The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism [Hardcover]

Hal K. Rothman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 2, 2004

From Yellowstone to the Great Smoky Mountains, America's national parks are sprawling tracts of serenity, most of them carved out of public land for recreation and preservation around the turn of the last century. America has changed dramatically since then, and so has its conceptions of what parkland ought to be. In this book, one of our premier environmental historians looks at the new phenomenon of urban parks, focusing on San Francisco's Golden Gate National Recreation Area as a prototype for the twenty-first century. Cobbled together from public and private lands in a politically charged arena, the GGNRA represents a new direction for parks as it highlights the long-standing tension within the National Park Service between preservation and recreation. Long a center of conservation, the Bay Area was well positioned for such an innovative concept. Writing with insight and wit, Rothman reveals the many complex challenges that local leaders, politicians, and the NPS faced as they attempted to administer sites in this area. He tells how Representative Phillip Burton guided a comprehensive bill through Congress to establish the park and how he and others expanded the acreage of the GGNRA, redefined its mission to the public, forged an identity for interconnected parks, and struggled against formidable odds to obtain the San Francisco Presidio and convert it into a national park. Engagingly written, The New Urban Park offers a balanced examination of grassroots politics and its effect on municipal, state, and federal policy. While most national parks dominate the economies of their regions, GGNRA was from the start tied to the multifaceted needs of its public and political constituents-including neighborhood, ethnic, and labor interests as well as the usual supporters from the conservation movement. As a national recreation area, GGNRA helped redefine that category in the public mind. By the dawn of the new century, it had already become one of the premier national park areas in terms of visitation. Now as public lands become increasingly scarce, GGNRA may well represent the future of national parks in America. Rothman shows that this model works, and his book will be an invaluable resource for planning tomorrow's parks.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"A significant contribution to the field and a model for all future studies of the so-called urban park phenomenon. Rothman's ability to place local park developments into a broader regional and national perspective gives the book exceptional strength."--Arthur R. Gómez, National Park Service historian and author of Quest for the Golden Circle: The Four Corners and the Metropolitan West, 1945-1970

"With wit, intelligence, and a lively writing style, Rothman provides an impressive, well researched, and important contribution to environmental and western history."--Albert S. Broussard, author of Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954

About the Author

Hal K. Rothman is professor of history at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and author of Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century and Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West, which won the Western Writers of America Best Western Contemporary Nonfiction Award.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: University Press Of Kansas; 1st edition (February 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0700612866
• ISBN-13: 978-0700612864
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,578,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New Challenges in Park Management, November 17, 2004

By 

Ranger Reub (Cedar City, UT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism (Hardcover)

Completing a full-length history of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) might seem odd considering its relative youth compared to other national park areas. Hal Rothman, chair of the history department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas demonstrates the park deserves such a study because it is different than anything the National Park Service has managed before. At GGNRA, the traditional NPS management style had to be adapted for a dynamic urban population that visited the urban park for a variety of reasons, most of which were not the typical uses long-established in the bureau's "crown jewels" like Yellowstone, Yosemite and Glacier.

Accustomed to exerting great influence in and around its larger, more conventional parks, at GGNRA the park held "one of many seats at a regional political and economic table" (x). Residents did not defer to park management like they had in and around the crown jewels. Previously, national parks functioned more as symbols than participatory reality (2). At GGNRA, the park service had to accept fully participating public and break its affinity to hiking by admitting visitors that enjoyed activities such as biking, hang gliding, skateboarding instead of simple sightseeing.

GGNRA has presented many management challenges. The park is largely without boundary signs or markers and it has been easy for visitors to overlook its national status (61). Many areas of the park contain private property, which is a source of management difficulty because the owners' decisions could impact visitors experience in the park and the park's ecology (94). Unlike any previous national park, GGNRA established a Citizen's Advisory Board. The NPS has greatly heeded to public comment in shaping management practices. The park presented one of the most comprehensive management plans ever enacted (62).

Interpreting became the linchpin of the park, a way of communicating to its endless constituencies. Instead of merely explaining features, interpretation in GGNRA explained the very presence of the Park Service (150). Interpretation and management of the park will always be a challenge, according to Rothman, because GGNRA is "asked to be all things to all people, all the time" (xi). GGNRA is a prime example demonstrating that no single presentation will impress all national park visitors. Multiple presentations must exist to appeal to a public that visits national parks for a myriad of reasons. Nowadays national parks are anything and everything to visitors, depending on their interests, whether they are recreational enthusiasts or car-bound sightseers.

The book contains one large map of the park, but no photographs or more detailed diagrams. The narrative would be thoroughly enriched by providing its readers with a means of visualizing the locations described. In the introduction, Rothman states that the Park Service embraced recreation in the 1960s. The park service, in reality, has embraced recreation since its inception. The author declares later in the narrative that the NPS was more accustomed to viewing its visitors as hikers and equestrians than bikers and skateboarders. Hiking and horseback riding are definitely forms of recreation. These small weaknesses aside, The New Urban Park proves a thorough study of how NPS management has had to reinvent itself to take on the administration of sanctuaries that appeal to a wider public than it has traditionally served.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good management history but neglects the larger philosophical question, October 8, 2007

By 

Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The New Urban Park: Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Civic Environmentalism (Hardcover)

In this book, Hal Rothman provides a history of Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). Rothman sees this as an example of a new type of urban park, though he doesn't really spend any time comparing it to Gateway NRA in New York, Cape Cod NRA outside Boston, Cuyahoga NP outside Cleveland, Santa Monica Mountains NRA outside Los Angeles, and the many other examples of urban national parks - - which should probably include the open spaces in Washington DC such as Rock Creek Park and the National Mall, for that matter. Instead, he views GGNRA more or less as one of a kind, despite the title of the book.

Two related themes take up most of his book: "civic environmentalism," that is, the local interest groups that pushed for the park and that shape its every action; and the management challenges that the National Park Service (NPS) faces in this environment. These challenges include issues such as dealing with natural and man-made fires, off-leash dogs, a nude beach, protecting cultural and historic resources, and figuring out what to do with Alcatraz. Most of the book deals with such matters and the politics around them. Rothman's narrative always risks going off into minutiae, but he keeps his eye on the larger management issues.

Rotman also includes lots of "obiter dicta" in his narrative - - opinionated and unsupported comments about American politics and society that are irrelevant for the story here. It's indicative of this predilection that Rothman mentions Ronald Reagan and his Interior Secretary, James Watt, far more than he mentions Nixon, Carter, Clinton or either Bush, or their Interior Secretaries. Rothman would rather get in some digs at Reagan and Watts as he tells the story, though these two figures were no more involved in decisions at Golden Gate than, say, Clinton and Babbitt.

Aside from that distraction, this is an informative and well-crafted book. I'd like to know more about why people think Golden Gate is a *national* resources as opposed to a state or regional resources, and in fact many of its properties used to be state parks. Given the remarkable diversity in resources, why should all these non-contiguous units be gathered together in a single national recreation area? Rothman never addresses this larger issue, which seems to me a fundamental policy question about these kinds of parks.