Commenter "Marc" on "Why bees and people swarmed at Sherwood Gardens yesterday"

Here’s the full text of Marc’s comments on this 4/9/12 Brew piece piece

‘Without getting too ponderous about it, I think there’s a lesson here.
This six-plus-acre park has no waterfront, no aerial tram nor “Ripley’s
Believe It or Not” attraction, not even a monument.”

“That’s a good point. Organizations like the Project for Public Spaces (of William H. Whyte fame) have long argued that it’s amazing how bad we are at making lovable public spaces when they’re actually quite easy to make. (We used to do it effortlessly in the past when we were a much poorer society – municipalities had *less* money to throw around but they often produced *better* parks!)

I think Sherwood Gardens works well for a couple reasons:
– It’s securely surrounded by affluence. People feel safe and comfortably enclosed. IMO Patterson Park is improving and seems to be trending in the same direction, but many of Baltimore’s larger parks are uncomfortably close to pockets of poverty on at least one side.

– Baltimore’s other parks sometimes enjoy “flash mobs” too, but of the wrong kind: think wild dirt-biking teens roaring around the lawns and ruining the tranquility. Uncivil behavior attracts more incivility and drives away civil people – even the best parks can fall prey to this (see New York’s Bryant Park in the 70s/80s).

– Sherwood Gardens is impeccably maintained. Some of Baltimore’s other parks have gone to seed: you can see many traces of former glory and elegance in parks like Clifton, but the out-of-control undergrowth suggests neglect. The neglect might even raise insecurity in some visitors – “if they can’t maintain this place, then maybe it’s not safe for me here.” And a brush-filled, overgrown park full of woods and undergrowth is self-evidently not a practical, comfortable, or secure-feeling place to hang out: this is the type of “wilderness” you go to the national or state parks for, but it’s not appropriate for most city parks. City parks seem to work best when all that is cleared away in favor of formal plantings and settings done in either a Baroque or romantic Olmstedian fashion (which Sherwood Gardens does!). People love opened-up parks that feel like gardens!

– The ‘neglect turning away people’ phenomenon is kinda like a self-reinforcing feedback loop similar to the “broken windows” theory. Fewer and fewer people show up. The opposite works too: the presence of some civil people encourages even more people to show up. Maybe there’s even something similar to the “eyes on the street” phenomenon here – you feel more secure when you’re surrounded by other people. The same “swarm” phenomenon that drives bees and flash mobs might be driving the aggregation of people in congenial places like Sherwood Gardens.

– Size matters: It’s hard for a cash-strapped city to handle the maintenance of big city parks. (New York had the same trouble with Central Park in the 70s/80s/early 90s.) Sherwood Gardens is arguably a “pocket park”: small and easy to maintain by the surrounding residents. The city’s other pocket parks – Lafayette, Harlem Park, etc. – often don’t have a pool of affluent residents or benefactors nearby to help pay for upkeep.

– But here’s the biggest reason why I think parks in other parts of the city don’t always enjoy the same level of activity: the stoop socialization culture (East and West Baltimore), porch socialization culture (Charles Village), rooftop deck socialization culture (Federal Hill and Fells), or “third place” socialization culture (Mt. Vernon and Fells) is more dominant than the park-going culture.”