In growing communities, windows of opportunity to create precious green spaces are fleeting. I urge our elected leaders to not miss their chance to look back, decades from now, at the lasting mark they made for Park City.
Our larger community enjoys lovely public spaces. The heart of Park City has just a couple, and much is being asked of them.
The library lawn has evolved to accommodate more four-legged friends than picnickers or blanket nappers.
City Park has been asked to do the most. Its precious lawn continues to shrink to accommodate growing demands for buildings and hard surfaces.
Sometimes a park needs to be just a park, as noted by Frederick Law Olmsted, our nation’s greatest public landscape architect:
“Suppose that you had been commissioned to build a really grand, opera house; that after…you should be instructed that the building was to be used on Sundays as a Baptist Tabernacle, and that a suitable place must be made for a…dipping pool. Then…afterwards, you should be advised that it must be so re-fitted and furnished that parts of it could be used for a court room, a jail, a concert hall, hotel, skating rink, for surgical [clinics], for a circus, dog show, drill room, ball room, railway station…? What chance would you see for making a fine affair, in any respect, of your building?
“But that, more or less, is what is nearly always going on with public parks. Pardon me if I overwhelm you; it is a matter of chronic anger with me.”
Let us, please, use this window of opportunity to create more park in Park City’s future. It may never present itself again.
Mark Ruelle
Park City