Public Employee Press

Profiles in Public Service
Green Magic

By JANE LaTOUR

Parks Dept. Landscape Architect Katherine Bridges brings New Yorkers in every borough access to open space, sunshine and fresh air, contact with nature, active recreation, and the joy of sharing them.

When she designs parks, she considers the needs of the people using them and the workers who take care of them, the politics and history of the site and the budget and materials available.

"My purpose as a designer," she said, "is to weave all of them together harmoniously, like the conductor of an orchestra who brings each instrument to its optimum function so beautiful music results."

A tour of her creations since she started her career at the Parks Dept. in 1989 demonstrates her imagination and versatility, as well as the depth of her knowledge about the natural environment.

Power of design

The new Robert Venable Park in East Brooklyn (see photos) - one of 22 parks she has designed - shows the transformative power of design. There, she replaced a flat asphalt lot with hills, greenery aplenty and opportunities for active recreation for all ages. "I selected a theme of fitness and collaborated with graphic artists to develop panels of fruits and vegetables and panels with an anatomical theme."

Bridges' talent has gifted the city by upgrading parks with restored historic monuments and woodlands. A rainbow and labyrinth theme marks the Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, which is dedicated to a woman who organized in Bushwick to drive out drugs but was gunned down by dealers in 1989.

A member of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375, she led a team made up mainly of union members who recently renovated Canarsie Park, starting with a community "wish list" and including environmentally sustainable grasslands, woodlands and wetlands.

On her own time in the northwest Catskills mountain hamlet of Hamden, N.Y., Bridges restored one of the last one-room schoolhouses, which sits on land that has remained untouched for decades and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

"I could see that the one-room schoolhouse tradition, which ended 57 years ago, was still important to the community," she said. She plans to use the building as a community center for nature walks and studies and yoga classes.

The building is featured in a book, "Old Golden Rule Days," which tells of the one-room schoolhouse tradition and the building's history is available at: http://www.nps.go/nr/feature/weekly_features/11_06_10_schoolhouse5.htm.

Growing up in an urban landscape in the 1960s, Bridges missed out on wildflowers, plants and trees, but she said she "loved the mountainous, native landscape she found during childhood summers in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

She studied in the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia. After graduating, she spent ten years working and traveling, gathering valuable experiences which now inform her designs. Her schooling included the principles of environmental preservation.

"Sustainability is inherent in my profession," she said. "The interconnectedness of all of life, working with nature and conserving resources was fundamental to what we learned. These concepts have always been fundamental in my designs and are thankfully becoming an integral part of the sustainability movement. I believe an abundance of parks and open space is essential to healthy urban living."