Championing urban national parks
Laurie Skrivan/Post-Dispatch
St. Louis is on today’s itinerary for Ken Salazar, the former Democratic senator from Colorado whom President Barack Obama appointed as the nation’s 50th Secretary of the Interior.
It’s a stop in a series of low-key visits the secretary is making around the country. He’s checking on projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, one of the administration’s main efforts to stimulate the economy by saving and creating jobs.
The department has about $3 billion in recovery projects allocated among its various operations, including the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
St. Louis is receiving $5.9 million in funding. It’s directed at the Gateway Arch (whose tram will be updated) and the Old Courthouse (which will get a new roof). They make up the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, operated by the National Park Service.
Mr. Salazar will visit both for the first time. His timing is auspicious.
The secretary’s stop is about jobs. But Mr. Salazar also should consider it to be a scouting trip — ideally, the first of several over years to come. The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is uniquely situated to help advance a key part of his ambitious plans for the Department of the Interior.
This spring Mr. Salazar outlined a sweeping vision in his 2010 budget presentation to Congress. Jobs and the economy came first. He also focused on long-term global initiatives involving national lands, such as promoting renewable energy resources and dealing with climate change.
But it’s clear the secretary has spent time thinking about how to protect and promote the nation’s “treasured landscapes” — not only the Yosemites and Yellowstones in all their grandeur, but the full range of National Park Service treasures.
He has said he wants to engage more children and encourage underrepresented groups to participate in parks programs. Metropolitan areas are fertile grounds for such initiatives. They are where 80 percent of America’s people live.
Urban centers largely have been second-class citizens throughout the celebrated history of the National Park System. St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, and the national park in which it is situated, stands out as an exception — a soaring symbol of a great historical movement and cherished element of the American character.
Former U.S. Sen. John Danforth has exhorted this community to rethink the park in ways that respect Eero Saarinen’s masterwork but reanimate the park for a new age. This precipitated a public planning process, capably managed by the National Park Service, that is expected to culminate in an international design competition that will solicit the best thinking of the world’s best and brightest designers and architects.
St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay is pushing Oct. 28, 2015, the 50th anniversary of the Gateway Arch, as the completion deadline for the project.
By helping to promote a treasured cityscape, Mr. Salazar could become the first great champion of urban national parks. When he visits the Arch, he’ll understand the possibilities.
(Note to the secretary: Arch tram cars offer very tight quarters. Someone on the ground will have to hold your cowboy hat.)
If he is the thoughtful visionary you seem to portray him as, he’ll realize that building in the already dynamic but precious limited acreage of the Arch grounds will ravage this national treasure and demean Saarinen’s already fully-realized vision on the riverfront. Rather, he will look elsewhere in the great blights that scar so much of slouis to acquire land for the park service to administer as another urban national park, within the parts of the city in which people live, geared for the residents more than for tourists, and enrich their daily lives by bringing the national park experience to them in their own back yards.