I’m talking about a massive park in the absolute heart of the city. Located such that is naturally surrounded by city high rises. *People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I’m trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are. Yes I understand nyc has more, the point is centrally located.
Copied by younger cities in North Americ. You know, the cities younger than NYC that could have seen the value of setting aside a large area for parkland before it was developed.
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Of the top of my head (because I lived there) - Berlin has Tiergarten and London has Hyde Park. The latter is so so in size but the former is quite large.
Thinking further, I remembered that Paris has the Champ de Mars (surrounding the Eiffel Tower), which is about Hyde Park size.
Also plenty of cities have large forested areas that merge with the city proper and are not too far from the center, such as for example Grouse Mountain on the north side of Vancouver and Monsanto on the west side of Lisbon.
Notice how even the cities in Europe were space has been at a premium for a lot longer than in the Americas do at times have a big centrally located park.
Vancouver has Stanley Park right in the city too
Well, I’ve only visited for a few days and I like hiking so naturally I only had eyes for Grouse Mountain … ;)
I don’t know about other cities, but the ones I’ve lived near were simply too irregularly shaped. NYC was able to be built like a grid, but a city like, say, Buffalo (go Bills!) is both too wibbly wobbly as well as too cold to envision a park being used as a centerpiece.
I may remember incorrectly, but NY was only ‘able’ to build in a grid by displacing a lot of residents and tearing it all down to start from scratch
Some democracy their city is if they actively sought out the world’s most frustrating city design at such civilian expense (and with it not being free).
I’m honestly not that stupid but it kinda seems like that would be the least frustrating layout.
All the streets in NYC are numbered, none are known by any name. After a while that begins to feel tedious.
Numbered streets are great.
I’m glad someone likes them I guess.
Hi. I grew up in a city with named streets. One street can have four names depending on where you’re at on it. You’ve never had to deal with directing someone down a city full of that, apparently.
On the other hand, we have an area with lettered streets. L comes before M, N, O, P, etc. If you’re on F and need to get to C Street, you know you need to go up 3 blocks. Meanwhile, if you’re on Johnson and need to get to North York, you have to know that it’s the same street and changes names in 7 blocks.
They didn’t set it aside, they displaced people to make a park.
I’m honestly surprised that they haven’t followed up by just allowing the city to gradually eat the park.
Kings park, Perth.
Bigger than central park and high up on the only hill for miles
One of the great design tricks of Central Park is that at almost every entrance you go downhill. You are instantly cut off from the city noise.
I live in Chicago and we do have a big centrally located park, along with other smaller parks scattered around. It’s down by the lake, and they keep that big stupid bean there.
Pro tip for tourists, if you absolutely have to go see the bean don’t touch it; everybody touches the damn thing and you will get sick. Go look at the Picasso instead. It’s on all of the tourist attraction maps and way more interesting than a big shiny bean.
Why would I ever choose to go to Chicago? From an outside perspective it sounds like a total shit hole.
Was just out there a month ago. Place was clean, good weather too. A lot of things to do. Nothing what they’ve shown in the news. I stayed near the loop, didn’t travel south, as I had no reason to.
Leaving Chicago, the taxi driver said he wanted people to continue thinking Chicago was a shit town, because it keeps rent down. Funny.
That’s fair.
Nah, Chicagos a great town with excellent food, culture, museums and events. Lots of festivals in the summer, it runs along a beatuiful lake with nice beaches, it has great people, all in all I love Chicago. Full disclosure, there are neighborhoods with high crime, it is unfortunately super segregated, and cold as hell in the winter.
I’m personally fond of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. They had the Bodies exhibit the time I visited and it was incredible.
Just so you know, you’re probably not being downvoted by any Chicagoans.
Even the most devout Chicagoan evangelist will just typically grunt and nod in response to someone calling Chicago a shithole.
We understand that Chicago is not everyone’s cup of tea.
naturally surrounded by city high rises.
Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)
For me, the “concept” is terribly wrong.
A park itself is fine, but you can’t use one park as an excuse for not having other parks, green areas etc. anymore in a big city.
New York has 5 times more people than Munich. But Munich’s biggest park is about the same size as New York’s Central Park (a little bigger even). And if you count all the green areas, parks etc. in Munich together, they are 6 times larger (counting only the ones that are publicly accessible and listed in wikipedia) than that Central Park.
So, give your New Yorker’s 30 central parks and lots of other green spots, and you got a concept.
Located such that.
Who said I want to use it an excuse for no other parks?
What’s with all the bad faith discussion.
Nobody said you wanted to use it that way. OP’s probably referring to the lack of parks in Manhattan.
What’s with all the bad faith discussion.
Good question. Do you need a mirror to figure it out?
Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)
They are better than spreading single family homes and ground floor commercial spaces over a huge swath of land that would inevitable need clearcutting and plowing under to be suitable for development.
Central Park is not New York’s largest park. It’s the 5th.
The English Garden in Munich comes close: A long park reaching almost into the very center of the city.
It was! San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (4.1 km²) is in fact larger than NYC’s Central Park (3.4km²).
So is Prospect Park in Brooklyn
St. Louis’s Forest Park is bigger still at 5.3 km^2
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My favorite urban park by far!
That one’s pretty neat.
Sorry, I don’t think GGP meets OP’s requirements of huge fuggin sky scrapers next to it.
We’ll have to change to Richmond and Sunset zoning requirements and try again.
Louisville has Cherokee park that was designed by Olmsted, same dude as Central Park.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
When I lived there I loved to go dirt trail running in the middle of the city.
As a New Yorker, let me just assure you that it wasn’t really designed with crosstown traffic in mind. If you’re going from West 69th and say, 10th Ave, to East 69th and 2nd, you’re in for a shitshow no matter what you do. This includes walking (try not to be ran over by an Uber walking through Central Park late at night). Taking the subway(what subway line goes from upper east to upper west?? Hahahah you’re fucked!) Or taking a crosstown bus (Takes almost an hour to go from 10th avenue to 2nd avenue cause you’re gonna have to go all the way up/down to the cross park street).
Multiple smaller parks would probably be much better, or just, y’know, having space for trees outside of the designated tree infrastructure.
I think having both large and small (and tree lined streets) are good ideas. But there’s something appealing about a large park that you can really immerse yourself in.
I don’t disagree with you, but due to the geography of New York, midtown smack above the meeting point of the busiest bottlenecks in the nation becomes literally the worst location for it. They could have buried FDR drive near south street seaport like in Boston and just turned the whole southern tip of the island under Houston into a huge park. Or maybe the whole northern tip up near inwood.
I don’t quite understand how you Americans number streets or why you talk so much about intersections, but I think this is right:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PgFcT1f5MCg1cJyd7 30-22 min with the metro or 30 min walking, or 30-17 by bus.
Jacksonville Florida doesn’t have a large central park, but with 86 acres of park per 1000 residents and one of the largest geographical areas of any single city in the US, that’s a lot of parks. I suppose I’m trying to say there are other ways a city can embrace park culture without a central park style hub park.
Agreed, but there is something interesting about a huge park that can really get immersed in.
That is true! Not that I would wish Jacksonville on anyone but if you ever do happen to be punished with it, the river walk and arboretum are two redeeming features, as well as the coastal marsh/beach parks on the north Bank of the river. For something almost sort of similar to central park, but not, there are several multi-block parks strung together through the riverside/Avondale neighborhood that make the area very walkable.
the guy who designed it actually designed a lot of other parks in other cities as well --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olmsted_works
I think most U.S. cities that were established before cars have large, centrally located urban parks. New Orleans, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, etc. The cities that don’t are probably ones that grew only after cars were ubiquitous so the park could be wherever.
Like a western city in a mountain valley that had a population boom after cars would probably prefer their main urban park to be on the periphery for hiking trails and access to the mountain. The green-space didn’t have to be on a trolley line near downtown to be accessible.
Jesus I had no idea
Hyde Park in Sydney
