Come hear about the visionaries behind Boulder’s Central Park from the past Director of the City of Boulder’s Planning Department.
In the early 1900s most of the town seemed united over the question of growth, since both the commercial interests, the so-called “Boosters,” and those interested in improvements, beautification, and various moral causes, the “Improvers,” wanted to grow. The question was, “what kind of growth?” The Boulder Commercial Association, founded in 1905, wanted to add more manufacturing to the mix and led a public subscription campaign to bring a sugar factory to Boulder in 1907, a campaign that failed. While there were earlier efforts at organizing improvement societies, in 1903 the “Improvers” had organized themselves under the banner of the Boulder City Improvement Association, the BCIA. Their purpose was “to cooperate with all other organizations and individuals in the work of bettering and beautifying the town.” This included better parks, better streets, better government, and a city of homes that would attract students to the University.
Who were the “Improvers?” Junius Henderson, President; Eben G. Fine, Vice President; Dr. William Baird, Secretary; Fred White, Treasurer; Maud Clark Gardiner Odell, Chair of Standing Committee on Education, Floral Culture, Schools, Window Gardening, and Play Grounds.
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was a accomplished landscape architect, city planner and conservationist. He was the son of Frederick Law Olmsted, who was a designer of New York’s Central Park and the “Father of Landscape Architecture.” Olmsted Jr. was born on July 24th 1870 in Staten Island New York and died on December 25th 1957. He died at 87 in Malibu and was buried in Hartford Connecticut. In 1908, Olmsted was invited to the Boulder City Improvement Association (BCIA). He gave numerous recommendations for Boulder. One recommendation was that Boulder is best not as a western town where people made money quickly and moved on. Boulder is, and should be, a community with a lifestyle that can be enjoyed.
Olmsted’s primary role was to advise the BCIA on a plan of improvements that they would champion, but with an eye to changing the minds of the other townsfolk as well. His focus was on improvements to be made within the public realm, and not on private property. Zoning was not to come to Boulder until 1928 through the work of another planning consultant, Saco Rienk DeBoer. Olmsted is best known locally as the inspiration for the treatment of land along Boulder Creek, in both the more formal parks near today’s Civic Area and throughout its run through Boulder in the form of a multipurpose greenway. In 1923 Olmsted looked at a stretch of Boulder Creek from 9th Street to 17th Street and created a unified plan for civic improvements. This larger plan envisioned a memorial to those who served in and those who lost their lives in World War I, the location for a city hall, an athletic field, and park and pathway improvements. Due to the vagaries of resident sentiment and legal judgment, a successful bond measure to fund the project was then struck down by the State courts, and then failed at the ballot box on a second try. This lack of funding led to a much smaller park in the area bounded by present day Broadway, Canyon, 13th and Arapahoe known as Central Park. About a quarter of the land had been owned by the railroad and was leased by the city in 1921, and then acquired in 1933. Olmsted’s design shows plantings concentrated along its perimeter, and a greensward created in the interior to the benefit of the people within the park.
Peter Pollock, FAICP, is an urban and environmental planner based in Boulder, Colorado.
From 2006 to 2018 he managed Western Programs for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy where he worked on climate resilience, collaborative landscape conservation, scenario planning tools,and peer to peer learning for planning directors. He worked for almost 25 years for the City of Boulder, Colorado as both a current and long-range planner, and he served as director of the city’s Planning Department from 1999 to 2006.
Pollock began his career as the staff urban planner for the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, where he specialized in solar access protection, energy-conserving land use planning, and outreach to local communities. He received his master’s degree in Landscape Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 and his bachelor’s degree in Environmental Planning at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1976. He was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1998.
9 июл 2024
