From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national
parks are sprawling tracts of serenity, most of them carved out of
public land for recreation and preservation around the turn of the
last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so
has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be.
In this book, one of our premier environmental historians looks
at the new phenomenon of urban parks, focusing on San Francisco's
Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a prototype for the
twenty-first century. Cobbled together from public and private
lands in a politically charged arena, the GGNRA represents a new
direction for parks as it highlights the long-standing tension
within the National Park Service between preservation and
recreation.
Long a center of conservation, the Bay Area was well positioned
for such an innovative concept. Writing with insight and wit,
Rothman reveals the many complex challenges that local leaders,
politicians, and the NPS faced as they attempted to administer
sites in this area. He tells how Representative Phillip Burton
guided a comprehensive bill through Congress to establish the park
and how he and others expanded the acreage of the GGNRA, redefined
its mission to the public, forged an identity for interconnected
parks, and struggled against formidable odds to obtain the San
Francisco Presidio and convert it into a national park.
Engagingly written, "The New Urban Park" offers a balanced
examination of grassroots politics and its effect on municipal,
state, and federal policy. While most national parks dominate the
economies of their regions, GGNRA was from the start tied to the
multifaceted needs of its public and political
constituents-including neighborhood, ethnic, and labor interests as
well as the usual supporters from the conservation movement.
As a national recreation area, GGNRA helped redefine that
category in the public mind. By the dawn of the new century, it had
already become one of the premier national park areas in terms of
visitation. Now as public lands become increasingly scarce, GGNRA
may well represent the future of national parks in America. Rothman
shows that this model works, and his book will be an invaluable
resource for planning tomorrow's parks.
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