Murphy Park
From CollabLandWiki
Case Study: WJ Murphy Park, 58th Avenue and Glendale Avenue, Glendale, Arizona
Location: 58th Avenue and Glendale Avenue, Glendale, Arizona
Designer:
Design/Programmatic Goals: The land that is the park was gifted by WJ Murphy with the intention and stipulation that the land remain a park. As the city around it grew the park added several different elements to it to support various activities such as walkways, trees, large open areas for markets and festivals.
Strengths/Weaknesses: The main strength of the park is its location. It is located in downtown Glendale and is surrounded by office complexes, restraints, and shopping areas. It also has two main bus lines going by it and free on-street parking. Other strengths include the access to the interior of the park and the openness for various activities. The other strength is the one pine tree that serves as the city’s Christmas tree. Weakness could be not enough parking areas for larger events, no children areas, and noise control.
Successes/Failures: Part of this parks success is the amount of people that it brings downtown; approximately 95% of the city’s population has been to the downtown area for something other than business. Other successes include the number of major activates that it brings in throughout the entire year, from “Glendale glitters” during the time around Christmas to the “Jazz Festival” in April. In all of the information that I went through, there were no identified failures of Murphy Park. One might say that a potential failure would be the location of the library in the middle of such a busy park, or the lack of noise barriers to block out the street noise from Glendale Avenue which has 45,000 cars driving past the park each day.
WJ Murphy Park is named for WJ Murphy who donated the land to the city of Glendale in 1909. It is roughly 3 acres in size with more than 100 trees providing shade from the warm Arizona sun. The original city library sits in the middle and the City Hall is connected to the park through a glass amphitheater. The park hosts many different events throughout the year. During the winter months the park has “Glendale Glitters” and “Enchanted Evenings”, for February the pine tree gets covered in heats for Valentine’s Day, in the summer there is the Jazz Festival, Water and Watermelon, and the Glendale Saturday Market. This park sees more than a million visitors a year and has 95% of the city’s population visiting the downtown area. This park has many flower beds and grassy areas that are cared for by a Gardner specifically hired just for the care of the park.
Critical Review:
The article that I read was Parks as Mirrors of Community: Design Discourse and Community Hopes for Parks in East St. Louis. The article starts with a discussion on how the issues of race and poverty segregation can affect the area. When the parks of St Louis were first being developed, the issues of race segregation were so prominate that there was actually a specific park designed for the African American community. The article then goes on to describe how the city of St. Louis was formed. What America was doing at this point in time and how that was shaping the city growth and planning. St. Louis has changed its park plan many different times throughout its history, each time adapting to the trends of the time and the current state of the city. From here the article focused on specific areas in St. Louis: Jones Park Fountain, Lincoln Park, and Pullman Porter Park. For each of those it discussed elements already there, changes that were made or proposed and successes or weaknesses of the park.
The strengths of this article lie in the historical information given. It is an interesting concept to try to connect historical events to how parks are designed and who was using the parks. Other strengths are the amount of information that it covers. This paper covers everything from racial issues to American history, from park design to city planning. A weakness of this paper is how it was organized. It was hard to follow where the paper was going and it didn’t have much flow to it. This was practically because of the huge differences between the papers title and the first 4+ pages of the article.
There really isn’t much connection between this article and my case study site. One connection that I did make was the potential issues of designing for Caucasians and other minority races, in Arizona there is a large Hispanic community. And although I don’t believe that Murphy Park was designed with the minorities in mind, the park is used by everyone. In fact in September, the Hispanic Community celebrates Fiestas Patrias. More than 10,000 people honor the city's Hispanic heritage with red, white and green flags flying over the park and dancing and singing in the amphitheater.
