This article was published in Inside Arden, August 2006, (pp. 36 & 41).
City Voices: Our Emerald Necklace
Why We Need Gold Rush Park
By David H. Lukenbill
Gold Rush Park is a planned 970 acre development at the confluence of the Sacramento and American River. It would replace the existing warehouse, business, and apartments with parks and open space, fine arts and performing arts venues, a zoo, botanical gardens and conservatories, and a canal district with boating and restaurants, housing and shops.
For virtually all of its history Sacramento’s two riverbanks have been our back alleys, where all the places we don’t want to look at wind up, while the two rivers have flooded so many times they have been leveed to the point of recreational and visual unusability.
In the suburbs the American River Parkway embraces the American River, creating sanctuary and delighting all who use it. In urban Sacramento there is nothing that embraces the rivers as beautifully, elegantly and completely as Gold Rush Park will, by fully bringing our two rivers into the marriage with the capital city which so many have long wished for.
Sacramento has the elements, as Joel Kotkin notes in his book The City, which form the foundation from which great cities are built, “the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and host for a commercial market…”.
Here is what Gold Rush Park will do:
1. It will form the jeweled pendant in an emerging vision of greenways, riverways, parks, and trails that will eventually embrace our region like a golden necklace from Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, where gold was first discovered by James Marshall in 1848, to the confluence in Sacramento, the gateway to the gold fields. This will create one of the most spectacular linking of parks, history and water in the nation, rivaling Boston’s famed Emerald Necklace.
This golden necklace, with Gold Rush Park as its beginning, would stretch east along the American River Parkway up to Folsom and beyond, all the way to Sutter’s Mill, reaching back and then south along the Laguna Creek Trail System down into the Cosumnes River Preserve Corridor, then west flowing back to the Sacramento River, and heading north back up to the confluence.
2. Along with the California Indian Heritage Center planned just across the American River, the park will memorialize the greatest migration of peoples in the history of the western hemisphere and commemorate the tragedy that the migration inflicted on California Indians.
3. Pedestrian and bike bridges will connect the park with the American River Parkway to create the largest urban park in the nation (surpassing the 5,000 acre Forest Park in Portland) and serve as an appropriate setting of land and water for the capital of the largest, most beautiful state in our country.
4. The vision for Gold Rush Park is financially feasible, beginning to be embraced by local public leadership, and possible to accomplish. The assemblage of supporters is broad, with deep roots in the history, commerce and public service of our region. This visionary marriage of land, water, commerce, history, and people can happen here as it has happened elsewhere.
Portland, with its award winning Eastbank Esplanade and the River Renaissance project, continues to have success creating its river-front as a vibrant front porch for the city; Boston’s Emerald Necklace and San Antonio’s Riverwalk are legendary; and White River State Park in Indianapolis 20 years ago began replacing an urban industrial area, and now is home to the Indianapolis Zoo, a baseball stadium, IMAX theater, the Indiana State Museum, and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial, the NCAA Hall of Champions and The Lawn, an outdoor performance venue overlooking the White River with seating for 5,000.
5. Gold Rush Park will be the capstone project that will complete the long regeneration of the downtown, finally making Sacramento a world-class, destination city—where people come just to wander its parks, boat and fish its rivers, shop in its stores and explore its zoo, museums, galleries and historical sites.
Gold Rush Park has all of the elements to make Sacramento a truly great river city.
For more information visit www.sacramentovalleyconservancy.org or www.arconservancy.org
David H. Lukenbill is the Founding President and Senior Policy Director of the American River Parkway Preservation Society and chairs the American River Parkway Task Force of the North Sacramento Chamber of Commerce.
