Each month since January, we’ve been steadily moving forward in time from Parks & Recreation magazine’s mid-1960s origins to today, most recently exploring September 1990. For our commemorative 50th anniversary issue, we’ve enlisted the help of Linnea Anderson, archivist at the University of Minnesota’s Social Welfare History Archives, who was kind enough to peruse NRPA’s extensive holdings for any 1965 issues. We were lucky to receive a handful of scans from the June 1965 issue, including Ronald F. Paige’s piece, “Planning Tomorrow’s Parks.” Once again, it wasn’t difficult to tie the themes Paige explored in those yellowed pages to contemporary discussions of placemaking and the role of parks and recreation in day-to-day life.
Paige poses a simple juxtaposition: A park, including “conventional facilities, haphazardly placed within a bounded area, with possibly some individual units boasting ‘second-thought’ colors, forms, or materials in a weak attempt at simulating so-called ‘modern design,’” versus a “hazy, but fascinating area involving unfamiliar, yet attractive designs of space. Colors, forms, and masses are identified in terms of function, use, and application, with maximum emphasis placed on developing the ideal atmosphere or ‘backdrop’ for wholesome leisure-time experience.”
Paige puts the onus of outcome on the park and recreation professional, asking his colleagues to look beyond “everyday problems” and traditional design and functionality of turn-of-the-century park spaces. “Except for a few isolated instances, there has been little improvement in the field of park design since Olmsted laid out Central Park in New York City,” he writes, going on to ask, “Is this good? Is it healthy? Can we afford to stake our reputation, our professional status — our very being — on the park facilities available today?”
Fifty years ago, Paige sensed the mission was moving beyond simply finding the ideal park design — park and recreation professionals should think bigger, working to create thoughtfully engineered cities. He recognized it’s the planning process, “the practical arrangement of people and services to produce the organization, support and talent necessary to effect the ultimate design,” as Paige defines it, that informs everything from where a park amenity might be located to the colors in which its swing sets are painted.
Paige’s admonitions are couched in terms of placement and planning for park facilities (ballfields, field houses, restrooms, etc.), but his near-anguished request that park and recreation leaders break out of their silos to seek expertise from related fields easily tracks with today’s thought leaders. “Another common pitfall is the lack of complete understanding between the professional designers, elected officials, and recreation administrators,” Paige writes. “Factors relative to engineering limitations, compatibility of design features, inter-relationship of structural units are not necessarily familiar terms to the park and recreation professional. Public acceptance, group pressure, inadequate financing, the responsibility for increases of maintenance and operation costs, or the problem of programing, supervision and housekeeping cannot always be discussed on common ground with the professional designer.”
As we all know, park and recreation professionals are well-suited to problem solving outside their immediate areas of expertise, often finding creative solutions to problems that perhaps should not fall under their purview. Paige instead advocates that we “make maximum use of the technicians available.” “The architects, the landscape architects, the engineers, the city planners — all have a vital role in the development of new and unusual park structures,” he writes. “It is our job to coordinate, to interpret needs, to educate the public to offer constructive criticism, and to broaden our outlook to encompass future horizons.”
Samantha Bartram is the Executive Editor of Parks & Recreation magazine.