Perhaps we should refer to them as unfortunates.

Take a couple home if you like, try to improve them, but first lock up the liquor cabinet, hide your money, jewelry, and tau beta pi pin.

Within the context of how much parkland we have, we must also consider the various uses. Nature areas can be quite large, but offer only limited recreation. Active uses have less impact on environmental protections. We need a good balance. We should not allow that discussion to proceed while failing to recognize the need for more parks space.

I think a more useful indicator would be some sort of primacy measure that takes in the distribution of parks by size. A city might have a zoo, which is really large and then just a few other parks. I wouldn’t want to rate that city’s parks per capita the same as a city that had 50 parks.

Likewise, I think one gets more bang for the buck with linear park, with might be 50 feet wide and 20,000 feet long as compared to that same configuration as a square. Almost all parts of that 50 foot width will be traversed. Some parts of the Arb are probably never walked on except by squirrels and stray dogs.

That said, I think cities need all sorts of parks.

3. Plymouth’s Kellogg Park is on their Main Street, in the historic core (the town grew up around it), and is therefore surrounded by their best shops and restaurants. In contrast to Library Lane, it does not face alleys, the sides and backs of buildings, or a bus station. It is comparable to how the campus evolved around the Diag.

And I would second the demolition of the Federal Building, but that doesn’t look likely anytime soon.

Plymouth’s town square is nice indeed, but I see two key differences with our situation here:

1. There are many more residential neighborhoods within a short walk of downtown Plymouth, so that townsfolk and their families can easily get to the town square and enjoy it. (Ann Arbor has a few on the west side, but north, east, and south are all surrounded by UM and student housing)

2. Plymouth has a negligible homeless population compared to Ann Arbor.

The Library Green group, of which I am a member, has revived an idea that has been around for generations – predating the relatively recent documents cited in the anonymous comment #3 – the goal of recreating Ann Arbor’s lost town square. This isn’t some opportunistic idea conjured up to block a particular development proposal. The Library Green’s push for a public open space on the Library Lot is not “narrow.” Rather, we seek the kind of open, inclusive community dialogue that it seems like the Parks Advisory Commission is working toward [link]. Those who claim that the “Connecting William Street” (CWS) process was “open and transparent” should look at it more closely if only to ensure that we never repeat that mistake. For those who want to better understand how the DDA’s CWS process is flawed, the Library Green put forth a detailed critique: [link to .pdf].