Letter from the President
Building a City of Parks
Dear Readers,
While my typical communications with you through this newsletter will be brief, I have chosen to adopt as my first letter the foreword I wrote for our master plan. While more lengthy than the norm, I felt that it was important, in our inaugural issue, to frame our project and its purposes clearly for you. This, I hope achieves that with a comprehensive statement of our vision and the way in which our master plan, now moving into the design phase, begins to bring that vision to reality for the citizens of Louisville and the surrounding region.
In the early 1890s, Frederick Law Olmsted, the greatest landscape architect in American history, came to Louisville to design one of his masterpieces: the Louisville Park System. Working on lands located well beyond the edge of the city, Olmsted created a ring of parks and parkways that remains one of Louisville's most remarkable assets. Swallowed by the city as it grew, they are today urban parks that create some of the most livable neighborhoods in the nation. Only a handful of Olmsted's system designs were ever completed, and Louisville is one of those places, a fact that landed Louisville a prominent place, along with New York and Boston, in National Geographic magazine's wonderful profile of Olmsted in the spring of 2005. As the city grew around these parks in the early twentieth century, they perfectly encapsulated Olmsted's vision of bringing nature into neighborhoods as a way of shaping a city's geography, its social interactions, and its economies. Not just a designer, Olmsted sought to use parks—as designed public spaces—to artfully integrate the environment and economics in the service of our social fabric. Connecting the community, and its neighborhoods, was as important as shaping the city's geography.
Despite this early vision, like most American cities following World War II, Louisville grew horizontally at a dramatic pace, and its allocation of parks and open spaces lagged. At the same time, what land was set aside was not integrated into the surrounding neighborhoods as Olmsted's parks had been. As we enter the twenty-first century-projected by demographers as a world of nine billion people, mostly living in cities by 2050-it is critical that we provide opportunities to bring nature back into the city in a significant way. It is the purpose of 21st Century Parks, Inc., and its master plan for The Floyds Fork Greenway Project ("The Fork"), to relearn the lessons of the Olmsted generation. To that end, we and our partners together have acquired, and protected in perpetuity, over 3200 acres of new parklands along Louisville Metro's fast-growing eastern and southern edges, and have hired one of the nation's premier design firms—Wallace, Roberts, and Todd of Philadelphia—to bring world-class design to these parks. Just as Olmsted embedded an environmental, social, and economic vision of parklands in beautiful designs, we want to do so again using a twenty-first century design vocabulary to create a lasting legacy for future generations.
The master plan that follows in these pages is a testimony to the integration of the diversity of uses the citizens of Louisville have expressed for these parks. It integrates over forty separately acquired parcels of land into a new series of public parks, preserved along Floyds Fork, a charming Kentucky stream that flows along the eastern edge of Louisville Metro. It also balances active recreational uses with large preserved natural areas. Whiles its vision encompasses sports fields, community parks, a park drive, and multi-use recreational trails for bikes, horses, hikers, and canoeists, it still sets aside over 80% of its acreage as naturally restored and managed woodlands, wetlands, and meadows. Finally, this plan integrates these open spaces into the city by creating gateways along major access routes, not just for cars, but also for bikes and walkers.
In the end, we want these parks to live up to an ideal of design and beauty that Olmsted himself would appreciate, albeit in the twenty-first century context of sustainable design. Wallace, Roberts, and Todd envisions a linear park system, linked by a park drive, trails, and natural habitat—always shadowing the central thread of Floyds Fork—to create a series of varied experiences, from the soft sibilance of a canoe sliding along the seam of a rapid to the crack of a baseball bat to the quiet contemplation of a countryman's woods. 21st Century Parks wants these parks to be well-used and well-loved, like the worn leather of a ballplayer's glove; otherwise, like many fragile parks before them, they will not survive. We demand excellence in park programming, so that we will provide our community with the recreation it needs for healthy, fun living. We also demand excellence in resource stewardship, in order to create healthy urban forests and wildlife habitats that will contribute to the overall ecological health of the watershed. And finally, we demand excellence in park operations, so that these parks will be clean, safe, and well-maintained at all times, now and far into the future. This includes the provision of sustainable funding. To that end, our plans call for the creation of a major endowment—already partly funded—that will ensure that our vision of excellence survives into the future.
A project of this size could not be achieved without the help of many people and perhaps its most striking characteristic is the strength of the partnerships that created it. Without the visionary leadership of Dr. Steve Henry of The Future Fund land trust, who saw the possibilities of Floyds Fork, and moved to protect land along it long before the creation of 21st Century Parks, none of this would be possible. United States Senator Mitch McConnell sponsored the earliest study of Floyds Fork in 1981, and has secured almost $40,000,000 in federal funding for infrastructure and park improvements. A portion of those funds financed the master plan that follows. Mayor Jerry Abramson and the Louisville Metro Parks Department have acquired several incredible parks along Floyds Fork, and continue to provide visionary leadership to our community on this, and many other issues. The Trust for Public Land brings national leadership and competence in land acquisition and park design. The Federal Highway Administration and The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, as managers of the federal funds, have been incredible partners. The Kentucky Heritage Land Conservation Fund has provided funding for several of the parcels within the master plan. Local donors and philanthropists have contributed over $26,000,000 to fund the purchase and preservation of much of the 3200 acres acquired to date. Finally, and most importantly, thousands of Louisville residents have provided crucial input to this master plan through attendance at public meetings, presentations, letters, emails, and phone calls. They are truly preparing the way for future generations.
In the future, exciting outdoor opportunities will abound, as you will see in the master plan. They include biking or strolling along The Louisville Loop, winding along a park drive across beautiful bridges, canoeing Floyds Fork, hiking quietly into a protected woodland, or assisting in the reforestation of stream banks along Floyds Fork. You may study natural history, play softball, or take your children to a playground after walking a mile on an exercise path. The possibilities are endless, but they begin here, with the master plan that is so thoroughly recounted in the following pages.
When I first coined the phrase "City of Parks" for Louisville, a phrase now thoughtfully applied to Louisville Metro's parks vision, I intended it to capture one of Louisville's most unique qualities, first bequeathed to us by Olmsted and his beautiful parks. That vision projects a place where people live close to recreational opportunities, where their neighborhoods flow seamlessly into their parks and children and families can stay in contact with nature. The twentieth-first century will be a world of nine billion, living in and around cities, making the reintroduction of nature as a central feature in urban life more important than ever before. As you browse our newsletter, and learn more about this project, help us to imagine a vision to keep Louisville The City of Parks for the next century.
Sincerely,
Daniel H. Jones, M.F., Ph.D.
Chairman and CEO, 21st Century Parks, Inc.