You can’t blame Cincinnatians for being a bit touchy about Burnet Woods. The 90-acre, heavily-wooded park wedged between the University of Cincinnati, several of the city’s hospitals and a few of its biggest uptown neighborhoods is one of the city’s most distinctive features and has seen some controversial proposals to change it over the years, many of them battled tooth and nail by the park’s fans.
So it wasn’t a surprise that a standing-room-only crowd of about 200 crammed into the Clifton Recreation Center May 23 to hear presentations about two new possibilities for the park during a meeting facilitated by the Cincinnati Parks Board.
The suggestions come as Cincinnati Parks looks for ways to fund upkeep and improvements to the city's parks. The system needs some $58 million in deferred maintenance, parks officials say, and it's unclear where that money would come from.
“We don’t have any new buckets of resources falling out of the sky," Parks Director Wade Walcutt says. "I’m not interested in making changes for changes sake. But if there’s an opportunity for all of us to get more people into the parks, I think that’s worth exploring. If we have to do that by talking to different partners, that’s worth exploring too.”
Walcutt said the changes proposed are designed to improve the park while bringing in partners who can raise outside money for their projects and provide programing the parks themselves don't have funding for. He says that no parkland would be sold and that neither plan would use taxpayer funds.
One plan, from the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, would place a 25,000 square-foot arts center in the park. The other, from the Camping and Education Foundation, would mean a smaller building occupying about 2,500 square feet, as well as renovations to other park facilities.
Some residents expressed excitement around the proposals, but also had concerns about the fact both partners are private nonprofits building in the public park. Attendees also had questions about how the partnerships would benefit the parks, which is currently grappling with a big funding shortfall for maintenance, and about the possibility of a new parking lot in the woods.
"I think there's a lot of excitement around these proposals," one attendee said. "But the real challenges are how these will address the maintenance and safety issues in the parks? It's unclear that any of these will be a real panacea for those."
Others in Clifton aren’t thrilled by the prospect of a building the size of the CCAC’s at all and predict a divisive battle should it go forward.
“Like many people in Clifton - and in the city - I am frustrated that Burnet Woods seems to be a magnet for construction proposals,” University of Cincinnati History Professor and Clifton resident David Stradling says. “Burnet Woods certainly needs investment, but it doesn't need a 30,000 square foot building and a forty-car parking lot. We have a limited number of park acres, and we aren't getting more. We should not use the current under-investment in the park to claim that a building represents an improvement.”
Changes to the woods have been touchy in the past. When it was initially leased to the city by wealthy Cincinnatians Robert Burnet and William Groesbeck in 1874, the park encompassed more than 170 acres. After the city purchased most of the land outright, it lopped off 74 acres that in 1895 became the home of the University of Cincinnati, which was then seeking to leave its crowded, hill-perched location surrounded by industry at Vine Street and Clifton Avenue. Half a century later, the city gave UC another 18 acres now occupied by the school of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning and other buildings.
Since then, fans of the park have been increasingly vigilant about proposed alterations. Voters in 2015 rejected Issue 22, a controversial charter amendment suggested by Mayor John Cranley that would have created a fund for big changes to the woods as well as many other parks around the city. Some of the suggestions for Burnet Woods in that proposal — a restaurant in the park, for example, thinning out trees, and a Washington Park-like center area —met with big opposition from residents of Clifton and other fans of the park.
Clifton Cultural Arts Center would like to create a three-story facility on Brookline Drive in the park, as well as a surface lot with as many as 40 spaces. That space, which would have a footprint of roughly 8,400 square feet plus additional parking, would replace CCAC's former home at Clifton School. Cincinnati Public Schools reclaimed that facility after a contentious push and pull over the last couple years.
"We've been at a building that is 53,000 square feet," CCAC Executive Director Leslie Mooney says. "We probably need somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 (square feet)" of space. Mooney says CCAC would try to get living building certification for its facility.
CCAC would like to start raising money this fall and begin construction next year. Building could take up to two years, Mooney says. The whole facility would cost between $6.5 million and $9 million. CCAC has more than $2 million it can put toward the building from funds Cincinnati Public Schools reimbursed the center after improvements it made to the Clifton School building. The arts center would raise the rest from donors, Mooney says.
"The parks asked us to put together some very early conceptual plans of where a building of this size could be," Mooney says about diagrams showing the three-story building. "With that said, these are extremely early."
Some Cliftonites support the proposal from the arts center. But Stradling and others are opposed to building in the woods, saying it will disrupt the park’s status as a haven for wildlife.
“While I think the CCAC is a great institution, it absolutely should not be building a building in Burnet Woods,” says urban historian Anne Delano Steinert. “There are countless places a new building could go, but once we take away the essential natural spaces Burnet Woods provides, we will never get them back.”
Another possibility — a "living building" occupying 2,500 square feet south of the lake in Burnet Woods by Hyde Park-based Camping and Education Foundation, a 50-year-old nonprofit that operates urban nature education programs and camping outings locally and at sites in Minnesota.
The foundation partners with Cincinnati Public Schools and other area public schools to provide nature education and camping experiences to youth who might not otherwise be exposed to environs outside urban areas. It also partners with the University of Cincinnati on two nature education courses.
Camping and Education Foundation President Hugh Haller says the proposed facility in Burnet Woods would be a great fit for the organization's mission.
“Why Burnet? It’s centrally located," Haller said. "If we’re going to reach all urban youth, we need a central location. As much as we’re not embedded in this neighborhood like CCAC is, we really value this neighborhood.”
Programming at the building, which would cost roughly $625,000, would include boat-building classes for public school students. Those classes generally run about two weeks and teach students about using basic tools. Other classes would include nature systems education for students aided by the facility's potential geothermal heat, solar panels and other green technology.
The building would also be living building certified, meaning it would have a number of environmentally-friendly features that would both fit in with the park and provide educational opportunities. The Foundation would also like to restore Burnet Woods' Trailside Nature Center and perhaps have its office in the Works Progress Administration-era structure. It would also like to do work on a nearby concession building, trails in the park and the meadow where its education center would be located.
Walcutt stressed that the potential additions to the woods are just ideas. Public input gathered at the meeting tonight and later will be compiled and posted on the Park Board's website, he said, and also presented before the Park Board at its public meeting in June 28. There will also be future public engagement sessions, he said.
“At the end of the day, if everything you hear is absolutely the worst thing you’ve ever heard in your life, good," Walcutt told the crowd gathered tonight. "That’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to have an open dialogue.”
At the May 23 meeting, one resident called the park "an oasis of quietness" and didn't want any additions to disrupt that. Some attendees thought the session should have been a more open listening session asking for suggestions for improving Burnet Woods instead of simply presenting two possibilities.
"Development in the park may lead to development in other parks," Cincinnati Parks employee Jennifer Harten said, reporting out for several other attendees. "It seems to this group that both organizations are private and not open enough to the public. The question came up — are we privatizing our public parks? How does this benefit parks?"
