Parks departments along the Front Range are working with the land to create spaces that the next generation will actually use.
Before 2016, Grant Frontier Park was touted as a place where prospectors first discovered gold in the South Platte River near Denver. No one seemed to care.
“I never saw anyone in the park,” Gordon Robertson, director of planning design and construction at Denver Parks and Recreation Department, said of the three-block long park that straddles the river at the edge of the Overland neighborhood.
Denver set out to change that a decade before, partnering with the Greenway Foundation to create more than 100 miles of hiking and biking trails and more than 20 parks, all of them linked by a restored South Platte River.
The river has become an example of how cities can use existing landscapes to create natural areas, parks and places for kids to explore. Replacing the plastic slides, turtles and jungle gyms with tree stumps and boulders still feels like a movement, and Colorado, full of adults who use its natural areas to play on the weekends, remains one of its leaders. Now visitors can find those parks near Denver’s poorest neighborhoods as well as its wealthiest, and all along the Front Range, including Fort Collins, Boulder and, more recently, Greeley, which just built a massive natural park in the eastern part of the city.
But before Denver decided to rehabilitate the South Platte and use its natural wonder to create places for kids to play, it was used mostly as a way to move water from one point to another. Residents of the neighborhood near where the park was built didn’t even know there was a river there, Robertson said.
Robertson, however, thought there was gold in the native surroundings of Grant Frontier. The city constructed a secondary channel by taking out tons of soil and sculpting it to lead to the river and built a concrete jetty that restored access to the water and the park. The work coincided with work to restore the South Platte.
The project even protected a 200-year-old cottonwood and surrounded it with boulders, a plaza and picnic area, and the city built some bridges to cross narrower sections of the Platte.
Robertson still remembers the day he went to check on the park after it re-opened in 2016.
“Kids were all playing games along the river,” he said. “Parents were yelling at them to get out of the water. It was being used exactly as we had hoped. I was just overwhelmed. It fulfilled my hopes and dreams.”
Robertson was already a champion of natural parks: Nearly 20 years ago, he began throwing catalogues for plastic parks equipment in the trash and telling manufacturers to do better. But he considers that day in 2016 a turning point. His vision seemed viable.
“I can’t say I’d ever believed the river would be used that way,” he said. “But it was. That was an affirmation.”
Searching for places to explore
Adam Bienenstock, one of the leaders of the movement to convert playgrounds into natural areas, is friends with Richard Louv, who suggested kids were suffering from what he called “Nature-Deficit Disorder” in his groundbreaking book, “The Last Child in the Woods.”
Bienenstock operates his company under the same philosophy Louv proposed in his book: That being outdoors is crucial to a child’s development and that playing in the natural environment can ease attention disorders and depression in children. Bienenstock’s goal is to bring nature, and the opportunity it presents for unstructured exploration, back to kids.
Many cities, including Greeley, have used Bienenstock’s expertise to build natural playgrounds: He designed Greeley’s newest park and helped renovate another.
“We have a lot of problems to solve,” Bienenstock said. “And connection to nature is the solution to a lot of these problems.”
Read the full article on Colorado Sun.
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