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City maps its future with plan for parks
Tuesday, July 18, 2000 By Jan Ackerman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Unveiling the city's grand new plan for its parks, former city planning director Eloise Hirsh said the 30-page document will serve as a road map for the future.
"We have a pretty clean road map," Hirsh told about 100 city residents who attended a meeting last night to see the proposed Pittsburgh Regional Parks Master Plan. "It does not have every single detail settled," she said.
The master plan spells out what the city, working with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, a private nonprofit corporation, hopes to do over 20 years to renovate and restore Frick, Highland, Schenley and Riverview parks.
In its final draft, it includes grand plans that would return some of the historic grandeur of the parks, improve the ecology and propose new ways to use the parks for recreation. Officials hope to use the plan to help establish funding priorities for future park improvements.
"The balancing act has three aspects -- ecology, history and use," said Michael A. Stern, who was hired as a consultant.
Last night, the city, the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, Stern and Fred Bonci of La Quatra Bonci Associates unveiled the plan to residents who immediately began questioning how its contents will affect traffic patterns and life in general in and around the parks.
Here are overviews of the plans for each park:
Frick Park
The master plan calls for enhancing woodlands, streams and trails, restoring its historical entry portals and creating new ones. The Nine Mile Run area will be annexed into Frick Park and a pedestrian-only trail will connect it to Riverview Hill. Plans call for rebuilding the sewers in the Fern Hollow and Falls Ravine watersheds and relocating existing recreation fields; moving the soccer field to Fern Hollow and the baseball field to a site near Commercial Avenue. The plan calls for building new terraces for viewing the Mon River Valley on Riverview Hill.
Highland Park
The plan calls for integrating the reservoirs with the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium through a series of pedestrian paths, building a bridge to replace the historic causeway across the middle of the reservoir and restoring its entry gardens.
The pool, pool deck and pool building would be rebuilt and will feature a formal pedestrian plaza, a new concession stand and eating terrace. A dump near the pool would be replaced with a multi-use performance stage.
Lake Carnegie would get a face lift, including replacing the concrete edge with a natural, soft edge and the cabin would be restored as a fishing and boating concession pavilion.
Riverview Park
Bonci said the important thing is to make Riverview Park, in Brighton Heights, "an equal partner with the parks in the East End." The plan calls for trying to create a unified woodland preserve -- the Wissahickon Nature Preserve -- by converting a portion of the loop road into a recreational trail.
An office now used for youth baseball would become a park visitor center; the plantings, gardens, terrace and fountain at Observatory Hill would be redone. Watson's Cabin would be redone as a historic interpretative center and the loop road that connects Watson's Cabin to Observatory Hill would become a multi-use trail. In Valley Refuge, the remainder of the public works site would be turned into a horse stable and riding facility.
Schenley Park
At Schenley Park, Bonci said, a comprehensive traffic, parking and pedestrian study still needs to be done to determine the best ways to move traffic through the urban park.
The master plan calls for renovating Panther Hollow Lake, developing a hydrologic plan for the Panther Hollow watershed and studying the viability of rebuilding the boathouse for recreational boating. It calls for reconfiguring the fields at Schenley Oval into single-use facilities, building new pedestrian walks and trails, restoring the garden theater at Flagstaff Hill, and establishing vista points at Prospect Hill.
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