News from PPS

Jazzing up Louis Armstrong Park; Rediscovering the center of Greensboro; Making Places...Journal.

Bringing Music Back to Armstrong Park

We need to introduce music to young ears so that it moves into their hearts, their activities and their emotions.
– comments from an Armstrong Park workshop participant

New Orleans' Louis Armstrong Park has a rich cultural heritage dating from the 19th century, when slaves and free blacks used it for meetings, open-air markets, and drumming celebrations. Today the 32-acre park commemorates the history of jazz in New Orleans, and it has been recognized by the National Park Service as the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park. Yet the place itself lacks a strong identity to match its historic significance, and there is little activity in the park.

On March 27, PPS met with local stakeholders to brainstorm ways to rejuvenate Armstrong Park and make it a place where music can become a living and current concept, especially to young people. One of the most important objectives identified was to establish a positive identity for the park based on jazz and its historic roots in the community. In addition to physical improvements, participants agreed that quality programs and activities were absolutely essential to develop a constituency for the park.

Participants stressed their desire to avoid commercialization by relying on local people and community institutions to spearhead the park's new programs. Their ideas ranged from giving oral histories, to showing movies outdoors, to working with local schools to teach music and dance in the park. The energy to transform Armstrong Park into a great community place was evident from start to finish.

Read more about the PPS approach to park revitalization.

Back to top

Residents Plan New Downtown Park in Greensboro, NC

Shortly after the Armstrong Park meeting, PPS President Fred Kent and Vice President Kathy Madden led a workshop for a park at the other end of the historical spectrum: Greensboro's as-yet-unbuilt Center City Park. The park is the cornerstone of a plan to revitalize downtown Greensboro. Situated among historic buildings and nearby a cultural center, YWCA, and library, the future park could tie together existing institutions and create a "destination place."

The park also presents an excellent opportunity to give Greensboro's diverse population a stronger downtown presence. Different ethnic communities provide many types of stores, markets, and services in Greensboro, but not downtown. The park could help change that by hosting a small business incubator such as a public market.

After the workshop, PPS led stakeholders in a placemaking evaluation--or "place game"--of several key areas around the proposed park. The group developed a range of ideas for making both short and long term improvements to the area around the future park site, including traffic-calming adjacent streets, "wrapping" a nearby parking structure with a mural or scrim, and adding a children's play area by a downtown bus stop.

Click here to download the diagrams PPS uses to evaluate a place.

Back to top

Making Places...Journal

PPS has partnered with Places, a Journal of Environmental Design, to produce an issue devoted to parks and placemaking. The issue, which will arrive in time for Great Parks/Great Cities: Celebrating 150 Years of Central Park, contains an amazing array of material, from talks by Chicago's Mayor Daley and Bogota's former mayor Enrique Penalosa, to profiles of successful park places big and small, from San Francisco's Chrissy Field to New York's Lower East Side bird garden. A timeline of the history of Central Park, with historical photographs, is a central feature. The issue will be available through the PPS website after publication, and will be free to conference registrants.

Back to top