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Filling the Vacancy 6 Daylighting streams and reforming our roads offer just two approaches to revitalizing a distressed city. But we’ll need to use multiple strategies to find productive and environmentally clean uses for Detroit’s vacant urban landscape. In this chapter, we look at several more approaches to vacancy, from rescuing vacant lots to filling the space with forestry, artwork, and wildlife habitat. Rescuing Vacant Lots The most basic unit of urban recovery is the vacant lot. So many of the tens of thousands of vacant parcels in cities we find interspersed—one here, two or three there—among still-occupied homes and businesses. Single vacant lots represent the starting point for recovery—or the harbinger of further decline. In Detroit, the smaller house lots run around thirty by one hundred feet, hardly a great deal of land. That’s not even one-tenth of an acre. But leave that single vacant lot to fester, and it infects the entire neighborhood—first the homes to either side or across the street, since no one wants to live next to or look out onto a weed-choked, debris-filled lot. In time, vacant lots can affect an entire street and even a neighborhood. Drive down any street in Detroit and look closely at the vacant lots, and you’ll get a pretty good idea which direction that block is headed. Nothing remains stable; our neighborhoods get better or they get worse. To halt decline and to get neighborhoods moving in the right direction, we need to figure out some constructive uses for our vacant lots. Fortunately, a lot of smart people have been thinking about this very problem. For many years, a neighborhood known as Northern Liberties in Philadelphia was the only zip code in the city to lack a public park. Picture a Philly street scene out of the Rocky movies—gritty brownstone homes lining one side of the street and mills and workshops lining the other. For decades, the 900 block of 02 Ch6_Concl.indd 97 7/16/10 1:51 PM Chapter 6 | 98 North Third Street was home to the American Street Tannery, the sort of smelly business that can define a district. In the late 1980s, after the tannery closed, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the parcel a Superfund site and helped remove the structures. For a while it looked like new residential units might rise there. But those plans died, and the developer donated the site to the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association in 1995. Local residents found themselves the owners of what was now a two-acre vacant lot. It was time, they decided, to create the park they’d always wanted. They envisioned not a passive park with lawns and a few benches, but a park with a purpose, or, rather, lots of purposes. Residents mapped plans for community gardens, a farmers market, and a performance platform to stage events. To get them started, a local nonprofit group gave the neighbors a $59,000 planning grant. The EPA chipped in $15,000 worth of soil testing to make sure vegetables grown there would be safe to eat. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society helped with technical advice.1 A dozen years after they began work, residents today boast that their Liberty Lands park is the heart of a revitalizing community. Park amenities include a fully subscribed community garden with thirty-seven plots, sculpture by neighborhood artists, and a children’s playground. At the lower end of the sloping site, a stage hosts musical performances. During summer months, the neighborhood association screens movies as part of its free weekly Lawn Chair Drive-In series. Perhaps most interesting, the slope of the land was graded to create a small rain garden behind the stage at the lower end of the park. Like many older urban neighborhoods, Northern Liberties never enjoyed sewers adequate to deal with heavy rains. The combined stormwater and sewerage that couldn’t flow through the city’s system spilled instead into nearby rivers. By channeling the rainwater through landscaping, the water flows down into a cistern behind the stage from which trees, plants and grass drink their fill. “This is an old part of the city,” Bob Grossmann of the nonprofit Philadelphia Green told me the day we visited the park. “The sewers here have always been challenged by the amount of stormwater. So this takes some of the pressure off the sewers.” It’s quite a package—locally grown vegetables...

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