Schenley Park circa 2012

Nestled between and wrapping around Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh is one of America’s great urban oases: Schenley Park.   Given its location, Schenley Park is hardly a secret to Pittsburghers; indeed, according to official city literature, it is the most heavily used of all Pittsburgh parks, outstripping the likes of Frick, Highland and Riverview Parks.

Still, just as the vast majority of visitors to Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks eschew the almost limitless back country to congregate in what amount to wilderness ghettos around Old Faithful and Yosemite Valley, so visitors to Schenley Park tend to gravitate to Flagstaff Hill and Schenley Overlook, leaving the bulk of its 435 acres of woodsy ravines and hollows to squirrels and skunks, robins and cardinals, garter snakes and salamanders . . . and the joggers, mountain bikers and walkers who travel a network of developed paths and unofficial trails winding through the park.

There is any number of starting points for these trails but the most dramatic entry to the park’s interior is along the path dropping into Panther Hollow behind the Schenley Park Visitor Center.  Just as one leaves the hubub of the Grand Canyon’s South Rim behind after a few steps along the Bright Angel Trail, so the mechanized noise Pittsburgh recedes as you descend into Panther Hollow.  Mind you, the sounds of the buses, sirens and horns never completely disappear; they just resonate on a separate, higher plane -- like the sounds of clouds -- the deeper you drop into the ravine, even as you became increasingly aware of Phipps Run gently splashing below.

There’s more to your insulation from the urban environment than sound, of course:  The musky aroma of the muddy stream bed soon supplants the smell of burning fossil fuels; the impossibly complex visual jumble of underbrush, tree trunks and branches takes the place of rigid architectural regularity.  There’s a gently winding trail instead of a broken sidewalk and and—what’s this – a mossy stone bridge, elegantly arching across the stream.

Some fifty years after Mary Croghan Schenley bequeathed what was then known as the Mt Airy Tract to the city, the Works Progress Administration codified the raw trails coursing through the park by constructing graveled pathways such as the Bridle Path and Panther Hollow Trail and, in more than a dozen instances, bridges of tufta and other rocks pried from the surrounding landscape.  The result was an idyllic urban woodland landscape of graded pathways and graceful bridges spanning gently sculpted streams destined for Panther Hollow Lake, where folks could fish, rent small rowboats and, in the winter, ice skate.           

     

Panther Hollow Lake is now a case study in neglect, a telling if largely overlooked commentary on shifting civic priorities and capabilities in the past half century. The automobile tires, refrigerators, orphaned gym shoes and other staples of urban trash that poisoned the lake as recently as the 1980s may have been removed, but it remains a decidedly uninviting brown pool sprinkled with downed tree limbs and reeds sprouting from its murky waters.  Likewise, some stretches of the nearby stream beds are choked leaves, forcing the eroding water onto adjacent pathways.

By no means is Schenley Park a disaster area.  For the most part, its trails and pathways are in good shape (although one hillside stretch of the Panther Hollow Trail has collapsed), its tufta spans are rock solid and there is no litter to speak of.   But a sign near the Visitors Center speaks of “severe erosion, crumbling infrastructure and declining populations of native plants and wildlife” and a “once glistening water retreat . . . filled to a third of its original depth with silt.”  That same sign notes the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, the City of Pittsburgh and other groups are working on ecological restoration, remedying erosion and “rampant” populations of invasive plants as first steps in reestablishing a healthy environment “that could sustain the lake’s eventual restoration.” 

     

These words, coupled with images from a walk in Schenley Park on the cusp of 2012, scroll through my mind while reading a notice from Allegheny County informing me that my home has been reassessed at roughly triple its previous value.  Like many Pittsburghers receiving similar news of this, the first county-wide property reassessment in a generation, I am taken aback by the numbers.  Still, I can’t help but ponder the infrastructural decay embodied by Schenley Park or more telling, the deaths of three motorists in a flash flood near my house this summer at an improperly drained traffic intersection.  What if we had all been paying taxes on the real values of our properties for the past thirty years . . . including the non-profit institutions that have emerged as the new economic foundation of a region whose manufacturing base evaporated in the 1970s and ‘80s?

Would Schenley Park still be the glistening urban jewel it once was?  Would the people who drowned on Washington Boulevard still be alive?

Those to whom the terms evil and big government are synonymous would, of course, say "Are you crazy? The additional revenue would have wound-up in the pockets of the pols or been pissed down the drains of various boondoggles.”  Those who believe an active government can be a positive force would, of course, say “Of course! The additional revenue would have enabled Pittsburgh and Allegheny County to maintain its ‘crumbling infrastructure.’”

We can never know what would have been.  But one thing is for sure: Unless and until everyone pays their fare share – and takes an active role insuring that all levels of government spend revenues wisely – maintaining places like Schenley Park will continue to be an uphill battle . . . and people will continue dying at places like Washington Boulevard and the I-35W and Silver Bridges.