Billy Insight-Whats out there Denver Park Tours

An insight from Billy Gregg about his involvement in the “What’s out there Denver?” Park Tours sponsored by the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Last weekend I led a tour of Berkeley Park as one of several tours around town sponsored by the Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington DC. The Park has been my local, neighborhood park, for the last 20 years and it was interesting and worthwhile to step back and look at the place as a professional.

I prepared by making some notes using an outline based on William Whyte’s, “Direct Observation and Site Analysis”. We wanted to cover both the historic detail that is so easy to spot in the park and communicate something about how a Landscape Architect looks at things and how that can change one’s thinking about a place.

It worked. Highlights for me include:

• Using topography, soils and hydrology to expand the scope of our conversation to include Rocky Mountain Park West 46th Avenue and Lakeside Amusement Park.
• Identifying these parks as a commercially developed complex based on the “City Beautiful” aesthetic and, specifically, the 1894 Columbian exhibition.
• Pointing out that the city’s acquisition of both Berkeley and Rocky Mountain Park linked by 46th Avenue provided the perfect terminus to Speer Boulevard and represented an accomplishment on par with the creation of other, major, in civic projects in Mayor Speer’s administration(s).

Coming away from the tour I was thinking about Speer and City Beautiful. About how his administration really did take control of the things that belonged to the City: Streets, Schools, Parks and Drainage and used them to create a civic framework that has defined our lives here in Denver for generations. It was hard not to contrast this approach with our current willingness to cede control of those same elements to individual interests. It is as though we lack the confidence to develop a vision of equal breadth to say nothing of the patience to see it through. Is there anything being designed or built in the City that will give shape to future generation’s lives the way this beautiful Park and Avenue have shaped mine?