It would be easy to miss Quaker Park.
Located at the corner of First and Sylvan in Emporia, the park is less than an acre. It has trees and grass, a ball court and a weathered basketball hoop — exactly what you’d expect from a neighborhood park in a working-class part of town. It’s a nice place to shoot hoops or play catch, but it doesn’t feel special. It’s not the oldest park in town. Others are bigger and nicer and have better amenities, including a zoo and several disc golf courses.
So it was no surprise that Emporia put the park on its surplus land list earlier this year, a kind of municipal equivalent of gathering items for a garage sale. Who would really miss Quaker Park? The city could shed the burden of maintenance and set aside land for a modest housing development.
Then something surprising happened.
The residents fought back.
I’m thinking about the petition drive to save Quaker Park because there was recent news in Wichita that the city is considering selling some of its parks to help offset a projected $3.6 million budget deficit by 2026. At a public hearing earlier this month, Wichita Mayor Lily Wu said she was not advocating for closing some of the city’s 146 parks, but all options were up for debate.
The future and function of urban parks is something that cities of all sizes have long debated. Parks are both an expression and a metaphor for democracy; an expression because they are politics made of concrete and grass, and a metaphor because they represent a community’s priorities, no matter what high-sounding marketing language you find on a city’s website. If you want a glimpse into the soul of a community, look at its parks.
While it might be reasonable to assume that there is a metric for how many acres of parks a city should allocate to a given population, there isn’t. While almost every other indicator scales with population—road networks and crime rates, for example—parks and other green spaces don’t.
“There is no clear relationship between urban population and the number of parks per capita or tree cover or even the area that is simply unpaved,” Emily Badger wrote in a 2013 Bloomberg article, citing the nonprofit Trust for Public Land’s study of parks in America’s 40 largest cities.
We’ll return later to an updated version of the Trust for Public Land study, but first—of course!—a little history.
The first urban park in America was Boston Common, created in 1634 and initially used for cattle grazing, militia drills, and public executions. By the time of the Civil War, it had become a place for non-lethal public events and free expression.
While the rich had always had private green spaces, the concept of a public park only emerged in the mid-19th century, with increasing industrialization and the need of the tired and poor to, well, breathe freely. The visionary who gave us city parks as we know them was Frederick Law Olmsted. Now known as one of the designers of Central Park, Olmsted was more than a landscape architect. What he did best was travel and think, and sometimes do a bit of journalism on the side. In 1850, he embarked on a six-month walking tour of England that would forever shape his—and our—ideas of public space. There he visited Birkinhead Park, a “people’s garden” that was (in theory at least) as open to the poorest British peasant as it was to Queen Victoria.
In Parks, Olmsted imagined democracy in action.
Public spaces brought citizens together “with a common goal,” wrote Olmsted, “which was by no means intellectual and competitive with no one. Each individual, by his very presence, contributed to the joy of all others, and all contributed to the great happiness of each.”
Opened to the public in 1858, Central Park has since gone through cycles of decline and restoration. Like other American parks that came later, it has reflected the sensibilities and sometimes passions of its residents, from Victorian dinosaur crazes to the massive free Simon and Garfunkel concert in 1981.
Upstate, our parks are full of history. Here in Kansas, you can hardly visit an older city park that doesn’t have a memorial to the Civil War or a later conflict. In Emporia, I like to walk around Peter Pan Park, a 130-acre site that for about 40 years featured monkeys in a WPA-built stone house in the middle of a lake. Most people here know Monkey Island, but the park still has a few surprises. My path through the park takes me through a wooded area where a lone, pylon-shaped memorial to the Spanish-American War stands.
While many parks originally served as memorials—and originally looked and acted like cemeteries—in later decades the emphasis has been on recreation, from ball fields to wading pools to pickleball courts. This reflects the conventional urban wisdom that parks should be useful in some way, that public spaces should provide a utility alongside, or perhaps instead of, contemplation.
But public parks offer more benefits than just playing or reflecting.
Access to green space is not only important for our health, but it also protects nature, fights climate change, reduces crime and strengthens communities, according to the Trust for Public Land. The original ranking of the nation’s 40 largest cities has been expanded to offer insight into the equity of communities based on what percentage of their residents can reach a park within a 10-minute walk.
The project, called ParkScore, has since expanded to include the 100 largest cities and many smaller cities. You can look up metrics for nearly any urban area on the project’s website. ParkScore uses five metrics: area, access, investment, amenities and equity. Washington, DC, ranks first among America’s large cities.
Wichita ranks 66th. It ranks below average in space, access and investment, but about average in amenities and equity. Only 4% of Wichita’s land is used for parks and recreation, compared to a national average of 15%.
In terms of cultivated area, Emporia performs even worse.
Only 3% of the area is used for parks and recreational areas. However, Emporia has above-average accessibility, with 74% of residents able to reach a park in less than 10 minutes on foot.
Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, was quoted in a recent study by the Trust for Public Land as saying that over the past 50 years, American society has seen a “decay” of public spaces where people gather. But that trend can be reversed by investing in parks and other green spaces, she said.
“The bold, beautiful and exciting promise at the heart of democracy is the idea that bringing people together in a community creates opportunities to learn the skills, abilities and motivations needed to shape a shared life,” Han said.
Does that sound like wishful thinking?
That’s what it sounded like to me at first. Then I remembered the petition to save Quaker Park.
In March, the Emporia City Council voted 3-1 to designate the park as surplus land and approve its sale. The plan called for three homes to be built on the property, two by private developers and one by local organization Habitat for Humanity. Some saw this as a step toward providing housing for the community, but others questioned whether the city should abandon a park in a part of town that didn’t have many parks to begin with.
The park was sold to the city in 1952 by the conservative group Friends of Galena. At that time, it had been a vacant lot for years. A Quaker meetinghouse had been built on the site in 1881, but when the number of Quakers in Emporia declined, the building was sold to another denomination and relocated.
The grassroots effort to save the park had to be carried out in a hurry. The goal was to collect the required 462 signatures on a petition to prevent the sale within 30 days. The signatures had to come from registered voters and the number represented 10% of those who had voted in the previous city election.
Organizers held a barbecue, spoke to journalists and community members, and set up a website. They ultimately collected over 800 signatures. The City Commission reversed its previous decision to declare Quaker Park surplus and for sale.
“We have spoken to so many people throughout this process and the vast majority of people we have met have been willing to sign the petition,” the five organizers said on the website. “The few who have not have always been respectful and we have not had a single controversial encounter. … Parks are a precious asset in our city and we want to preserve them – even if it is not necessarily ‘our’ neighborhood park.”
For Wu, the mayor of Wichita, there are at least a few lessons to be learned from this.
First, people will fight for their city parks.
And secondly, they will do so in a surprisingly civilized manner.
I use the word confusing because virtually any political activity these days is likely to involve a dispute with your neighbor over the garden fence. But not here. Not a single “contentious interaction.” That has to be some kind of civic miracle in 2024.
Since Wu is a registered libertarian, I suspect she wouldn’t be particularly upset about the transfer of public land to private ownership. Libertarians are known for their belief that free markets and private interests can manage assets better than the government. But Wu should take notice of a community coming together to save a city park in a neglected neighborhood.
So let’s hear “Save Quaker Park!”
Maybe that’s exactly the lesson we need to save democracy. Or at least it might make opportunistic politicians think twice before picking out office furniture for a city garage sale.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through his opinion section, the Kansas Reflector seeks to amplify the voices of people affected by public policy or excluded from public debate. Information, including the ability to submit your own comments, can be found here.
