One of my favorite spots in New Haven is Edgerton Park, right by the edge of the East Rock neighborhood. A 20-acre beautifully landscaped garden on the old grounds of a long-gone Victorian mansion, it has plenty of nice spots to wander around, sit down to read a book, or marvel at the great, wonderful trees.
Edgerton Park, however, has a problem – it is quite boring. Other than basking in the beauty of it all or maybe tossing a ball around with some friends, there is not much to do there or in the neighborhood around it. The park is wonderful, pristine, and gorgeous, but outside the few days of summer when the Elm Shakespeare Company stages one of the bard’s plays, there are no real amenities there.
This is a fairly common feature of many of our parks in the state: There is not much to do. Lighthouse Point, also in New Haven, is a truly wonderful park right by the water. Beachgoers there, during the summer, can either lie in the sun or take a dip in Long Island Sound. Other than a (nice) playground for kids, there is nothing else in the area. If you want a soda, or a burrito, or anything to eat, you must drive a mile out of the park. God forbid you forgot your sunscreen or just want to get goggles, some beach toys, or an inflatable contraption for the kids to have fun, because the nearest shop is two towns over.
This turns many of our best public spaces into places that we visit, but we do not live in. We go to many parks across the state to do one thing, and one thing only, but there is no reason to stay.
It is not hard to imagine a slightly different, better version of Edgerton Park where there is a café right next door, maybe with a bookstore or small grocery store nearby. If there is a school in the vicinity, it will be a nice spot to take the kids to run around before heading home. Lighthouse Point could do with a couple of little restaurants with outdoor seating, a few taco trucks, and a small shopping area or an arcade. Connecting it to the neighborhood will also make it less of a nuisance and more of a place to enjoy for those who live nearby.
We know these kinds of amenities would be popular, because in the few locations we allow our public spaces to be more than a pristine, isolated park, people really enjoy them. Niantic has a lively, enjoyable Main Street a few steps from the beach; Mystic is invariably popular. We just choose not to build things this way.
We do this through zoning, first and foremost, by keeping land restricted to a single use as much as possible. If a park is located in a residential area, nothing but housing (more often than not, low-density single family housing) is allowed there, no matter how much nicer it would be to have a coffee in the park next door. Despite ample evidence that neighborhoods with mixed use have higher property values, there is always the one homeowner who loudly complains the moment someone suggests opening a convenience store nearby, and local officials rarely have the vision or courage to push against the mildest opposition.
Besides zoning, there is this persistent, misguided idea that public spaces should be kept as far from commerce and private businesses as possible. No one should benefit from or earn a profit from our one wonderful public beach; keep the privatization vultures at bay. There is also this automatic fear that anything more involved than a tree or a swing set opens the door to the destruction of the natural beauty of any park, so nothing but massive parking lots should be allowed. Neither argument makes sense, frankly; a taco truck or terrace does not mean we will be selling the park to build condos anytime soon, and having a park more welcoming to civic life should be a priority.
We can build better public spaces where we can meet, hang out, and do things together. Doing so does not require a big investment or much funding. It requires looking at our parks as real places where we want to be, not postcard backgrounds with nothing but trees – and having some denser mixed-use zoning where it matters, close to these wonderful spots.