Gold Rush Park is a wonderful vision, truly a grand plan for Sacramento, and is being led by people who believe in it and will persist in seeing it through.
That is an unbeatable combination, and Sacramento will someday embrace its great park, and be the better city, a great city, for it.
An excerpt.
Lawyer readies bandwagon for his grand park plan
By Mary Lynne Vellinga -- Bee Staff Writer Published 12:01 am PDT Monday, July 17, 2006
These are the oft-quoted words of architect Daniel Burnham, who led Chicago's audacious and ultimately successful quest to host the 1893 World's Fair and eclipse an attendance record previously set by Paris.
Burnham went on to design the lakefront park system credited with helping make modern Chicago a beautiful and livable city.
Sacramento lawyer Joe Genshlea appropriated Burnham's credo last week for a PowerPoint presentation he made at a Thursday breakfast meeting of more than 100 of Sacramento's leading citizens.
His goal: To rally attendees behind his ambitious -- some would say quixotic -- proposal to transform an industrial district along the American River north of downtown into a 655-acre park studded with museums, a botanical garden and a San Diego-sized zoo.
"You'll see that I took (Burnham's words) to heart," Genshlea told those gathered at the Sheraton Grand Hotel. "This is not a little plan."
Gold Rush Park, as Genshlea has dubbed it, would be nearly triple the size of William Land Park and almost as big as Central Park in New York. Genshlea envisions an additional 315 acres adjacent to the park being developed to pay for its construction.
The swath of green space would stretch south of the American River to Richards Boulevard, bordered on the east by the Capital City Freeway and on the west by the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers.
Within the next two months, Genshlea and his supporters said, they plan to go before the Sacramento City Council and ask that the park be included in the new city general plan.
