Sun, Dec 31, 2017 page6

• Revive Taipei’s existing parks first

  • By Lu Ching-Fu 呂清夫
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  Thirty years ago, a politician running for election and promising to build parks would not have had much of an audience, but as the race for the Taipei mayorship heats up, one candidate has proposed creating a “grand central park.” This is a sign that general living standards are improving and people understand that parks are a city’s lungs.

  Having had some free time recently, I took advantage of the good weather to stroll around Taipei’s Guting River Park (古亭河濱公園). It was originally intended to be a wedding-themed park, but while there were lots of people there on the day I visited, there was not a single couple having their wedding pictures taken.

  The best thing about the park is probably the flower gardens, but the props set up for wedding photographers, such as a windmill, a pavilion and a pathway of heart-shaped arches, were in disrepair and rusty. The original design was also very simple, perhaps because of a lack of funds.

  The most worrying part was that the bicycle path and the footpath were combined rather than separate. I felt unsafe while walking along, as most cyclists were traveling at speed, as if they were in a competition, and there were many of them. The danger increased as dusk fell.

  This made me think of Central Park in New York. In a mayoral election in the 19th century, someone brought up the idea of creating a park. The candidate who promoted the concept won.

  This is how New York ended up with Central Park, a slice of pristine land in the middle of a concrete forest. It is surrounded by the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Central Park Zoo and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others.

  A few well-known authors helped bring about the creation of the park, such as Washington Irving, best known for his short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He suggested the city government buy the area where Central Park is now located and leave it as a slice of green land for future generations.

  However, the important thing was the planning of the park. The winner of the tender was Frederick Law Olmsted, who is considered the father of US landscape architecture, and his partners. He made detailed plans for the sculptures in the park and designed an arts promenade that now includes one of the four Cleopatra’s Needles, a bronze statue of Alice from Alice in Wonderland and the Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon.

  The park’s landscaping, which looks natural, was planned in great detail. There are several artificial lakes, long footpaths, two ice-skating rinks, a protected area for wild animals and a playground for children. The 10km-long road surrounding the park is a favorite among cyclists and inline skaters.

  Most bicycle paths go around the perimeter of the park. While there are some bicycle paths closer to the inside of the park, they are still situated near the outer perimeter. They are also all one-way paths that run counter-clockwise. If you want to enjoy the scenery, you can ride your bicycle along the bike path closest to the spot you want to look at, get off and push it.

  In other words, creating a “grand central park” is a massive undertaking, even if we only consider the museums around the park, its sculptures and the plants within it. It is not something that can be achieved overnight.

  The Taipei City Government would do better to first give the parks that already exist a good tidying up — the “urban acupuncture” that people love talking about these days.

  The Guting River Park was very likely a place where people relaxed and were happy during the Japanese era. Offering the city’s most beautiful scenery, it was a place where “the moonlight could shine from the east all the way to the west without being obscured.”

  There was a well-known teahouse there called the Kishu An (紀州庵), and one of the main reasons people would go there for their evening tea must have been the combination of beautiful riverside scenery and good food.

  After World War II, the Kishu An was turned into a dormitory for civil servants.

  However, there was a fire, so all that is left of the original structure is one restored house, from which there is no view of the river. The area around it is now called the “forest of literature” because the writer Wang Wen-hsing (王文興) once lived there.

  During the Japanese era, there were small boats and larger, covered, cruise boats on the river. Tickets for the boats could be bought at Kishu An and people could row them on this “blue highway.” Unfortunately, the river bed silted up after the war and it can no longer be used.

  Since it is a large park, stretching from Guting to Gongguan (公館), there was also a horse racing track, a baseball field and even a sumo wrestling arena in it. These facilities are now long gone.

  It should be easy to manage the area, but it seems impossible for those in charge to even maintain the footpaths, not to mention other issues.

  People should be a bit more pragmatic and make sure the city’s existing parks are first taken care of. If Taiwanese are to look to New York’s Central Park for inspiration, they must first learn to plan footpaths the way New York does.

  Lu Ching-fu is a professor at Fu Jen Catholic University’s Department of Applied Arts.

  Translated by Perry Svensson
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