A native plant nursery roves the streets of Northern California.
On a sunny September morning, a black box truck rolled into a suburban California neighborhood playing a catchy jingle of insect sounds. The truck stopped and, within minutes, transformed into a verdant plant nursery: The rear door rolled up and its sides folded out, revealing a pop-up shop bursting with native ferns and forbs, saplings and starts. With the addition of decomposed granite, yellow loungers, and recycled crates, a curbside neighborhood hub emerged. Over the course of the day, the quiet residential street came alive with dog walkers, bicyclists, and neighbors interested in buying plants and learning about native vegetation.
The idea for the nursery came about in 2019 as a low-cost and flexible alternative to traditional retail spaces. Miridae, a landscape architecture and construction firm based in Sacramento, California, purchased a graffiti-covered produce truck and slowly started converting it into a plant shop on wheels. Then came COVID-19. “We saw this immense and urgent need for community and super-localized shopping, so we fast-tracked the project,” says Billy Krimmel, Miridae’s founder. In six weeks, the team transformed the truck into a fold-out nursery equipped with misters, irrigation, solar panels, and rows of shelves for showcasing an inventory of native plants sourced from local wholesale growers.
Krimmel says that since launching in the spring of 2020, the Miridae Mobile Nursery has held some 70 events in the region, selling more than 2,600 plants (their best seller list includes Salvia apiana,Bouteloua gracilis, and Elymus condensatus). Miridae employs professional ecologists and landscape architecture students at the University of California, Davis, to staff the truck and provide customers with localized gardening advice. “Our goal is to promote habitat restoration at the neighborhood scale by bringing people together through plants and gardening,” says Kate Hayes, ASLA, Miridae’s design principal. “The mobile nursery provides communities with opportunities to introduce native systems into urban areas where there typically isn’t a lot of biodiversity.”
According to Krimmel, the mobile nursery is all about accessibility to build support for native habitat in neighborhoods and to create community through that. Profits from the nursery help fund the work of Miridae Living Labs, the firm’s nonprofit arm focused on native plant and arthropod research. “Ultimately, we aim to design experiments into all of our projects,” Hayes says, “and to take the data from these experiments and bring it back into our design and build work so that we are continuously learning and adjusting our design process with the findings.”
The Miridae Mobile Nursery and parklet in Davis, California, grew out of a project for a flexible, low-cost plant shop. Photo by Emily Schlickman.
Emily Schlickman is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and sustainable environmental design at the University of California, Davis.
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Posted in ECOLOGY, EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, GARDENS, PLANTS, PRACTICE, STUDENTS, THE BACK, WILDLIFE | Tagged biodiversity, California, Davis, Emily Schlickman, Miridae, Miridae Living Labs, Miridae Mobile Nursery, native plantings, NURSERY, plant, retail, truck, University of California | Leave a Comment
Julie Bargmann and her Core City Park in Detroit. Left photo courtesy Barrett Doherty, The Cultural Landscape Foundation; right photo courtesy Prince Concepts and The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Known for the many students who cite her as an influence as much as for her work as the founder of D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio, Bargmann is revered for remediating polluted and neglected postindustrial sites with designs that celebrate infrastructural refinement and industrial power. A master at regenerating degraded land without erasing its history, Bargmann reveals layers of strata and ruin, but also layers of narrative, granting her projects strength, performance, and a kind of raw beauty.
According to the Oberlander Prize jury, Bargmann “has been a provocateur, a critical practitioner, and a public intellectual. She embodies the kind of activism required of landscape architects in an era of severe environmental challenges and persistent social inequities.”
The award comes with a $100,000 cash prize and two years of public engagement programming focused on the laureate’s work and the importance of landscape design.
A treatment pond at Vintondale Reclamation Park. Photo courtesy D.I.R.T. Studio.
Bargmann has crawled through abandoned mines, been described in magazine headlines as “The Queen of Slag,” and worked with the EPA on design studios focused on Superfund sites. She’s known for her multidisciplinary approach, working with architects, engineers, scientists, ecologists, and artists to expand the bounds of landscape design. At Vintondale Reclamation Park (see “Coming Clean,”LAM, October 2005), Bargmann designed a passive water treatment system in western Pennsylvania coal country, diverting a stream that had been polluted by acid mine drainage and channeling it into six pools where limestone, engineered soils, and plants filtered and cleaned the water. In Philadelphia, her firm designed a campus for Urban Outfitters at a former Navy yard (see “Julie Bargmann Unexpurgated,”LAM, October 2007), largely made from materials salvaged on site: brick, rusted metal, and chunks of concrete large enough to inspire their own nicknames—Barney and Betty Rubble. It’s an approach that kept almost 1,000 cubic yards of waste out of the landfill. More recently, her design for Core City Park in Detroit (see “To the Core,” LAM, October 2020) incorporated an unearthed bank vault and pieces of a 19th-century fire station into a shaded urban grove.
Bargmann is the first-ever recipient of the Oberlander Prize, named in honor of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the pioneering landscape architect who died at age 99 in May. The Oberlander Prize, according to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, is given to recipients who are exceptionally talented, creative, courageous, and visionary and have a significant body of built work that exemplifies the art of landscape architecture.
Bargmann’s approach to practicing landscape architecture was unique when she was developing it in the 1990s, but with her sustained example and influence, it’s become a fully developed practice ethic and design language all its own. She views landscape as “one big machine,” and her work has played a signature role in tearing down false dichotomies between nature and industry, green and gray, and the “natural” and “unnatural.” Through both pedagogy and practice, Bargmann has developed a hybrid synthesis between these seemingly opposed poles, functioning within ecological constraints and lessening the inequities of the built environment. Under her example, this approach has defined yet another way to practice landscape architecture as design activism.
Bargmann’s Urban Outfitters campus in Philadelphia. Photo courtesy Barrett Doherty, The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Other coverage of Julie Bargmann in LAM:
“Prix de Rome Winner,” June 1989, on Bargmann’s 1989–1990 Prix de Rome fellowship, and her proposal to study prehistoric built forms in Europe and examine how they might relate to contemporary environmental art practices.
“Visionary,” December 1994. Selected as part of a jury with a mandate to recognize “visionary” design, Bargmann rejected entries that were “just nice design projects, but didn’t have any content or vision to them,” giving the nod instead to works that “were pretty modest and restrained in their means and engaged the real stuff of places, versus divine intervention via design.”
“Design Culture Now,” June 2000, by Heather Hammatt, on a Cooper-Hewitt Museum exhibition that outlines the conceptual framework for what would become Bargmann’s Vintondale Reclamation Park.
“Let It Be,” December 2004, by Philip Nobel, which sketches out Bargmann’s design competition proposal for New York City’s High Line.
“Contours of Debate,” May 2015, by Timothy A. Schuler, where Bargmann explains her approach to mine reclamation practices that aid biodiversity and acknowledge site history.
“Deep Cut,” November 2015, by Zach Mortice, on the critical role Bargmann played in designing a limestone quarry turned park on the South Side of Chicago that evokes the city’s ancestral landforms.
“San Antonio Takes the Shot,” April 2017, by Jennifer Reut, about D.I.R.T. Studio and Stephen Stimson Associates’ wild, gnarly, and native Phil Hardberger Park in San Antonio.
LAMCAST: Julie Bargmann’s “Toxic Beauty,” March 2021, a Bargmann lecture delivered to her alma mater, the Harvard GSD, where stigmatized landscapes emerge as tragic characters worthy of redemption.
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible, LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish.
The state of Virginia has regulated landscape architecture as a profession since 1980, certifying practitioners through its professional occupational agency. In 2010, landscape architecture became a licensed profession in the state.
A few bills attempted to deregulate or lower the level of regulation back to certification, but none of them made it out of legislative committee. Around 2011, Republican then-Governor Robert McDonnell set up a commission to eliminate regulations in general, including of professions such as landscape architecture and interior design. Members of the Virginia chapter of ASLA persuaded the governor to remove landscape architects from the list.
Robert McGinnis, FASLA, an associate principal at Kennon Williams Landscape Studio and a member of the Virginia ASLA chapter’s government affairs committee, says that interior designers and landscape architects get targeted because people don’t know what they do. “They see the word landscape and think we put trees in the ground.”
“Once we show them what we do, they usually back off,” McGinnis says. “We believe that our defense of our licensure in Virginia is important not just to our licensure but to the entire licensure status of all landscape architects, because once you pull that one licensure out, it will be identified by another state—particularly nearby abutting states—as an example.”
McGinnis has been active in the profession for 35 years and engaged in advocacy for licensure for more than 20 of them. “It is exhausting,” he says. “I never wanted to do it. I wanted to just practice. But once your license or regulatory status is threatened, somebody has got to do something.”
Led by right-of-center advocacy organizations and often funded by private interests, state legislatures have increasingly been writing bills to restrict licensing requirements for professions and occupations. With legislative titles such as the “Right to Earn a Living Act” and “Consumer Choice Act,” the laws are put forward under the premise that professional licensing imposes an unfair barrier to entry into certain types of work, infringes on individual freedom, and increases the costs of services to the consumer.
Lawmakers have included landscape architecture in “right-to-work” bills reflexively, without clearly understanding the nature of the practice or its difference from other kinds of landscape work. Conservative and libertarian lobbying groups such as the Institute for Justice,the Goldwater Institute, and Americans for Prosperity—the latter funded by the libertarian Koch brothers, heirs to the commodities-production-and-trading conglomerate Koch Industries—began pushing these laws around 2016; by now, nearly every state has voted on some version of a law rolling back or limiting licensing requirements.
Licensing laws now guard entry into hundreds of occupations, including jobs that offer upward mobility to those of modest means, such as cosmetologist, auctioneer, athletic trainer, and landscape contractor. Yet research provides scant evidence that licensing does what it is supposed to do—raise the quality of services and protect consumers. Instead, licensing laws often protect those who already have licenses from competition, keeping newcomers out and prices high.
ASLA, other professional design associations, and licensing boards argue, on the other hand—with decades of jurisprudence as evidence—that the rationale for licensing professional practices and occupations derives from the idea that their work can have significant impact on public health, safety, and welfare. The public has an interest in ensuring that someone calling themselves a doctor, engineer, or an architect—or, for that matter, a beautician using chemical agents on clients’ bodies—has adequate education, knowledge, and experience to perform their job without causing injury or harm.
One of the first direct assaults on landscape architecture licensure was in Arizona in 2016. Licensure came up for sunset review, a routine process in which programs, regulations, or agencies are reviewed for relevance. The Arizona ASLA chapter hired a lobbyist, went to legislative committee meetings, and then the licensing board, which makes decisions about licensure applications, passed the renewal through the legislative committee in a unanimous vote. (To get passed into law, a bill has to be approved by the relevant legislative committee, then put on the floor for a vote of all members of the legislature.) In February, a bill came up, introduced by Representative Warren Petersen, a surrogate of Republican Governor Doug Ducey, that included landscape architects with occupations such as geologists, citrus packers, and athletic instructors as licensed work that should be deregulated. The chapter had to scramble to figure out how to respond, with help from ASLA national.
Because the bill was being sponsored by the Republican governor, it was going to be difficult for Republican-majority legislators to vote against it. The chapter’s lobbyist advised a strategy of simply getting landscape architects removed from the bill. Then they notified their membership, called on state universities with landscape architecture programs, and engaged ASLA national and chapters in adjoining states. Students showed up en masse to speak and explained to the governor’s aides that, if the bill passed, they’d have to leave the state to practice after investing in a four-year degree. Within 24 hours, landscape architects were removed from the bill.
Galen Drake, ASLA, a senior landscape architect at J2 Engineering and Environmental Design, was president of the Arizona chapter of ASLA. “After this experience it became clear, especially in 2016, talking to legislators, that they had no clue—no clue—what landscape architects did,” says Drake. “At one point they said, ‘Why do we need registration? Why can’t we just go on Yelp and see who’s good?’ So, our focus became education: Let’s educate them as to what we do.”
Elizabeth Hebron is the director of state government affairs at ASLA, and she has led the fight to protect licensure as attempts to deregulate landscape architecture have proliferated in statehouses over the past five years. Hebron oversees the tracking of licensure bills and coordinating the response to educate lawmakers and the public on the importance of clear, responsible licensing standards for landscape architecture—a highly skilled, technical profession with a direct public impact.
ASLA and the state licensing boards operate independently of each other, but ASLA has been engaging them in recent years through quarterly joint webinars with CLARB, sharing information about what’s happening with legislation, organizing in-person summits, and encouraging closer communication between the state chapters of ASLA and licensing boards.
Hebron gives as examples a boy who nearly punctured his heart because of a spear-like thorny bush on the edge of a playground, and larger-scale flood mitigation failures in Louisiana. In presentations she gives to various groups about the importance of licensure, she offers images of unnavigable driveways laid abnormally steep at nearly 45-degree angles and playground slides that literally run into tombstones.
Anti-licensing advocates invert the logic of harm prevention: Occupations and professions should have to prove a continuing need for regulations. In some cases, they argue for mandating a periodic review or automatic sunsetting of licensing requirements. In the most extreme cases, they claim the free market will weed out the incompetent players and that wrongs can be pursued through the justice system.
In Wisconsin, the battle against deregulation started with a November 2016 report by the libertarian think tank Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty,Fencing Out Opportunity, which argued that occupational licensing creates barriers to employment and identified landscape architecture among the target professions. Republican legislators moved to study an approach to professional licensure involving “self-certification.” Instead of licenses, a Yelp-like review platform would allow consumers to choose self-identified professionals based on evaluation by past clients.
Jonathan Bronk, ASLA, a landscape architect in the campus planning department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was the president of the Wisconsin ASLA chapter at the time. He spoke at the hearing, gathered others to speak, and coordinated with lobbyists to fight the bill. Among the occupations listed for the study, landscape architects turned out in the largest numbers to defend licensure, and the profession was removed from the list for the study. In the end, the bill passed committee but never made it to the floor for a vote; it was not prioritized by legislative leadership.
Recently, ASLA has joined a coalition to defend professional licensure alongside architects, engineers, civil engineers, accountants, and surveyors. Founded in 2019, the Alliance for Responsible Professional Licensing (ARPL) has an office at and receives most of its support from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The other members of the coalition along with ASLA are the American Society of Civil Engineers, CLARB, the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying, and the National Society of Professional Engineers.
To support its defense of licensing, ARPL commissioned a study, published in January, to examine the value of the licensure process and its outcomes from Oxford Economics, a business consulting and forecasting firm. The report found that, as of 2019, nearly a quarter of workers in the United States held a certificate or license, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report cites a public opinion survey finding that 75 percent of the public recognizes the importance of the distinction between trades and “highly technical professions that have a direct impact on public health and safety.”
Oxford also surveyed studies of the impact of licensure on salaries, which indicate that, on average, unlicensed workers earn wages that are 10 to 15 percent lower than those of licensed workers with similar education, training, and experience. Although this figure suggests an increased cost to the consumer, the report cited studies to show that two-thirds of the increase is because a license signals higher productivity on the part of workers. A plumber or an electrician earns more not only because the consumer is captive to licensed workers but because the requirement to have a license—and the specialized nature of the knowledge necessary to perform the job—ensures the consumer a higher value of work. The report also noted that for women and people of color, licensure led to significantly higher wages and earnings, even narrowing the wage gap between them and white men in professions, especially among highly trained professionals. One study found that college-educated women with licenses earned 20 percent more than their non-licensed counterparts, whereas college-educated men earned only 8 percent more than their non-licensed counterparts.
Marta Zaniewski, the executive director of the Alliance for Responsible Professional Licensing and vice president of state regulatory and legislative affairs at AICPA, notes that it isn’t just libertarians and industrial lobbyists who push for limiting licensing. “What we saw that began with the Obama administration and carried on with the Trump administration was suggesting legislation that would take a broad brush to everyone from your manicurist to your engineer, looking at deregulating these professions,” she says. “There was just too much risk [to the public] to say that everyone should reform regulation across the board, and they were fixing something that didn’t need to be fixed.”
Hebron says that ASLA doesn’t necessarily oppose all of the features of the bills when legislated in a careful, responsible way that does not have the potential to affect public health, safety, and welfare. Some of the bills mandate reciprocity of licensing among states, also known as universal licensure, which allows professionals to move and work fluidly across state borders without additional testing, certification, and fees. Some state boards restrict licenses for people who have defaulted on their student loans, a practice that 13 bills have sought to limit. Many boards prohibit licenses for people with criminal records, which could be regarded as further punishing and ostracizing formerly incarcerated persons who have already paid their debt to society. Legislation known as Second Chance Acts limits the use of criminal histories in hiring and eligibility for a license: Sixty-three bills have attempted to limit use of criminal histories in hiring, with 15 of them so far passing and 23 others yet to be voted on.
For some landscape architects, there is also a concern with the barriers licensing creates to the profession, particularly as they impede those who are historically shut out of design fields. The licensing process became particularly arbitrary and onerous in the case of Sara Zewde, the founding principal of Studio Zewde and assistant professor of practice at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
By the time she began her licensing exams in 2016, Zewde had already become fairly recognized in the field. She had topflight credentials, having studied sociology and statistics at Boston University and earning master’s degrees in landscape architecture from the Harvard GSD and city planning from MIT. Zewde started her exams in the state of Washington, where she lived at the time. After she moved to the East Coast in 2018, even though all states use the same exam—the Landscape Architect Registration Examination, developed and administered by CLARB—she had to fly back to Washington at significant expense to finish the examinations where she had originally begun them. By 2019, her exams complete, she then submitted her paperwork for licensure in Pennsylvania, where she had most of her ongoing work. Then came the multiple reference letters and the requirement to undergo a criminal background check in every state where she had lived in the previous five years, involving hundreds of dollars in additional fees. A gap in her timeline in which she was traveling for research raised additional questions with the licensing board, leading them to ask her for additional background checks in those states or an FBI check, which she followed through on.
By this time, it was 2020 in the early months of the pandemic. Zewde’s work had already been published in this magazine, Harvard Design Magazine, and Topos, among other places, and she had been working and teaching in the field for more than five years. Yet the state board rejected her license, saying she should have asked for permission from Pennsylvania to apply for licensure there before she began taking the tests five years earlier—before she knew where she would be working, and something that she says was stated nowhere in any available public information.
During the appeals process, Zewde, who is Black, says she had to submit samples of work to demonstrate her proficiency and was told to prepare for questions from the all-white board in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to prove her credentials, though she had already passed all of the exams. Finally, in the spring of 2021 she received the approval.
“I feel like I stand in a position of privilege, knowing that I am a professor and show some level of competence there,” she says. “Being put in that situation to be voted on by this board is a harrowing experience that I don’t wish on anyone, but I especially don’t wish it on young Black people or young people of color, or young people at all. Knowing that there are [so few] Black women licensed in landscape architecture in the country, it seems like something is wrong with this process. I never even questioned the idea of licensure, but in the form that it exists right now, I cannot defend it.” (In response, the Pennsylvania State Board of Landscape Architects cited the relevant regulatory statutes mandating its requirements.)
CLARB represents the state licensing boards that set policy and developed the universal examination that is used in every U.S. jurisdiction. Veronica Meadows, CLARB’s chief strategy officer, agrees that some reforms in the process could be helpful but defends the public interest in licensing.
“We know that landscape architecture does have a profound impact on people [and] the environment, and so we do push to defend the integrity of licensure in the public’s interest,” Meadows says. “We have obviously seen in the last six years much more significant movement for licensure reform.” She allows that reforms are needed but cautions, “Reducing barriers to entry of a licensed profession that doesn’t have a direct public safety outcome is a good thing. Smart, targeted licensing improvements are important, but those have been hijacked and taken to extreme.”
CLARB joined ARPL as a founding member, and ASLA joined soon thereafter. ARPL provides support to local chapters and boards when proposed legislation would undermine the board’s authority to protect the public interest and works with ASLA and other member organizations to track, monitor, and respond to the legislation. As of today, no landscape architecture licensing restriction has passed in any state, but several sunset regulations, reviews, and studies of the issue have been approved. ASLA and its local chapters remain vigilant, engaging in outreach, activating advocacy networks, and educating legislators about the profession and what landscape architects actually do.
In a sense, professional licensure belongs to a legacy of good multinational and transregional governance and oversight that suffers from being misunderstood and underappreciated, quietly preventing harm without fanfare.
“I have not ever seen what I have seen in the last 10 years,” Robert McGinnis says. “It’s scary to see how this may play out in the future. We don’t know how long we’re going to have to deal with wrong-minded, uninformed individuals who hate government and just simply want to destroy it.”
Stephen Zacks is an advocacy journalist, architecture critic, urbanist, and organizer based in New York City.
Floridians are rallying to restore a uncommon Dan Kiley landscape, starting with 800 trees.
On June 17, 1988, life altered for Laurie Potier-Brown, ASLA. She was dwelling in Tampa, Florida, and doing the job in marketing when also pursuing an MBA. Her company’s offices were being positioned downtown, around the new NationsBank tower, Harry Wolf’s now-legendary concrete silo of an workplace developing. That Friday, through her lunch split, Potier-Brown ventured down to the park that had just opened in conjunction with the setting up. She walked less than the plexiglass-bottomed canal and up into the interesting, leafy garden, and as she wandered by the grove of flowering crape myrtles and listened to the “gurgling of h2o operating in the rills,” Potier-Brown claims she made the decision to abandon everything—her occupation in marketing, her MBA—and turn out to be a landscape architect.
30 decades afterwards, Potier-Brown is portion of a team working to support restore the park that so profoundly altered her occupation. Currently it is acknowledged as Kiley Garden immediately after its lead designer, the renowned modernist Dan Kiley—though for all those who try to remember it, the yard is barely recognizable. Its 800 crape myrtles are gone, as are its allées of sabal palms. The crystal clear-bottomed canal has been taken out, and the reflecting swimming pools 1 the moment crossed have been paved in excess of. “They’re basically parking automobiles exactly where the reflecting swimming pools were being,” suggests Christian Leon, the director of a neighborhood nonprofit and a supporter of the garden’s restoration. “There’s an entire parking garage beneath!”
The suspended structure functioning parallel to the Hillsborough River utilized to be a drinking water feature. Picture by Foto Bohemia.
The space was originally designed as a contemporary leisure backyard impressed by the Persian architecture of the university throughout the river and Wolf’s use of the Fibonacci sequence in the adjacent tower. Primary the force to rehabilitate the room are Pals of Kiley Garden and the Tampa Bay Foundation for Architecture and Design, which have introduced a multipronged marketing campaign aimed at raising two items: a single, consciousness of the garden’s historic significance—Kiley himself imagined it would be 1 of his most long lasting works—and two, dollars for a $2 million endowment to help pay for ongoing upkeep. The precise restoration function, they argue, falls at minimum partially to the metropolis, due to the fact it was the town that eliminated the trees and water functions after exploring quite a few leaks in the garage down below.
Opened in 1988, Kiley Backyard sits atop a multilevel parking structure in downtown Tampa. Photograph by Foto Bohemia.
“In two or 3 days, the city arrived in and reduce down 800 trees,” recollects Linda Saul-Sena, a former Tampa metropolis council member and a founding member of Pals of Kiley Backyard. “I wept. We referred to as it the tree massacre. But the city mentioned, ‘Don’t get worried, we’re going to resolve the leaks and then we’ll put the trees back again.’ But they hardly ever set the trees again.”
To educate Tampa residents about the garden’s pedigree, Buddies of Kiley Backyard garden strategies to deliver the Cultural Landscape Foundation exhibition The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley to the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, situated in just one of Wolf’s jewel-box buildings following to the back garden, in spring 2022. The most urgent obstacle, suggests Shaun Drinkard, the director of public programming and functions for the Tampa Downtown Partnership and a landscape architect by coaching, is the garage, which however leaks, and the mother nature of the ownership settlement concerning the metropolis and the building’s operator. “When you have two proprietors that possess two undefined parts in a garage, when you get to routine maintenance, there’s going to be an undefined line as to how the upkeep is done,” he states.
The backyard as it appeared soon soon after opening, with a collection of fountains and 800 flowering crape myrtles. Image by Harry Wolf.
Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, the president of the Cultural Landscape Basis, factors to Pittsburgh’s Mellon Square, developed by John Ormsbee Simonds in 1955 and restored in 2014, as precedent for the profitable rehabilitation of a fashionable garden amid advanced authorized and structural difficulties. It also sits on top of a parking construction, but was rehabilitated by means of a partnership between the city, the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, and the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. “That’s a great case in point of a multijurisdictional area that was in will need of a principal steward, and the conservancy stepped in,” Birnbaum suggests. “Tampa demands that form of management below.”
