Growing up in the country, I never gave much thought to city parks. Who needs a park when you have so much space to play?

When the children were grown we moved to a small old house on Melbourne Street on Munjoy Hill. Our house had a postage stamp garden barely big enough to throw a ball in. But just across North Street was Fort Sumner Park. That became our new garden where my grandson and I played catch and football. A photographer from this newspaper took a picture of 6-year-old Teddy kicking a football and put it on the front page of the local section.

That’s when we realized why cities need parks. In densely populated areas, not everyone can have a garden, but everyone needs one.

Seven years later, we moved over the hill to Sheridan Street, to a house with no yard. So the Eastern Prom Parks became our yard, where we walked, played, sat, picnicked, gardened, and enjoyed the incredible views of Casco Bay and its hundreds of islands.

A lot has changed in Portland in the nine years since we last moved, but the 68-acre Eastern Prom, a jewel-encrusted necklace that encircles the peninsula from the Old Port all the way to Mount Joy Orchard on Washington Avenue, has only gotten better.

In 1883, Portland historian William Gould declared, “The Eastern Promenade commands a finer view than any other open space in the city, and should be preserved as an open space.”

This has been done to the great credit of the city and thanks to the Friends of the Eastern Prom and a number of other organizations. It was Gould who first proposed the idea of ​​the park when a hotel was proposed for the present site of Fort Allen Park at the tip of the peninsula.

In the years that followed, Portland secured 21 acres of waterfront land and Eastern Promenade Park was created. The design was entrusted to the landscape architecture firm of Olmsted Brothers, the most renowned park designers in the world.

According to the Olmsted Network, the company believed that urban parks in densely populated cities would meet “basic social and psychological needs” and that “connecting to nature in urban areas would be restorative and beneficial to mental and physical well-being” while also helping to “foster a sense of community.”

Today, as cities like Portland attract more and more people who need more housing, the Olmsted philosophy is more important than ever. Because Portland is surrounded by water, it has little room to grow except upward. One of Portland’s newest apartment buildings, the Casco on Federal Street, is now the tallest building in the state.

Portland desperately needs housing. But the more we stack homes on top of each other in condos or apartment buildings, the fewer people will have backyards to enjoy. The city’s parks are becoming our shared backyards. Protecting parks has never been more important.

Portland residents know this. That’s why, in 2017, when a housing development on Sheridan Street threatened to block Fort Sumner Park’s coveted sunset views, residents responded with a campaign to permanently protect the view through a zoning amendment. The City Council approved it, forcing the developer to remove the top floor from the design. The view was preserved thanks to the Friends of Fort Sumner Park, the work of hundreds of residents, and the common sense of the City Council.

But Eastern Prom’s parks face new challenges. The Portland Planning Board is currently developing recommendations for the Planning Department to finalize Phase II of Portland Recode, a comprehensive redesign of the city’s land use planning. Current land use regulations require that “buildings and structures shall not obstruct important views currently available to residents, pedestrians, or users of the site.” Portland Recode should take this concept into account.

Such a threat already exists at 165 Washington Avenue, where under the new zoning proposed for the area, a seven-story, 75-foot-tall building would block popular views of the Portland skyline, including the Cathedral of Immaculate Conception and Portland City Hall. With Recode, more view obstructions could occur along Washington Avenue.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The city’s views can be kept open with the same kind of zoning plan that protected the views of Fort Sumner Park. Hundreds of people have already signed a petition urging the City Council to approve the plan.

The view is an essential part of the park experience. Blocking this popular view would impact Eastern Prom Park, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. But this is about more than just the view; it is about the promise our city leaders made to future generations. They committed to providing park space for the benefit of the public. We must keep their promise. Approving the proposed zoning extension will protect the views of the city and Back Cove.

Future generations will thank us, just as we thank those who had the foresight to create these beautiful parks in the first place.

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