A green gift

Thanks to the Kinders, Memorial Park can become the nation’s top urban park.

“No way!” That’s what many Houstonians say when they learn that Houston’s Memorial Park is bigger than New York’s Central Park. They don’t know that the south side has one of the largest urban forests in the nation or that it even exists. They’ve never gathered under a canopy of trees to host a barbecue with family and friends in the picnic area or visited the bayou’s edge to view its sleepy and winding progress.

Nancy and Rich Kinder have offered a $70 million grant to Memorial Park Conservancy that will change that. The largest greenspace donation in the city’s history is going to help the public experience much more than a nearly three mile running trail with an adjunct golf course and several little-used and obscure side areas. Instead, we’ll be able to see the park as one integrated place containing varied opportunities for reflection, recreation and respite.

Houston has suffered multiple blows to its civic pride over the past few years. There was the collapse of the University of Texas plan to build a cutting-edge data science center on 300 acres to keep Houston at the forefront of energy and health industries. And then there was our city’s poor showing in the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters; we didn’t even make the cut as a finalist. Of course, the crowning blow was the devastation of Harvey, which is still wreaking havoc on so many Houstonians’ lives.

But our setbacks as a city should make celebrating our successes sweeter.

All those discouraged about Houston’s long-term prospects should view the Kinder grant as a statement of deep faith in Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, and its continued trajectory to become one of the world’s foremost cities to live, work and play.

It’s more than symbolic that a land bridge across Memorial Park connecting the north side with the south will be first up for development and could be completed in as few as five years. The bridge will not only heal the concrete chasm created by Memorial Drive, but the plan is also a crucial next step in connecting the island of Memorial Park with parks across the city.

It’s also significant that the public-private partnership would release the city from annual obligations of $600,000 for park maintenance and the operation of the Cullen Running Trails Center, enabling the parks department to redistribute those assets elsewhere.

Memorial Park draws its daily crowd from both the city and the state, and the MapMyRun smart phone app lists the park’s Seymour Lieberman Trail as the most popular of its top 20 running routes in the nation. But with gnarly traffic jams becoming more frequent, not everyone is going to be willing to hop in a car and hit the road to join in the communal experience of a run around the park. Some may prefer a stroll around a smaller neighborhood park.

Our city’s strategy needs to be to invest in these neighborhood parks while continuing to promote improvement of its green jewels.

Whether large or small, for dogs or joggers, for bikers or strollers, parks are great equalizers and bring people together. They’re about green space, but they’re also about community. Parks give people a place to gather that’s free.

We owe a Texas-sized thank you to Houstonians Rich and Nancy Kinder. Long after our we’re gone, our children and grandchildren will look to the trees and the sky in what will then be the third largest city in the nation, and they’ll add their thanks, too.