The greening of Seattle’s commercial waterfront could not happen until a blighting highway was ripped down and a crumbling sea wall replaced.
Impatient ice skaters await the replacement for the Lasker Rink and Pool in Central Park, and its restored setting. Called the Harlem Meer Center, it is the largest restoration ever undertaken by the Central Park Conservancy.
At Olana, the home of the 19th-century Hudson River painter Frederic Church, a painstaking restoration has brought back the artist’s lost Romantic landscape.
The venerable Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley has “reimagined” itself with a playfully swaying greenhouse rising from a shallow pool. It opens as 200 acres of outdoor displays settle into winter slumber.
This is a golden age for parks, with cities sprucing up waterfronts, transforming abandoned industrial sites and bringing some green space to neighborhoods where treeless cracked-asphalt sports courts are the rule.
These eagerly awaited, high-ambition park and garden projects will open when trees are bare and people are choosing indoor pursuits. If this seems counterintuitive, consider that each took more than a decade to come to fruition and navigated construction complications and supply-chain delays. Opening at the perfect moment wasn’t an option. All will offer distinctive experiences to the intrepid cold-weather patron — and will be visitor-tested by the time crowds flock in the spring and summer.
Seattle’s Waterfront Park, a ‘New Front Porch’
Visitors and locals already swarm a new promenade hugging Seattle’s downtown commercial shoreline, where beefy wood-framed wharves alternate with vistas across Elliott Bay. They dodge construction fences and heavy equipment, as a line of trees and dense plantings come together, interwoven with bike lanes, quiet shaded paths, stormwater-filtering bioswales, and public artwork (much of which tells stories of Indigenous tribes).
There’s even a recreated natural beach, restoring the kind of gravelly shoreline where Coast Salish tribes harvested shellfish and salmon.
James Corner, founder of Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm that designed Waterfront Park, calls it a “new front porch” for the city. The firm has been dodging regulation and construction contingencies since 2010.
In part the crowds are celebrating the waterfront’s emergence from the shadow of the fume- and noise-spewing Alaskan Way Viaduct, which formed a highway barrier that Seattleites reviled since its construction in the 1950s. Its 2019 demolition made room for the promenade.
Though the full 20 acres won’t open until early spring, an acrobatic section of the park welcomed the public Oct. 4. The Overlook Walk rises in a pair of curved stairways where the promenade takes a sharp turn inland around a new Ocean Pavilion serving the Seattle Aquarium. As visitors ascend a 110-foot bluff, culminating at the city’s famous Pike Place Market, vistas of downtown skyscrapers and the cranes of the container port open up, as does a moody expanse of Puget Sound (now increasingly referred to as the Salish Sea) that even on an inevitable gray day can offer views of mist-wrapped islands and mountains below a pewter plane of clouds. (Elevators serve the mobility-challenged and those who think only fitness fanatics would climb so many stairs.)
Marshall Foster, who heads Seattle Center, the park’s operating entity, and who has worn a number of hats during the 15-year project, called it a multibillion-dollar infrastructure rebuild led by the landscape design. The viaduct had to come down, a $3.3 billion replacement tunnel had to be bored, and a tangle of aging utilities needed to be rebuilt before the $781 million park could begin construction. The first phase replaced the waterfront’s sea wall, into which Field Operations scribed niches to encourage colonization by harbor species friendly to migrating juvenile salmon. It works, according to University of Washington researchers.
The city’s civic and business leaders think — or desperately hope — that the park crowds will spread into downtown’s commercial core, which is still too quiet, because of years of remote work. Foster is an optimist. “Though the Waterfront Park was in the pipeline well before the pandemic,” he said, “it has preloaded a shot in the arm for downtown.”
An Oval Pool Restores the Harlem Meer
The Loula D. Lasker skating rink and swimming pool was Central Park’s most jarring addition, a concrete flying saucer that looked as if it crash landed in a ravine at the edge of the Harlem Meer, the picturesque lake that meanders across much of the park’s northern edge. At its 1966 opening, the New York Times’s architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable let ’er rip, calling it “an oppressively jazzed-up military installation of sawtooth-trimmed concrete.” It also leaked from the beginning.
Now a $160 million replacement, named the Gottesman Pool and Rink, is coming to completion and will open in the first quarter of 2025 for skating.
Susan T. Rodriguez, who heads her own architecture firm (working with Mitchell Giurgola), stretched the round pool into an oval and tucked it into the eastern slope of the ravine, tight against the park drive. The new pool, with a shallow slope at one end to invite children and people with disabilities, can be covered with an artificial turf lid; the rink goes on top. The lid extends the usefulness of the facility. Lasker was only used two months for swimming and four months for skating.
The contractor has been placing several feet of soil atop the roof of the 30,000-square-foot Davis Center, a building containing concessions, changing rooms and equipment. The soil supports plantings that will make the building largely invisible to the hordes of cyclists that whiz around it on the East Park Drive. The Conservancy’s landscape architects, led by Christopher Nolan, have shaped sloping planted areas around the edge of the new rink so that it nestles near to — rather than bulges into — the Meer. “The goal was to emphasize the landscape experience” for visitors, “rather than using landscape to soften the impact of the building as an object,” Nolan said in an email.
As a bonus, the trimmer new footprint makes room for the restoration of a lost mini-estuary. A stream flows north from the Pool in a series of ponds and waterfalls braided with paths through the North Woods Ravine, then spills through the picturesquely stacked boulders of the Huddlestone Arch beneath the park drive. The Lasker rink, by damming the ravine and confronting path users with a high wall and untidy service area, had forced the stream into a pipe.
Now it is reopened to daylight, with its boulder-strewn course running along the west side of the rink-pool. The view from the arch will unfold as the original designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, intended, with the spreading of the stream into the calm surface of the Meer framed by trees.
While happily shrieking skaters will be the first to enjoy the new rink, the full scope of the project — which over decades has entailed additional Meer restoration and a total of $310 million — won’t reveal itself fully until summer, as water-loving plants edging the Meer invite turtles and egrets. Largely native trees and shrubs will complete the softly Romantic landscape silhouette the designers intended.
Church’s Romantic Vision Reconstructed at Olana
Among the most striking historic sites in the Hudson River Valley is Olana, the polychromed masonry pile built atop a high hill by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), among the most beloved painters of the 19th-century Hudson River School. Its exotic architecture, dubbed “Persian Gothic” by the art historian John Wilmerding, hosts Orientalist interiors featuring paintings by Church as well as other art and decorative objects.
From the house’s numerous vantages, Church could gaze upon and paint the Hudson River as it curved lazily around the property to the southwest. He captured roiling clouds above the river and lurid sunsets behind the tree-carpeted slopes and sharp peaks of the Catskill Mountains that march into the distance.
Though the house and its breathtaking views have been the primary draw, many of the 250 acres that Church acquired around the hilltop and turned into an idealized Romantic landscape have now been restored.
Beginning in 1860, Church bought land that had been denuded of vegetation for timber and subsistence farms. Over decades, he “planted trees by the thousands,” explained Sean Sawyer, president of the Olana Partnership, the nonprofit stewardship entity that operates this New York State historic site.
He shaped his new forest to frame meadows that opened vistas to hilltops and other picturesque natural landmarks. He dug a pond which visitors encounter as they begin the ascent to the house. He connected the meadows he planted with carriage trails that gently wind up the steep slopes. He would paint and sketch from the vantages he had constructed and shared these idealized places with visitors.
Though the house was designed by Vaux, working at that time with Olmsted (Church’s fourth cousin) on Central Park, “the landscape was entirely engineered by Church,” Sawyer said on a tour. He united the house and its setting as an “artistic environment, a total work of art.”
The problem in 2015, when a master plan was drawn up by the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, was that Church’s work had largely vanished due to neglect. The meadows had been obliterated by invasive tree growth.
“Our task was to physically re-establish Church’s intentions,” said Thomas Woltz, the senior principal. With painstaking research and projects undertaken over years, visitors can again appreciate most of Church’s constructed natural world. “The idea is that no one would know we had been there,” Woltz added.
A new Frederic Church Center for Art and Landscape also welcomes visitors at the site’s edge. Interpretive displays will acquaint visitors with features they may have overlooked in the past, such as the bucolic cluster of farm structures that Church called the Ferme Ornée.
The architecture firm ARO has designed the visitor center as a low, barn-red, wood-framed pavilion, hidden from Church’s vistas and invisible beyond Olana’s borders.
A stone stair ascends from the center to a tiny clearing framed by trees. There a reclaimed view unfolds across the pond, up a meadow and through a gap to the grand house rising from the hilltop. Church, Woltz observed, “leads you upward to seduce you with this vista.”
Longwood Gardens Reimagined Under Rippling Glass
Inspired by the glass houses of Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition, Pierre S. du Pont, the longtime chairman of the company then called E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., spared no expense when he founded Longwood Gardens in the 1920s. It is a 200-acre display garden that includes a conservatory complex, thematic exhibits, topiaries, a 600-jet water-fountain garden and a meadow inspired by Andrew Wyeth paintings. It lies within larger holdings totaling 1,000 acres in the Brandywine Valley at the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania.
The palatial formality of Longwood’s famous conservatories, where visitors walk around large, densely planted set pieces pierced by flowing water, contrasts with the immersive new West Conservatory that subtly dips, kinking a bit to one side, seeming almost to shimmy. It floats atop a reflecting pool. That’s quite an act for a 32,000-square-foot greenhouse.
There is a method to the apparent oddness of this centerpiece of “Longwood Reimagined,” a $250 million project that adds several new attractions to the greenhouse core as well as a restaurant that opens toward the fountain garden and its choreographed water spectacles.
The saw-toothed profile of the new conservatory shapes subtly warping bays that vary in height from 15 to 48 feet. Supporting columns rise, then curl like unfurling fronds, to support the glass roof. The intention of this manipulation of the conventionally symmetrical botanic greenhouse, said Marion Weiss, co-founder of the architecture firm Weiss/Manfredi, is to “taper some perspectives and open others up.”
In the West Conservatory, visitors find themselves immersed in permanent and changing plantings native to Mediterranean climates worldwide, orchestrated by the landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand.
The conservatory extends the visitor itinerary that moves westward from the original greenhouse complex but used to end abruptly at a traditional waterlily court. Weiss/Manfredi restored this court and used it to frame a close-up view of the new building behind a scrim of ginkgo trees.
Other elements of the “Reimagined” project are tucked around the glass house. A diminutive greenhouse encloses the Cascade Garden, a painstaking reconstruction of the stylish little tropical rainforest conjured by the beloved Brazilian Modernist landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. A similarly intimate garden court, screened by hedges, hosts a bonsai collection. Weiss’s co-founder, Michael Manfredi, describes the informal arrangement of these attractions as “a checkerboard of gardens and crystal pavilions.”
Hilderbrand draws the eye to a stand of London plane trees given pride of place on a grassy rise. They front a Brandywine Valley meadow view that seems infinite.
“Creating beauty and bringing joy to people through the gardens we share — that’s what we do,” explained Paul Redman, Longwood’s chief executive. Its expansion opens Nov. 22, past the time when outdoor gardens die back. “It’s our slowest season,” Redman said, “but now we offer almost five acres of gardens under glass.”
The post Four Must-See Parks Opening in Fall Herald a New Golden Age appeared first on New York Times.
