The visionary thinking that created Boston’s Emerald Necklace is alive in Atlanta and can be an inspiration for Sacramento, for whom the framework exists for our own Golden Necklace, written about in an earlier article I wrote about what the visionary Gold Rush Park , their site at http://www.goldrushpark.org/ would do for Sacramento:
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.
Atlanta's Emerald Necklace
A city known for traffic and sprawl sets the standard for 21st-century parks with a 22-mile circle of green.
By Todd Wilkinson
When the Reverend Gerald L. Durley speaks of a new green gospel, he doesn't mince words. "Let's face it," says the charismatic community activist from the south side of Atlanta, "the environmental movement in this country hasn't always been real inclusive of African Americans. For a long time, the welcome mat extended to us has been like a party invitation sent in the mail but covered in mud."
These days, however, Pastor Durley is preaching urban conservation from the pulpit—in part because a revolutionary park concept is taking shape in his city, where he ministers to 1,500 parishioners at Providence Missionary Baptist Church. "I truly believe that parks can be a way of bringing us closer to the Almighty," Durley says. "We all want to live in the Garden of Eden. If that makes me sound like a tree hugger, so be it."
Durley's inspiration is a big and bold vision known as the Atlanta BeltLine Initiative, which would create a 22- mile ribbon of interconnected parks, trails, light-rail routes, and landscape friendly development encircling downtown. By the time the BeltLine nears fruition in a quarter-century, upwards of $3 billion will have been spent on revitalizing the city's historic railroad corridor and adjacent neighborhoods, some of which have been regarded as blighted eyesores and symbols of urban decay for generations. In the way it proposes to link park-making with new transit, economic development, and community revitalization, the initiative also has national significance, shaping up as one of the most important pioneering park efforts of the 21st century.
"The BeltLine is changing the way cities across the country think about urban parks, and it is enabling Atlanta to ponder how it thinks about itself," says Jim Langford, state director of TPL's Georgia field office, which has played a cornerstone role in the project's planning and development. "Moments like this, in which a major city literally has an opportunity to reinvent itself, seldom happen. We need to seize upon it. Atlanta's been given a second chance, and what we're doing is unprecedented."
Atlanta reigns as the booming capital of the New South, headquarters to famous multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola and CNN. The city also holds the distinction of having hosted the 1996 Summer Olympic Games; supports a thriving arts community and successful professional sports franchises; and is home to nationally known political leaders, world-class universities, and the nation's busiest airport. But Atlanta is also known for some of the worst traffic congestion in the country. And in one notable category of civic resource, it clearly has missed the mark.
According to statistics gathered by TPL's Center for City Park Excellence, only 4.4 percent of Atlanta's total land area is set aside as public parks and open space—approximately half as much as the average of major U.S. cities of similar population density. Furthermore, the Big Peach ranks near the bottom among cities of similar size and density in acres of parkland per capita, offering fewer than nine acres for every thousand residents.
Park-Making for the New Millenium
The idea for the BeltLine as a transit corridor was born in 1999, as a master's thesis by Ryan Gravel, then a 27- year-old graduate student at Atlanta's Georgia Tech University. "Everybody asks if there was an aha! epiphany, and there really wasn't," says Gravel, now a trained architect who works as the city's coordinator of the BeltLine project. "I was looking at designs of infrastructure relating to public policy in the city and ended up focusing on the old railroad corridors."
Through the mid-20th century Atlanta's growth was fueled by its position as a railroad nexus of the South. By 1999, however, most of the rail corridors within the city were abandoned or little used, and Gravel thought that a solution to the city's transportation problems might be found in the mass transit and trails those corridors could support. In 2001, Gravel mailed packets of maps and a briefing paper on the BeltLine to dozens of influential people around town. One of these was Atlanta Councilwoman Cathy Woolard, who sat on the city's transportation committee and soon thereafter became city council president.
