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Schenley Park old glory is goal of 20-year overhaul
Tuesday, August 08, 2000 By Marylynne Pitz, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
This is the second in a series profiling the city's four major parks, which are all due for upgrades outlined in a master plan released last month. Stories on Highland and Frick parks will appear later this month and one on Riverview Park ran last week.
If the playing fields and woodland trails of Schenley Park look more inviting, it's because city employees performed a "green clean" on half of the park's 417 acres earlier this year.
For the first time in 20 years, many trees and shrubs were pruned and fertilized while invasive trees and plants were removed, according to Mike Gable, assistant director of the city's Department of Public Works.
This is just one aspect of a planned overhaul of Schenley, a workhorse of a park that draws people to its Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, skating rink, club and golf courses, as well as to events such as the Vintage Grand Prix and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Run. In addition, it is bordered by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, making it Pittsburgh's "civic park," said landscape architect Fred Bonci. Any changes in the heavily trafficked park entail satisfying many constituencies.
Schenley is "our most highly used park," he said. "A lot of people drive to it for these events or for these institutions. It has a lot of stress that some of the other parks don't have."
Bonci's South Side firm, LaQuatra Bonci Associates Inc., and architect Michael Stern of Shadyside led a local team that created a master plan to improve Schenley, Riverview, Frick and Highland parks.
Schenley exemplifies the classic design of 19th century parks because it combines formal gathering spaces such as Flagstaff Hill with pastoral landscapes for athletic activities, such as Schenley Oval, and the wildlife area of Panther Hollow, Bonci said.
In the next 20 years, the city and the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy hope to restore 19th century glory to the green spaces while minimizing 21st century traffic -- it is crisscrossed by many more roads than the city's other major parks -- with landscaped islands and reconfiguration of some areas that are more parking lot than park.
The first major step in Schenley's transformation will begin this fall with renovation of the visitors center, which dates to 1911 and is one of the few remaining original buildings.
Meg Cheever, president of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, said the project will cost more than $1 million and be let out for bids in the next two weeks. A facade and roof that were put on in the 1960s will be removed and the building will be returned to its original appearance.
"It might take a year to complete the whole project," she said, adding that the cost includes stabilizing an eroded hillside behind the structure, repairing crumbling stone walls and steps, and removing invasive plants, trees and shrubs.
The renovated visitors center will offer creature comforts such as public restrooms, cold drinks, trail guides, a small gift shop with T-shirts and park-related books as well as space for exhibits about the park.
Once the center is finished, plenty of work will remain, said Gable, whose 15-member public works crew tends the park daily by removing litter, emptying trash cans and cutting grass.
Miles of stone walls along Serpentine Drive must be rebuilt and a dilapidated drainage and sewerage system, which has broken terra cotta pipes that cause hillside erosion, is in dire need of repair.
"I know the park needs a lot of work. It's not going to be done overnight," he said, adding that employing the same 15-member crew in the park each day is a strategy that improved visitor satisfaction in Point State Park and Frick Park.
City crews have not neglected Schenley, Gable said.
A few years ago, Anderson Playground was redone at a cost of $400,000. At Schenley Oval, 13 tennis courts were resurfaced within the past year. Five miles of park roads were paved last year. A new fountain was recently installed at Westinghouse Pond and a nearby monument that marks the sesquicentennial of the creation of America's flag was cleaned.
Wooden barriers known as bollards, which are designed to keep pedestrians on sidewalks, were installed at playgrounds and Westinghouse Pond.
Gable is well aware of a daunting list of tasks that still remain.
Many of the park's narrow asphalt sidewalks are cracking and should be replaced. A soccer field at Schenley Oval needs an underwater irrigation system so that it can withstand constant use. In Junction Hollow, the city has been planning to build recreational soccer fields for more than a year.
City Councilman Bob O'Connor said there is a great demand for soccer fields and hopes that the city will use a $40,000 Keystone grant received earlier this year to build three in Junction Hollow.
The park's golf course is very tight, Bonci said.
"The fairways are on top of one another, as opposed to having nice roughs along the edges. You're hitting across roads," he said. Some have suggested making it a nine- or 12-hole golf course. The overall goal is to improve pedestrian access to the course and to better integrate it into the park, he said.
Panther Hollow Lake "looks muddy all the time," Gable said, and a set of crumbling stone steps that lead from Panther Hollow Bridge to the lake must be rebuilt.
The lake must be dredged, cleaned and the woods around it turned into an arboretum that would showcase plants and trees indigenous to Pennsylvania.
The master plan calls for a restaurant on Schenley Overlook near the ice skating rink where park visitors can enjoy a spectacular view of Downtown while eating or having a cup of coffee. The restaurant would be similar to the cafe outside Clayton, the Frick mansion in Point Breeze.
One of Bonci's fondest hopes is to restore the entrance to Schenley Park, now occupied by a parking lot that sprawls between Pitt's Hillman Library and the Carnegie Library. The area is known as Schenley Plaza.
"As that was claimed for parking for the institutions, people really forgot that that used to be the entrance to Schenley Park. It's park property," he said.
All that remains of the original entrance is the Mary Schenley fountain and a bosquet or thicket of sycamore trees that parallels a walkway to Carnegie Library.
The master plan calls for relocating 80 to 100 parking spaces to either side of Schenley Plaza and building a fountain in the center surrounded by a large green space and ornamental plantings, a move that would require reconfiguring streets in that area.
"The goal there was to create a large public open space," Bonci said.
Parking, Bonci said he realized, is always an issue in Oakland. He said he believed the city, local institutions and the parks conservancy should agree on a new parking plan that takes the pressure off the park.
With the expansion of Phipps Conservatory, the need for parking is bound to increase.
Richard Piacentini, executive director of Phipps, said the conservatory wants to add more glass houses for an exhibit on tropical rain forests and butterflies, renovate production areas, add a visitor and education center with a cafe, and improve parking.
The pressures on Schenley are not about to abate, and the sometimes competing constituencies that use the park can make even seemingly simple proposals potentially combustible.
"One could say that everything we're proposing in Schenley Park is controversial," Bonci said.
That seems only appropriate, since the woman who gave the park to Pittsburgh was at the center of a 19th century controversy that involved a lengthy legal battle over her inheritance that began when she eloped to England.
Mary Croghan Schenley prevailed in the courts and, in 1889, gave 300 acres to the city, stipulating that the land be called "Schenley Park" and never be sold. The city bought an additional 125 acres from Schenley for about $100,000.
The gift of land came 47 years after the heiress left a Staten Island boarding school and secretly married British Capt. Edward W.H. Schenley in February 1842. She was 14, her husband was three times her age, and the marriage created a huge international scandal. The couple, who spent the majority of their lives in England, had nine children during a 36-year marriage.
If redesigning the park's entrance causes some controversy, Mary Croghan Schenley's ghost will no doubt be amused.
"Every city has its great public spaces. Schenley deserves to have a great public entry," Bonci said.
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