• What We Do
  • Conservation Initiatives
    • Parks for People
    • Working Lands
    • Natural Lands
    • Heritage Lands
    • Land&Water
  • Federal Programs
  • TPL Services
  • Climate Conservation Program
  • Working With TPL

expireBrownfields to Art Parks

When is a brownfield not a brownfield? When it's transformed by artworks, as in two U.S. cities. One art installation is opening next year and will be permanent; the other was temporary while officials worked out final plans for a park on the site. Both examples show that wonderful things can happen when a formerly contaminated industrial site is cleaned up and rededicated to public use.

Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism

Sculpture in Seattle

For decades, squat oil tanks dominated a six-acre site wedged between downtown Seattle and Elliott Bay. But by 1998, Union Oil of California had largely finished a decade-long cleanup of the land-three separate parcels divided by a four-lane highway and a railway corridor-and was ready to sell.

With the city's real estate market red hot at the height of the dot-com boom, there was no lack of potential buyers. (One developer had completed preliminary designs for a hotel, 800 housing units, and 250,000 square feet of office space.) But others believed that the land's best use was as a much-needed park linking downtown to the waterfront. At the same time, the Seattle Art Museum was looking for an outdoor space downtown in which to display sculpture.

Thus was launched an effort by the museum and TPL to acquire the Union Oil land for the 8.5-acre Olympic Sculpture Park, which will open in 2007. Designers Weiss/Manfredi (New York), with the help of Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture (Seattle), have created an innovative plan for the new park. A meandering pathway will seamlessly link the three former brownfield parcels, crossing the highway and rail corridor on a pair of broad landscaped bridges. Five garden areas will reflect Pacific Northwest environments: valley (fir, cedar, ferns, and groundcovers); grove (aspen, flowering currant); meadow (grasses and wildflowers); and shore (low-lying pines, a pocket beach, and an underwater environment for fish).

The park will feature an 8,500-square-foot glass-and-steel pavilion and an outdoor amphitheater. And of course, there will be the Seattle Art Museum's world-class collection of sculpture, including works by Richard Serra, Tony Smith, and Louise Bourgeois. For more information and photographs, go to www.iamsamcampaign.org

Photo: Steve Rowell. Copyright 2005 Not a Cornfield LLC

Not a Cornfield in L.A.

When is a cornfield not a cornfield? In one of the most unusual art projects ever to come out of Los Angeles-and certainly one of the biggest-a team directed by Los Angeles artist Lauren Bon planted one million corn seeds in a 32-acre site in the heart of downtown in the spring of 2005. The project was funded by the Annenberg Foundation, of which Bon is a trustee.

The resulting crop was exactly what you'd expect to find growing in a cornfield, which is the historic name of this property in the shadow of L.A.'s Chinatown. But the project transcended a cornfield, Bon explained, because it raised larger artistic issues, not least being the power and function of art itself. To capture this ambiguity, she named the project Not a Cornfield.

Photo: Rich Reid/Colors of Nature

Key to the concept's power was the land's history: as a Native American village along the Los Angeles River; an irrigated agricultural field in the heart of colonial Spanish Los Angeles; and, through most of the 20th century, a huge Union Pacific railyard surrounded by largely poor and working-class communities. After the railyard operations were discontinued in 1989, the property-by then contaminated with hydrocarbons and metals-was slated for redevelopment as warehouses, until community groups protested that other uses, such as a park, would be more appropriate.

In 2001, TPL acquired the land for what would be the first California state park in L.A. After excavating 5,000 tons of contaminated soil and completing an environmental cleanup, TPL transferred the land to the state, which is now working on a plan for the new Los Angeles State Historic Park. In the meantime, Bon's project has called attention to the site as the parks department and Angelenos contemplate its future. More photographs and information on Not a Cornfield will be at www.notacornfield.info through 2006.

Posted 5/2006