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Jul

27

Gaps in Our Midst

Filed Under Uncategorized 

The Hortem Obtainium

Great City friend and urban eco-pundit Roger Valdez can be credited for highlighting what he calls “the sustainability gap.” It is the chasm between policy outcomes that fail to reflect an understanding of the perilous path of human civilization is on – especially when said policies are championed by the most ardent political rhetoricians among us.

Crosscut’s David Brewster today laments a different kind of gap – one that is more geographic, although still a result of policy, to be sure. In a post called “Seattle’s Botanical Gap,” Brewster notes the core of our city is “hardened,” reflecting our forefathers’ preoccupation with commerce over livability. The legacy is a concrete jungle, but the opportunistic entrepreneurs who founded Seattle would likely see no problem with that.

In the Northwest’s economic and cultural center a “botanical gap” between modern, urban-livability principles and the reality of the built environment is of our own making, but it is our charge to fill it, nonetheless.  It is a charge we at Great City pursue with zeal.

Seattle’s botanical gap

By David Brewster

Botanical gardens, one reads in The New York Times, are having an identity crisis. Flower shows, horticultural lectures, and garden-club patrons are no longer able to pay the bills. So the gardens are putting on cooking demonstrations, building model green structures, and even inviting in dogs ($2 per canine). Would that Seattle had such a problem.

As it happens, my wife and I were recently at the Denver Botanic Gardens, a very beautiful, tremendously varied facility on Denver’s Capitol Hill. They filled us with envy for such a facility, particularly in Seattle, which has one of the great gardening climates of the world. The extra draw at Denver, one of the country’s largest botanic gardens, was a show of a score of major Henry Moore sculptures, gorgeously sited amid pools, on hillocks, and among the blooms.

Such facilities are the legacies of earlier benefactors, the kinds of worthies who normally contributed and laid out major downtown parks. The Denver gardens used to be closer to downtown, but they suffered from constrained space and some vandalism before moving into a handsome residential district. Denver has the nation’s best public support for arts and “scientific institutions” such as the botanical gardens, so these facilities are flourishing. (The mechanism is a tenth of a cent of sales tax spread over seven counties, raising $40 million a year in public support.) More…

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