HomeMy WebLinkAbout2/2/2021 Item 11, Papp
Wilbanks, Megan
From:James Papp <
To:E-mail Council Website
Subject:Proposed Mitchell Park pickle ball courts
Attachments:Mitchell Park pickle ball courts.pdf
Dear Council Members,
Please see the attached PDF describing substantial adverse change in the significance of a historic resource (the 80-year-
old X-form town square of Mitchell Park) in the proposed pickle ball courts proposal.
Sincerely,
James
James Papp, PhD
Historian & Architectural Historian
805-470-0983
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1
Aerial views of Mitchell Park since its transformation from a baseball diamond to a town
square in the 1930s, showing the evolution and persistence of its historic X form. This
organic pattern, born out of the desire for shortcuts, characterizes the four squares (now
Rittenhouse, Franklin, Logan, and Washington) that William Penn laid out in the late
seventeenth century for the corners of Philadelphia as the first planned city, “a green
country town that will never be burnt and always wholesome.”
1937 (the earliest available)
1947
2020
1941
1959
Proposed pickle ball courts
Unlike English squares, which are largely private, American squares developed as public
access and quickly grew X forms. The ability to cut across it is one of the sustaining features
of a successful park—as Jane Jacobs points out in her essay “The Uses of Neighborhood
Parks” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities—as well as a centering, “at the very
least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax.”
In American town life, the X-form square historically functioned not only as a shortcut and
resultant resting and social space but a parade ground and a public meeting space, the
literal and proverbial “town square,” which parks comprising formal gardens, natural or
artificial landscapes, or specialized athletic grounds cannot do. The Mitchell Block and later
Park has hosted congregations of dozens to thousands for everything from President
Roosevelt’s 1903 environmental speech to 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests.
There are essentially seven type of parks: natural landscapes, artificial landscapes,
zoological gardens, formal gardens, formal squares or parade grounds, greenswards, and
specialized athletic facilities. If a park is large enough, it may accommodate more than one
type. Probably the only park that accommodates all seven is New York’s Central Park,
which is larger than the principality of Monaco and segregates each type. Its nearest effort
to combine types—athletic facilities and a town square, by making the Great Lawn and its
softball fields a space for concerts in the 1970s—resulted in the Great Dust Bowl. Also
because of the softball fields, most of the Great Lawn doesn’t function as a greensward;
people picnic and sunbathe in the Sheep Meadow, where they are not at risk of being hit by
balls or bothered by noisy games.
No one expects a pickle ball court in a natural or artificial landscape, formal garden,
zoological garden, or town square; equally, no one expects a flower bed, sea lion pool, or
public meeting in the middle of a pickle ball court.
Of some 42 parks and open spaces in San Luis Obispo, 4 over 50 years old retain their
historic form: the Jack Garden (a Gardenesque landscape designed and planted in the
1880s), Triangle Park (a greensward established circa 1909), Mitchell Park (an X-form
town square developed in the 1940s), and Mission Plaza (redesigned and rebuilt 1969–70).
The substantial evidence above provides fair argument that the proposed pickle ball courts
would cause a substantial adverse change in the significance of a historical resource: the X-
form town square of Mitchell Park, undisturbed in its current form for some 80 years and
center of the Old Town Historic District. It is not clear why the staff report of 2 February
2021 considers the pickle ball courts not a project, but if it is because the author believes
them to have a categorical exemption, they clearly trigger an exception to the exemptions
under 15300.2 (f). There are 38 non-historic parks and open spaces in San Luis Obispo
where pickle ball courts might be placed without creating substantial adverse change in the
significance of a historical resource, even parts of Mitchell Park where no such adverse
change in the significance of a historical resource would be created—but not plopped down
like an alien spacecraft in one quadrant of the city’s historic X-form town square.
James Papp, Historian and Architectural Historian
Secretary of the Interior Professional Qualification Standards
Former Chair, City of San Luis Obispo Cultural Heritage Committee
2 February 2021