Standing at the edge of Harbour-8 Park, Toody Maher is wrestling with a makeshift drinking fountain fashioned out of wooden two-by-fours and a nearby hose. As executive director of Pogo Park, Maher, 54, is a major force behind the trans- formation of unmaintained Richmond parks into thriving community hubs.
“YOU HAVE TO DO ONE
THING GREAT, INSTEAD OF DOING A LOT OF THINGS GOOD.”
Toody Maher, founder of pogo park
Her first project, Elm Playlot, turned a pocket park in the heart of the Iron Triangle into a nationally recognized model for park redevelopment. Harbour-8 Park followed last year. Inside a two-and-a-half-foot-high picket fence, a wooden pavil- ion provides shade from the afternoon sun. Children play on swing-sets and climb in and out of a fanciful rope jungle gym Maher calls “the spider web.” Buildings on either side of the park feature bright and cheery hand-painted murals. The park is small, running just two city blocks out of the entire three- mile greenway—but that concentration of resources is part of Maher’s philosophy. “You have to do one thing great, instead of doing a lot of things good,” Maher says. “Otherwise there’s no break- through, there’s no change in thinking.” In the sandbox, Nancy and Aurelio Armando Ybarra set out what they call “loose parts”—rope, cardboard, fabric, tape, and other building materials to encourage creative play. The Ybarras, siblings who live near the park, are employed as one of the local resident teams that manage Harbour-8, maintain- ing the park and keeping an eye on the kids. Maher believes that the transformation of these parks—both the vision and the labor—has to come from within the community. In a stor- age shed next door she proudly shows the donated materials that Pogo Park volunteers use to improve the space—the wood they’ve turned into chairs and the pallet of hundred-year-old bricks they plan to use to build barbecue pits. “These bricks have got such soul!” she says.
Maher has borrowed part of her park development strat-
egy from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. “It’s a design prin- ciple called minimum viable product, or MVP,” she explains. “Whatever concept you have, you get it out to market as soon as possible.” Unlike time– and money-intensive business strategies that invest in long periods of study before a product release, the MVP approach calls for building the best product with the least effort, releasing it quickly, and then using initial feedback to make rapid improvements and tailor the next ver- sion to users’ needs. Explaining her philosophy, Maher likes to quote Berkeley landscape architect Susan Goltsman: “The greatest parks are in a constant state of change.” Soon, Maher has finished setting up the drinking fountain. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do for now.
56 · LAND&PEOPLE · FALL/WINTER 2015
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68