of Rent Boy Park/Caesar's Folly. Trees are being felled ... during a thunderstorm. Another year, another tone deaf administration. As Bluegill wrote on Facebook:

We overpaid a slumlord for the lot, overpaid for the design, and for the projected cost of what is essentially a backyard-sized project, we could've had a restored bicentennial hall. The whole thing stinks of England era payouts and favoritism. Hooray us, 200 years worth of the same Tammany Hall crap.

That summarizes it. Thanks to K for the photo.