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Houston stakes a claim as the nation's Emerald City

Despite praise, some say parks need upgrades

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One of Anthony Shumate's sculptures is seen along the Kinder Footpath in Buffalo Bayou Park Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015, in Houston. ( Jon Shapley / Houston Chronicle )
One of Anthony Shumate's sculptures is seen along the Kinder Footpath in Buffalo Bayou Park Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2015, in Houston. ( Jon Shapley / Houston Chronicle )Jon Shapley/Staff

At a time when many cities are turning once-blighted infrastructure into iconic public spaces, Houston has emerged as a surprisingly fertile pasture - such a model green city that more than 1,300 landscape planners from across America will visit for a closer look this weekend.

During a Friday conference organized by the Washington, D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation, they'll examine how more than $700 million in public and private park investments have blossomed here since 2004, and how such energy might be emulated elsewhere.

With its network of nine major bayous, Houston boasts what may be the nation's largest green infrastructure. That network is the linchpin of the nonprofit Houston Parks Board's $220 million Bayou Greenways 2020 project to connect 150 miles of trails. Meanwhile, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership is transforming the city's signature waterway from Shepherd Drive to the Ship Channel. Hermann Park and Memorial Park, Houston's legacy inner city green spaces, are being transformed, too, along with myriad smaller parks.

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Yet Houston's parks budget is insufficient. And the city's parks aren't accessible to diverse segments of the population, one of the reasons the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, ranked Houston 58th in a 2015 survey of the 75 largest U.S. cities.

"Parks are great equalizers. They can change a neighborhood," said Houston parks director Joe Turner.

Ironically, the better a landscape architect is - shaping topography, channeling water, designing paths and installing native plants - the more "invisible" he or she becomes.

"It's a lot easier to look at the Pennzoil building and know someone built that than Buffalo Bayou," said Charles Birnbaum, the Cultural Landscape Foundation president.

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His group will also host tours this weekend with the designers of Houston's signature parks and launch an online guide to more than 40 significant area landscapes.

Tour participants will see Discovery Green with Hargreaves Associates' Mary Margaret Jones, hike Buffalo Bayou Park with SWA Group's Scott McCready, walk with Thomas Woltz through Memorial Park, view the Houston Arboretum with Design Workshop's Steven Spears, and tour the Menil Collection campus with Jack Ohly of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

A balanced life

The last time Houston got this much attention for urban design, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and César Pelli were creating skyscrapers. That wildly vertical era wasn't confined to Houston: the Sears Tower rose in Chicago, the World Trade Center's twin towers took shape over New York, the Transamerica Pyramid came to define San Francisco, and on and on.

Today, though, people in the shadows of tall buildings want more.

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Van Valkenburgh principal Matthew Urbanski, who is preparing Hermann Park's next master plan, said millennials helped drive new attitudes.

"For many of today's talented young professionals, the city is not just a way station to a married life with kids in the suburbs. It's a place they plan to live a balanced life," Urbanski said.

Landscape urbanism is "metaphorically more in tune" with what cities need today than the traditional mode of "design some roads, put buildings on them and what's left over becomes the landscape," Urbanski added. "Now the landscape might even come first, using geographic features and the shape of the land, then adding infrastructure and infill."

Houston's lack of zoning and miles of once-wild bayous, for decades treated as little more than flood-control culverts, have helped create opportunities for connectivity.

"You usually cannot retrofit a city with parks so easily," he said, "but that drainage was necessary."

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Kinder Baumgardner, president of the SWA Group, says Houstonians crave well-designed public spaces, "and we have no chains." SWA's Houston office has orchestrated dozens of public space-shaping projects, including Buffalo Bayou Park, the Uptown Houston streetscape and the current reworking of Avenida de las Americas. Baumgardner often recruits young landscape architects, and SWA's Boston and San Francisco offices look tempting, he said.

"But if you're a designer looking to make an impact, those cities are finished," he said.

"All they're doing is pocket parks and boutique projects. In Houston, it's big master plans, totally reinventing the landscape. Huge projects other cities can't touch."

Some marquee projects of the past decade have been inspired by master plans drafted long ago by early 20th century landscape architects Arthur Comey and George Kessler after George Hermann donated the land for Hermann Park and brothers Will and Mike Hogg enabled the city to buy Memorial Park.

Without that history, "none of this would be happening," said Guy Hagstette, the Kinder Foundation's director of parks and civic projects.

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Established by pipeline mogul Richard Kinder and his wife, Nancy Kinder, the Kinder Foundation has invested nearly $100 million into Houston's public parks in the past 15 years, leading campaigns to help fund Discovery Green, Buffalo Bayou Park and Bayou Greenways 2020.

Hagstette has championed Houston's parks since the mid-1980s, when he had his own firm and designed Sesquicentennial Park. Back then, it wasn't easy to persuade civic leaders that parks mattered.

"But projects started to produce results. And seeing is believing."

Parks became an economic development priority after the first big energy cycle bust of the mid-1980s, he said.

Then, momentum really shifted with the opening of Discovery Green in 2008, which saw crowds from day one and immediately drew national attention.

Crumbs on a map

For the current year, the city's parks budget for its 371 parks totals $70.7 million, most of which is devoted to staff and maintenance.

"The budget is just a starting point," Turner said.

In 12 years on the job, Turner has cobbled together a wild mix of resources to stretch parks dollars, including federal grants, bond money, deals with other city departments, Harris County commissioners (who manage 20 parks within city limits), the Harris County Flood Control District, tax increment reinvestment zone groups, private conservancies and neighborhood grass-roots organizations.

Even fabulous parks have to be "programmed" by people who keep them lively and give visitors a reason to return, Turner said. Hermann Park, Buffalo Bayou Park, Discovery Green and Market Square Park are thriving because they're heavily programmed by conservancies and management districts.

Maintenance is critical, too. So far, the big parks partners have figured out ways to finance upkeep, Hagstette said, but he wonders how sustainable future projects will be without a bigger city budget.

Soon, the focus will turn to the hundreds of neighborhood parks that look like crumbs on a map, sprinkled across the city's more than 600 square miles. They're especially tiny between Loop 610 and Beltway 8.

"It's shocking when you look at portions of the city built after World War II, when we forgot about parks," Hagstette said.

Turner envisions $4 billion in projects that might happen over the next 25 years. Mulling another bond election, he knows he won't get all he wants, but he's optimistic that Mayor Sylvester Turner appreciates parks.

Parks are long-term propositions, Hagstette said. He's among those already talking up what's next, after Bayou Greenways 2020 is finished.

The Houston Area Greenways project, as it is currently called, could retrofit trails into utility easements and other un-park-like environments that run north and south across the city's grid, further connecting the east-west bayou trails.

Millions of Houstonians will be watching, along with the landscape architects.

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Molly Glentzer, a staff arts critic since 1998, writes mostly about dance and visual arts but can go anywhere a good story leads. Through covering public art in parks, she developed a beat focused on Houston's emergence as one of the nation's leading "green renaissance" cities.

During about 30 years as a journalist Molly has also written for periodicals, including Texas Monthly, Saveur, Food & Wine, Dance Magazine and Dance International. She collaborated with her husband, photographer Don Glentzer, to create "Pink Ladies & Crimson Gents: Portraits and Legends of 50 Roses" (2008, Clarkson Potter), a book about the human culture behind rose horticulture. This explains the occasional gardening story byline and her broken fingernails.

A Texas native, Molly grew up in Houston and has lived not too far away in the bucolic town of Brenham since 2012.