Win-Win

With real, live lions, tigers ‘n bears living yards away from picnickers, joggers, beach volleyball players and the city’s only dedicated bicycle track, Highland Park is surely the most diverse of Pittsburgh’s great parks. 

Those lions, tigers and bears reside in the Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium, tucked away in the Park’s northwest corner along with a delightful zoological mosaic lining the road known as One Wild Place.  The picnickers can be found at any of a score of open air shelters dotted around the 380 acre green space that also includes a faux beach complete with volleyball courts adjacent to a public swimming pool and a pond rather grandiosely named “Lake Carnegie.”  Meanwhile, over and down a precipitous hillside -- and thus separate from the main body of the park -- sits the Bud Harris Cycling Track, a paved half mile oval with banked turns.

But as most any Pittsburgher can attest, the heart of Highland Park is The Reservoir, a man-made, kidney-shaped bowl atop a height of land named for Edward Bigelow (father of the city’s park system) that’s provided drinking water to the city since 1879.  Actually, Highland Park boasts two reservoirs, but Reservoir #2 is locked behind a chain link fence on a knoll above the zoo parking lot, decidedly off limits to the public.  Reservoir #1, on the other hand, has been a magnet for generations of joggers and walkers who circulate its 7/10 mile perimeter and, in the late spring, summer and early fall, enjoy the breezes drifting across its waters against a backdrop stretching from the glass and steel Parklane apartment tower to the middle class houses of Morningside and Stanton Heights across to the rocky bluffs on the far side of the Allegheny River.

One would be hard-pressed to find a resident of Pittsburgh’s eastern neighborhoods who hasn’t made his or her share of laps around The Reservoir; or spent an hour or two people-watching or conversing with friends, neighbors and former strangers while perched on one of the benches dotting the asphalt path around its perimeter.

This central component of life in the East End was at risk in the 1990s when the EPA concluded it wasn’t such a great idea for city residents to be drinking water from a man-made lake exposed to the witches-brew of airborne toxins and carcinogens that continued falling to earth even after Pittsburgh cleaned-up its infamously polluted skies in the 1950s and ‘60s, and the sources of much of that pollution vanished (along with the steel industry) in the ‘80s.  The government’s proposed solution was inelegant at best, hideous at worst:  a cap/roof that would have transformed the beloved Reservoir into the aesthetic equivalent of a parking lot.

Years of legal wrangling ultimately produced a remarkable victory for common sense when a host of government agencies, environmental organizations and community groups agreed on an alternative that not only alleviated the need for that monstrous roof, but resulted in a couple of added attractions to Highland Park.  The plan featured a new microfiltration plant (housed in a building designed in architectural harmony with the Park’s existing structures) along with a “water feature” - a “Babbling Brook” that naturally de-chlorinates and aerates water from The Reservoir as it tumbles down the hill to Lake Carnegie.

In the process, the Babbling Brook crosses one of the least-utilized features of Highland Park – its network of woodland trails.   While the walk around The Reservoir draws people by the hundreds daily, I rarely encounter anyone while hiking the gently meandering trails encircling Mt. Bigelow.  As with most any urban park, the paths of Highland Park hardly offer a sense of remote solitude akin to the Appalachian or Pacific Crest Trails.  At any time of day the noise of automobile traffic rushing along nearby Allegheny River Boulevard and the freight trains lumbering along both sides of the river is with you.  On summer days, sounds of picnickers and their radios drift among the trees; on occasion, the roar of lions and cries of peacocks penetrate the woodsy calm as well.

Still, the hiker able to compartmentalize the disparate elements of Highland Park’s soundtrack can pause on the new footbridge spanning the Babbling Brook, focus on the patter of The Reservoir’s water “aerating” on its merry way down to Lake Carnegie and, for a few moments, imagine he is standing at the headwaters of the Shenandoah or Snoqualmie Rivers . . . and give thanks that, every once in a great while, what initially seems to be the clash of regulatory agencies, environmental groups and civic organizations produces a win-win outcome for everyone.