Public engagement drives multimillion-dollar renovation in City Lake Park

By Dave Toms

The year was 2017. Like a time-worn photograph, City Lake Pool showed its age. The 1.25 million-gallon “cement pond” was quickly becoming obsolete in an era of lazy rivers, water cannons, and colorful dumping buckets. It was due for a significant renovation. However, contemplating change was no small feat, as both the pool and its namesake park had become integral to the City of High Point’s cultural identity over the past century, making any transformation a challenge.

Safe spraygrounds are necessary for young patrons

By Nikki Kelly

Waterparks are the rock stars of summer, with their towering slides and lazy rivers attracting thrill-seekers of all ages. But let's be real—they're not always the best fit for the smallest adventurers. With height restrictions and associated fees, waterparks can sometimes leave toddlers and younger school-aged kids high and dry.

A hydrogeologist offers perspective on water-management solutions

By Rob F. Good Jr.

Golf course irrigation has become a highly engineered science of pumps, piping, sprinkler heads, controls, automation, and telemetry, configured to maximize efficiency and conservation. Advances in system design have been driven by architect and player expectations for optimum turf conditions and the endless struggle between turf disease and fertility. Decisions about application rates, frequency, duration, and coverage have become more technical, with the added pressures of balancing expectations, performance, and environmental awareness. All of these factors have forced a keen focus on the most important resource for any irrigation system-water.

The case for restorative waterparks

By Karen Fischer

One hot summer day when I was five years old, my mother broke her ankle coming down a slide in a busy waterpark. In the chaos that ensued, kids crowded around me, stretchers carried my mother off over my head, and I couldn’t find the family friends with whom we’d traveled to the park. It was a nightmare.

A horticultural oasis reimagined for music and play

By Jody Ashfield

Botanical gardens are often thought of as serene settings, spaces for horticulturalists and garden enthusiasts to discover and research flora and fauna. Research and education at botanical gardens around the world have been vital in protecting endangered plant species. However, a botanical garden in Florida has started to reimagine what these gardens can look like by creating an innovative space in which play and music coexist alongside the important horticultural work the gardens carry out.

The Land sports complex features flexible designs for a vast range of activities

By Nick Henninger

The Land is a premier sports, recreation, and events complex currently under construction in Saraland, Ala. The $72-million park spreads across 100 acres and will offer a wide range of indoor and outdoor amenities. The goal of the facility is to service the local community, but the space will also provide opportunities for regional tournament play, bringing additional revenue from sports tourism to the local economy.

How the Oregon coast became accessible to everyone

By Melissa Hart

In 1966, having witnessed how property owners cordoned off private beaches in California and Washington, Oregon Governor Tom McCall alerted the media and jumped into a helicopter. He disembarked outside a Cannon Beach hotel and lobbied for public ownership of the coast from sea to vegetation lines on dry, sandy beaches. McCall signed The Beach Bill into law on July 6, 1967, declaring Oregon’s beaches accessible to everyone.

The Marina Park Sailing and Boating Center makes watersports accessible to all

By Gale Nye Pinckney

“We giggled like kids when we got back to the dock. We had that much fun!” That’s how a longtime instructor described a recent ocean sailing class at Marina Park in the City of Newport Beach, California. “The wind was blowing hard, and we all worked well together as a team steering the boat through the big puffs of wind. The thrill of being on the water just never gets old!”  

Is your community ready for a parkour park?

By Heidi Lemmon

Parkour has been around for centuries and provides a full-body workout, which has led to the development of current fitness trails and military obstacle courses. Modern parkour consists of daredevils leaping between buildings, somersaulting off walls, and scaling tall buildings. This doesn’t really sound like an activity a recreation and parks director would be interested in, but it does sound exactly like a skatepark proposal from the 1990s: a wild idea presented by a ragtag group of kids and young adults to duplicate city obstacles for use in a public park. 

Free fitness programming helps residents rediscover Jacksonville’s parks

By Dan Biederman and Greer Gavin

Riverfront Parks Conservancy (RPC), the nonprofit responsible for the activation of riverfront parks in downtown Jacksonville, Florida, retained the placemaking firm Biederman Redevelopment Ventures (BRV) in June 2023 to plan and implement free public-programming.