Conservationists advocate for elevating nature over cars— increasingly, cities are taking the suggestion literally. Freeway-deck parks conceal traffic while creating much-needed pedestrian con- nections, helping to remediate a legacy of 1960s highway planning that cut off communities from their waterfronts and downtowns. In his design for Klyde Warren Park, the award-winning landscape
architect James Burnett conjured a five-acre oasis by bridging the gap over the eight-lane recessed freeway that long separated one side of Dallas from the other. “The city essentially had a moat around downtown,” says Tara Green, the park’s president. “We like our cars in Dallas,” she acknowledges. “We had to figure out how to get people out of buildings and walk- ing instead of driving two blocks.” Public agencies own the “air rights” over
Along the Lake Superior shoreline in Duluth, Minnesota, a compromise between conservationists and trans- portation planners resulted in three separate park decks over I-35—one a transplanted English-style garden with more than 3,000 rosebushes.
freeways, meaning the sites themselves may cost nothing. To foot the bill for park construction, Klyde Warren benefitted from fundraising by boosters who saw the proj- ect as an investment in surrounding neighborhoods—a form of public-private partnership common for freeway-deck projects. In Trenton, where the popular South Riverwalk Park covers a por- tion of U.S. 29, city planner Andrew Carten thinks the payoff is clear. “After all, would you rather look over 600 trucks barreling past every day, or a scenic park and river?”
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