Parks - Tumblr Posts - Page 2
The view at dawn from the imperial Jingshan Park in Beijing, where the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty hung himself.
Women need nature play.
Blue Mounds State Park
Luverne, Minnesota
Someone built a mini house in Riverside Park, Vancouver BC! ❤️🌱🍃🪴
Did you know that you can just go to the park and swing on swings and it's free? And no one even knows you're stimming!
Creepy girl routine: roam around in the parks at night dress in black, with the uncanny valley autistic gaze and ask people for their teeth when they catcall you.
Also for your safety bring a ritual knife to stab your enemies :)
I love this! “Sometimes a chipmunk” is the best one. If I still worked for the parks department, I would totally steal this idea.
so they put up these new signs at the ima and they make the whole thing feel very alice in wonderland kind of
but the ones with words on them are really great
Some of my photos from this year...
(Taken at the Harold Washington Library train stop. July 2014)
(Relaxing in the park, wearing my sweet purple laced Converse. Summer 2014)
(A couple of Bot Bakery goodies. Summer 2014)
White water at McConnell’s Mill State Park
The Grand Canyon at twilight, and deepening into night. Slowly becoming real as the stars emerge.
The Age of American Cities
I spent the last two weeks in Omaha and the surrounding area, and I was constantly struck by the newness of every human thing, and even of so many of the green spaces. There was hardly anywhere in the region that looked like it hadn't been sculpted by the actions of people within the last 120 years.
It was almost disorienting for me, even coming from a city barely 100 years older than that, but Pittsburgh and its outlying areas are still built on the skeleton of the 19th century, and on earlier bones than that, too.
My house, and many of the neighborhoods I see every time I leave it, are older by decades than anything I saw in Omaha, and they _feel_ older in ways beyond just architectural style. It's old trees hanging over streets, and a century of renovations juxtaposing old with new.
The roads here weren't made for cars; they were adapted to them. The rare wide boulevard here was carved out for trolleys to run beside horse-drawn carriages and wagons, for pedestrians and market stalls to fill the gutters and the roadway. Only in the 20th century were they overtaken by automobiles, pedestrians relegated to sidewalks and crossings, most street vendors banished until they finally reappeared as food trucks in automobiles of their own.
But Omaha was made for the car, it's neighborhoods made BY the car. A grid of broad, flat, 4-lane divided roadways connecting perfectly-contained and neat little neighborhoods, built each in a single architectural style, no house too close to its neighbors or too distinct.
Everywhere accessible by car in 30 minutes or less, nowhere accessible by foot.
I am a frequent user of the parks in my area, and of State and National Parks when I leave my immediate area. In Pittsburgh, many of the parks are old enough, or were carved out of places already old and untouched, that they feel timeless. There, manicured public spaces run aground on seas of wild and ancient forest, timeless meadows and fields of stone.
Even the neighborhood playground near me is only a fence away from a cliff dropping 10 meters down into a forested ravine whose trees yet tower over the slides and swings of the park above. Some trees as old as the oldest houses in the neighborhood bear silent witness to the nearly dozen generations of children playing and shouting down the streets that went from feet to horses to trolleys to cars.
The parks I explored in Omaha, by contrast, feel human and manicured in every way that matters. Each plot of ground has been designated to a purpose, and each plant selected for its spot. Trees only grow where they are permitted, and only to the size allowed by the landscapers. Carefully cut grass covers every uniformly-measured square of earth, and the only dirt allowed to expose itself to the people of Nebraska lives on the baselines of the sports fields cut into each park.
By contrast to Pittsburgh, Omaha is filled with intentional green spaces. Pittsburgh realized too late in its life that it needed parks and green spaces, and only carved them out of wilderness, wealthy estates, and farms as it expanded outward. As industrial sites and rail lines mouldered and decayed, the spaces were reclaimed into trails and wild spaces.
In some ways, this informs the feel of these parks and green spaces; wild and ancient, or full of life pouring through gaps in the concrete.
Omaha built parks and common spaces into the plans of its neighborhoods in ways the early residents of Pittsburgh should envy, but at the price of a uniformity of look and feel and a loss of wildness. Perhaps in another century, some of these places can be left to grow as wild as the parks of Pittsburgh, and freshly-abandoned spaces can be reclaimed into wilderness that links the manicured parks together.