Mary Anne Piacentini Interview, Part 1 of 3

DT: My names David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas.

We are in Houston, Texas and it is February 26th, 2008 and we are going to have the good chance to visit with Mary Anne Piacentini, who is a nonprofit manager for the Katy Prairie Conservancy and previously worked for the Friends of Hermann Park

and before that with the Cultural Arts Council. So she brings lots of skills and experience to conservation and, I guess, civic improvement, you might say and for that I wanted to thank her and also for her time today to talk about it.

MAP: Thanks for asking me.

DT: Sure. I thought we might start in your childhood years and ask you if there were any experiences that might've exposed you to the outdoors, taking you closer to nature that might've somehow planted the seed for the kind of things that you do now?

MAP: Well, you know, it's funny that you say that because when I thought about doing this, you know, I often thought you know, I'm really kind of a city person and I grew up till I was about ten really close to downtown Portland, Maine. I'm from New England.

And really we didnt have much of an opportunity to get out of doors, even though I was right by the Atlantic Ocean and I did go out with my parents. But you know, pretty closely guarded.

And at ten, I moved out to the suburbs, of all things, and the neat thing about where I lived was it was not a classic subdivision. It was an older neighborhood that just had a couple of new houses on it and ours was one. And at the end of my street was this incredible Native American cemetery and a huge gully where in the winters, we would slide down with sleds and in the summer, we wouldwe would slide down with cardboard.

But the best part was a forest that was on the other side of our street and the forest had blueberry bushes. So I went ostensibly to make money and to get blueberries for my mom to make blueberry pies. But truthfully, most of us went there because it was an opportunity to just explore, to kind of be away from real suburban, kind of classic area and go into the woods. And it was right off a major thoroughfare and it was amazing. It was really quiet, a little scary at times.

But itit was just wonderful and we kind of rode awent around inin gangs, a little group of good gangs, but in a gang and and I thought it would always be there. And every time after I left when I was eighteen, it was still there and Id gone to to college, first to New York and then in New Hampshire. Then, I went to graduate school in Massachusetts, it was still there.

But then, as I grew up and moved away,, I would come back and more and more development had come, until everything was gone except the Native American cemetery. But the forest was gone and, instead, was a shopping center. And it seemed really sad that my nieces and nephews who still live in Maine would never have that experience that I had, and it was harder and harder.

You had to go someplace for nature. You couldn't experience it right outside your door. And I think that made me realize that you have to work at this, that it doesn't just happen magically. That as growth occurs, you have to manage it.

You have to find that balance. And oftentimes, we we miss it because we think everything will always be there and it isn't. And I think, for me, that's what, you know, made me get started thinking about I had to work at it.

DT: Speaking of working at it, it seems like a lot of the conservation challenges for everyone, and in particularly for a woman like you who runs a land trust, is trying to cope with and direct growth so that it doesn't end up putting the shopping center in the forest that kids enjoy.

I was wondering if you could talk about your education as it related to planning and design of how cities can grow in a way that is good for making sure that some of these opportunities remain for many years to come.

MAP: Well, its interesting because, you know, as I I said, I went to school in Massachusetts and I have a masters in urban and regional planning.

And when I was there, what's really the most amazing part is I had gone because I was interested in kind of the qualitative aspects of planning, looking at how people respond to the way their cities look. Kind of the aesthetics of it, but also in how cities are structured.

So I I thought a lot about the City Beautiful movement in Chicago, the Daniel Burnham, about Paris and (inaudible) and how much that impacts people and how it makes neighborhoods come together and be more cohesive.

And interestingly enough, the program that I was in, which I felt like sort of sold me a bag of goods because I thought it was going to be about that, about looking at the way you plan cities how they work, how they look, how they function.

And instead, a lot of it was about quantitative things. How do the transportation systems run? How can you help more people through? How can you pack them more densely?

And I felt like that wasn't really what I wanted and so it ended up that actually I took half my classes at MIT, which you'd think MIT would be all about the numbers. But MIT was actually more about the way things looked, the way people interacted with it and so it gave me another sense about why cities and areas around them should be designed in certain ways.

But it was almost really afterwards, when I moved down here, and I was and and you know, working, but I happened to marry someone who teaches architecture and was very involved with architecture and began to bring in a lot of people like Michael Graves and Robert Venturi, brought in people like J.B. Jackson, people who think about how cities are are built all the time.

And it really kind of tested my own values and my own philosophies because I began to hear people like J. B. Jackson who talk about that roads are the greatest impetus for development more than anything in the world. That where people put a road, that is where people then begin to develop and road planners and engineers will tell you oh, no, they put the roads there because that's where people are.

But often the roads are put well before people are there. They're put there because other people, developers, landowners, maybe even sometimes planners feel like that's the way I want growth to to move.

And so you look at all of the loops that we have and you realize that a lot of those were built well before they were needed. And yes, you should do some things for, you know, anticipated growth, but I think they also direct them. So it it made me start to really think about how cities grow.

DT: And how did you put some of these ideas into action or how might they have influenced how you at least thought about your work, when you were with the City of Houston in the community division where you were a planner?

MAP: Right. Well, I think that one of the first things that, you know, we looked at is just the infrastructure, what was already there and why was it put there?

And then we started looking at things that people sometimes discounted, like the bayous, the waterways and that, in many cases, early on, they were kind of throw-aways. It was like okay, that's a vehicle, we can channelize it, we can put concrete in it.

We just got to get water from one place to another place, as opposed to looking at the way that some community leaders for example, like Terry Hershey would look at it and say no, this is a incredible natural wonder. Why aren't we taking advantage of it? Why aren't we enhancing it? Why aren't we using it?

So I began to this is a a funny story, but when Drexel [Turner] was actually my husband was working for the city as a consultant and I was working for the division as a staff person, our dates were going around the city to try to find out what made them interesting.

What made neighborhoods work? Why were some parts of them so much better than other parts of them and how could we incorporate that into our plans? [Coughs] Excuse me.

And so so we we really worked at it and we started kind of almost developing these these little guides to, oh, in that neighborhood, what works is because there's a park in the middle of it and people congregate about that park. But not only that, their houses are ringing that park, they're radiating it.

And so I began to try to use that and it was really hard because, you know, when you work with and we were just a a little kind of anti-poverty program division and we were working with public works.

We were working with engineers and they were kind of saying uh huh. Want to get it from A to B and A to B isn't always the best way to do it. And I also recognized the value of both the green space that was created the parks and the the esplanades but also the natural green spaces that were already there.

Thethe, you know, the the waterways, you know, the trees, the things that people didn't sometimes think were very valuable. And and I also, you know, one thing that is very interesting is when you look at it historically, you look at places in this city now, people think, are the most beautiful parts of our city, one of which is Broadacres, going down Main Street and Fannin and part of that is because of the trees that were put there.

It's not just that there's Hermann Park there, which is certainly a wonderful amenity, but its also that somebody had the foresight now, of course, you know, the Hogg brothers and but then it was also, you know, the mothers who were trying to memorialize their sons lost in World War I. They felt that this was a fitting tribute to them.

Well, now whenever I take people through here and they come and they they hear about Houston as an ugly city and then I take them through certain neighborhoods, they go it's not ugly. It's green, it's beautiful.

And I think that I tried to do that when I was with the mayors office. We did an esplanade planting program that we did through poor neighborhoods, that not only were great because of the the air quality benefits that they had, which at that time was just considered a by-product, but they were great because they softened the landscape.

But they also made people slow down and so it had a lot of benefits. And so you try to do things like that and you may do them for one reason, but then they have five other reasons that they continue on. And now esplanade planting projects are done and tree planting along freeways are done routinely. You know, it's not a a phenomaaaaaa weird phenomenon. It's actually done all over the place.

DT: That's interesting. Maybe I could ask you a couple of follow ups. You were working for the City of Houston from 1975 to 78, which as I remember was a time of huge growth and I was wondering how planners and cities accommodate growth and change at that pace.

MAP: Yeah. I think.

DT: And protect some of the things that they value.

MAP: Right. I, you know what, it's interesting because at that time, you're right. There were a lot of people who were here because it was a very vibrant community.

It was growing like crazy and I often used to go in neighborhoods that weren't seeing a resurgence of that growth and I think about an example, like Midtown, which just wouldn't even no matter how much growth there was, it just didn't seem to be going anywhere.

And Third Ward, historically African American neighborhood, just seemed to be going farther and farther down when in fact parts of the city, you know, neighborhoods were just going quickly up and escalating and growth was going out.

And I have a a wonderful map, that I didn't have back then but I wish I had, that looks at the growth of this city, that for the most part was west and then north. And I think that in Houston, it wasn't really planned at all because, as you know, we dont have zoning. We have planning,

but the planning department is more about did you bring the right plat map in? Did you get your streets the right width? Do you have your drainage there? And so there was a lot about accommodating growth and not a lot about do you have a park in your area? And it's been later in actually in the last, I'd say, ten years and especially under Mayor White that developers are beginning to have to recognize that they have to provide those green spaces.

And if they do, they get, in many cases, a clientele that's willing to pay more for the house because they want to live there and they want to be part of that community. But for a long time, in the, in the late 70s when growth was incredibly booming and oil prices were really high, I don't think there was planned growth.

It was just wherever they'll put it; let's just take advantage of it. And it was the 80s that I think caused us to recognize that maybe unparalleled growth isn't necessarily and unplanned growth isn't necessarily the greatest thing in the world. I'm not sure we've learned all those lessons, but now were beginning to.

DT: You touched on this just a moment ago, but aside from the fact that Houston was growing so rapidly at that time, Houston was continuing this tradition that it's had, I guess, for many, many years of having no zoning, which I think is unique. It's maybe the largest city that does not have zoning in the U.S. How has that affected the shape of the city and the ways that it grows and the mix of uses that you see?

MAP: Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of zoning opponents will tell you that zoned cities aren't necessarily prettier or better planned than Houston is and that its just a function of age that similar activities sort of grouped together.

But you know, in a lot of ways, that's not true. I mean, it it is true that in a zoned city, you try to keep industrial activities in an industrial zone. You try to keep residential in a residential area, but they also have a lot of mixed used areas and I think a lot of it is because in many other cities, there's more of a sense that it's a live, work, walk, play area and that you don't have to drive someplace to have fun. You don't have to drive to the grocery store.

And I think that in Houston, you know, it's easy to forget about the neighborhoods that have a house here and a kind of toxic dump here because you don't have to look at it. And and it's amazing to me that people have talked a lot about wanting zoning and have been, I think, three or four referenda that have been, you know, the ballot initiatives and they've failed.

And they've failed every single time, even though you talk to the vast majority of people and maybe were talking to all the same people, so who knows but you you talk to people. And if they understand it, they have a sense that maybe zoning would be okay, that it would help us at least maybe put in place certain controls.

It might not do everything we want it, but what it would say is and and I, I applaud Eleanor Tinsley, a council member, who recognized that even if we werent going to have zoning, we should have things like setbacks. We should have tree ordinances so that if you take down a tree, you have to plant another one or two.

And the in in a zoned city, they have those kinds of rules and regulations so that at least if you want a variance, you have to pay for it. And I don't mean just with money. You might pay for it with, okay, you want to go up higher? You have to put in two parks. And it's only been recently with this new park set aside iniordinance that the Mayor White put in here, where if you build so many units of housing, you have to put in so many acres of parks that are accessible to the public and it's not just your private little parks within your subdivisions.

But in a zoned city, they often have those kinds of controls and guidelines and I think in Houston, there's been a sense that it's a if if we had zoning, it wouldn't be quite such a freewheeling city and it would, it would inhibit growth and development. And I guess a lot of us who are urban planners, who know what zoning can do, it's not to inhibit growth, its to provide a balance of, you know,

how much growth should there be? Where should the growth be placed? And how to moderate it, how to really, really, um, I don't want to say control, but how to find a balance between, you know, what the density in this neighborhood should be versus the density in that neighborhood.

And um, it's really amusing to me because, you know, you've got something here that is going on recently where a high rise wants to be built in a, a predominantly, you know, single family, residential neighborhood and there are no controls.

I mean, the deed restrictions don't say they can't do it. There are no zoning laws. The city ordinances don't say they can't do it and you can't kind of retroactively fit that back and if we had zoning, there would've at least been those discussions before the problem occurs or or it's concerned.

DT: So I guess part of the zoning is anticipating things. Uh, I guess a follow up might be to ask how you went from being a planner and working for the city to working for this sort of quasi public, private effort the Cultural Arts Council, where you're not talking about the uh, well, the sort of nitty-gritty of transportation and other sort of infrastructure,

but more about the soul and the spirit and the aspects of arts that maybe makes a city more livable. Maybe you can talk about that. Take us from 78 through 1990?

MAP: Exactly. Well, it was interesting. One of the projects that I was actually working on when I was winin the city was a teeny, tiny part of my budget and it was called Art in Public Places. And it just so happened that I knew some people at the National Endowment for the Arts and I knew some people in the city and they called me up and they said were going to lose this grant, were going to lose this grant. Help.

And I was aa good negotiator and I knew how to navigate kind of federal systems and I managed to save the day and get Louis Jimenezs sculpture outoriginally it was proposed for the airport. And I was working on it when I was actually at the city and then it so happened that I heard about this arts council.

And while I loved working for the city, you have to recognize that because I was in a sort of antipoverty program, we had a budget of about thirty-five million dollars for capital improvements in very poor neighborhoods. The Capital Improvement budget was six hundred and fifty million dollars at the time; its now much bigger than that. Billions of dollars.

And I was kind of a rebel rouser, if you can imagine that, and I would go to neighborhood meetings and I would tell them this thirty-five million dollar budget is this big, Capital Improvements project is this big. You should have your fair share of that.

And it wasit was really frustrating because a lot of people, especially low income people in Houston just weren't rebel rousers and they didnt get that and I wanted to do more. I really wanted to do kind of bigger and better projects,

but we couldn't convince public works and the mayors office that that we really could do a bigger, better plan. So this Arts Council started and because I was working on these public art projects, they just said come talk to us.

And I thought why not? And they were looking for an assistant to the director at the time and I took the job and after about a week, he said could you be my assistant director instead?

And I said sure. And after about a year and a half, he left and I was named the director but I was working on what were really wonderful projects. I, you know, continued to work on this Louis Jimenez project, which ended up not being at the airport, but being in a neighborhood, in a very low income neighborhood, the Moody Park area and it was wonderful.

With the engagement that Louis hashes a Hispanicwas a Hispanic artist out of El Paso, he just charmed everybody in the community and we had neighborhood meetings. It was fun again. It was really cool.

And wewe had a dedicated source of funding and I got to give away millions of dollars and it was very cool. But it was also the case that we worked with big institutions and we worked with very little institutions and we tried to make room for the big institutions to recognize that if they didnt help the little institutions grow, there might be no audience for the opera or the symphony years from now because, you knowandand II see that with my conservation work as well.

Ifif you feel that theres a sort of conservation ethic or an art ethic, thats great. But if you dont teach it to your children or you dont teach it in the schools, then who takes it on? Who takes the responsibility for making sure thats there?

And so one of the things that the Arts Council did was to encourage the bigger institutions to not only help the smaller institutions, but to put in place ways to engage a new and young audience.

Now Im not saying we were responsible for, you know, young audiences or or art in the schools, but I think we told them that in order to get this money, you had to have some public component. You couldnt just be doing this for people who could afford hundred dollars a seat or fifty dollars a seat. Do it for somebody who needs to know about it

and, you know, interestingly enough, whenwhen I was in Massachusetts later on, they were cutting out arts in the schools. And in Houston, the thing that was so wonderful is they embraced it.

They recognized that bringing every fourth grader and every eighth grader to the Museum of Natural Science to learn about, you know, sciences. Bringing everybody to the symphony, I think they are the fifth graders can't quite remember now. Gave them an introduction that they might not get in their homes and so it was a wonderful opportunity to kind of spread this knowledge to a really, much bigger community.

And ultimately what you want from a city oror even a rural area is an opportunity to experience so many different things. Yes, its getting out of doors, but its also knowing that Mozart was an amazing composer and even if you cant afford to go to an opera, you get to buy a CD.

You get to download it for a few bucks. Or you get to play it on a, you know, a a piano. It it's really accessible to everybody and I think, you know, I I told you earlier that one of the reasons that I really wanted to be an urban planner is because I really loved kind of the social aspects of planning and I thought it was a great opportunity to spread that kind of social aspect of it to it. And doesnt matter if its the arts or its humanities or its conservation. All of it works.

DT: So you were at the Houston Cultural Arts Council. Then you went to the Massachusetts Arts Council.

MAP: Just for a couple years.

DT: And then you returned. You came back to Houston and decided to sort of take a different turn on how to benefit a city and the people that live here. Not so much focused on the arts or on planning issues, but more on protections of the common space, the public parks, particularly Hermann Park. Could you tell us a little bit about your work with the Friends of Hermann Park?

MAP: Well, interestingly enough, thethe reason I got to go to Hermann Park was actually because of a project I did earlier than that. I did a project for Texas Parks and Wildlife and I looked at how state agencies have developed sort of ancillary institutions, like a foundation.

And in the course of doing that, I actually interviewed a gazillion people, but I started looking at this phenomenon of land trusts. And I started getting really interested in land trusts and thinking why dont we have any here? What should we do? How can we do this? And there really wasn't a venue for that here other than say The Nature Conservancy or Trust for Public Land.

But it wasIbut I had started talking to people about this notion of these kinds of things and I happened to get a call. Susan Keaton knew me through the Rice Design Alliance, which my husband helped start, and she knew that I had an urban planning background and a regional planning background. She knew that I had worked with nonprofits; I knew how to raise money.

I knew a lot of those aspects and also that I had done this study for the National Endowment for the Arts on five neighborhoods around Houston and one of the projects was, you know, we looked at Midtown, we looked at Third Ward, we looked at the Heights, we looked at Downtown Aquarium, all of these kinds of really interesting projects that we thought would be wonderful for the City of Houston.

And so shthey called me and said would you be interested? And finally I thought okay, I cant be a classic urban planner in Houston because they dont want them. So what about if I look at actually helping revitalize a major inner city park, an inner city park that was tired but still so well loved that it was amazing.

And so I came on board because theyd had a competition that I think you remember. Jack Mitchell, who was the dean of the School of Architecture at Rice University and he had died and they wanted to do a memorial to him and they did a competition called The Heart of the Park. And Jack had really always thought that Hermann Park was beautiful and that its reflection pool shouldnt have muddy edges and it shouldnt look downtrodden and thatthat the people who loved it so much should have better than that.

And so when I came on board, they said okay, we just want you to raise money for Hermann Park and I said well, you know, dont you want to really look at Hermann Park as a whole? Don't you think that you should have a master plan for it and don't you think we could find somebody who could do that? And so I suddenly saw a use for myyou know, my urban planning background and my, really, my notion ofthat I'd like to kind of draw on those pretty little maps and Id like to kind of say what could be done.

But I was also good at looking at historical documents and it just so happened that I knew of a number of other projects that'd been done. There'd been a, been a study by Charles Moore that the culture that excuse me, the Municipal Art Commission had funded that again people at Rice had helped do.

And then a wonderful replan for Miller Theatre. I'd looked at, you know, what the Museum of Natural Science had done and what the zoo had done and I thought, you know, if we don't bring all these people together and we don't talk to them about, not only their individual visions for what Hermann Park ought to be, but their collective responsibilities for what Hermann Park ought to be. We're never going to have anything other than a set of disparate units and that Museum of Natural Science might be the best thing that you could go to or the zoo might be the best thing,

but their impacts might be totally negative on what the park would be. And I'll, I'll give you a perfect example. The zoo wanted to have parking right in the middle of Hermann Park. Is it really appropriate to have a huge concrete jungle in the middle of a beautiful, natural park? And so when we looked at it and we brought in three wonderful landscape architects to come up with, you know, who should do the master plan and, and the Hannah Olin at the time, now Lori Olin, was selected.

But but we've looked at all that, knowing that, yes, the zoo needs parking, but does it need to be surface parking? Could it be offsite parking and you have a tram that brings people over? What fun for kids to be able to ride an elevated thing. Maybe kids can't get to Colorado, you know, to to ride a a a ski lift, but they can get to Hermann Park and ride up above.

Maybe that wasn't aesthetically the best thing. Maybe underground parking. We, you know, and we looked at a lot of those things and Ill have to tell you, I mean, I, Hermann Park was a wonderful project because so many people had so many wonderful ideas and we collected a lot of those ideas.

But we also looked at historically, there was a wonderful Kessler Plan for Hermann Park, and Kessler was a devotee of Frederick Law Olmstead and learned from him and and, you know, originally, they wanted Frederick Law Olmstead to do the planning for this. But they got Kessler and he did a plan that would've had a park all the way from downtown out past Memorial and it would've been a huge greenbelt.

And one of the things that I thought was how can we bring some of that back and use some of what he wanted. And you know, at the time, they didn't think about soccer fields and stuff, but he had some active ball fields there, you know, some things that where people could run and and play.

And you know, Houston was a very different city by the time we did a new plan for a revised master plan in starting in, in 93. But, but some of those same elements were important. How much activity can you have before its too much? So it was very quickly decided that huge ball fields maybe were not appropriate.

Those were appropriate for other parks. You had sort of tier level of what can it accomplish and what couldn't it? Could you do huge festivals in it? Miller Theatre was a great resource, but again, was it the best Miller Theatre that it could be? No.

There were things that could be done to it to make it better and so we looked at all those things and I think that the park today is so much more wonderful. Is it the best park it could be? No, because you have individual constituencies that still find it hard to realize that their particular group isn't the most important.

And for example, Ill tell you, the Museum of Natural Science is a wonderful space, but you know, in another place, would you put it right in the park? Maybe not, because with the growth of the Museum of Natural Science, you need more buildings. You need more parking and one of the best things they did was put in their garage.

But maybe they could've thought about an underground garage. Maybe they could've thought about a smaller footprint. You know, their buses used to line the Hermann Drive, no, not Hermann Drive, but the drive in front of the Rose Garden and fill up the Rose Garden.

Again, is that what you want to see when people come to use Hermann Park? So you know, again, what I see my role was, or is, always is try to find that balance, that balance between it being aesthetically beautiful, it, it really providing a respite from a very busy, busy neighborhood around it, with your medical center on your one side and, you know, downtown andand Midtown on the other and Third Ward.

And opportunities for people to run in it, to play golf in it, to go to the Rose Garden and see what beautiful flowers can be produced. And it was it was really, I think, the first the well, the second time, I should say, in some ways, that I really got to use my my planning background.

And it was fun, it was really neat. Again, a lot of it was, was not necessarily that I got to draw it, but I got to bring in a lot of input because I talked to a lot of people.

I got to balance, you know, here's this group over here that wants this. This group wants this. They negate each other, how can we deal with that. And so I saw my role in a lot of ways as kind of a historian, a facilitator, lucky that I had the background I had because I could when the architects and the landstatel, landscape architects would say you can't do this and I'd say yes, you can and here's how.

And sometimes it would be the case that I would think it couldn't be done and they'd find a creative way, so it was a really nice partnership. And it was fun.

DT: It sounds like while you were working for Friends of Hermann Park, you (inaudible) maybe acted as a liaison between all the multiple (?) that ring the park, you know, a theatre and Museum of Natural Science and the zoo and the Rose Garden...

MAP: Japanese Garden.

DT: And I'm curious if you looked back and kind of discover the tangible legacies that came out of your tenure while you were there, what would you point to? A lot of seems to be the negotiating among all these (inaudible). What do you see when you go back there and say ah, that happened because?

MAP: Well, I guess from my perspective, there were a couple things. One, we, we put a lot more money into the park. I think the park had been neglected for a long time and suddenly people recognized its value.

The city put in thirteen million dollars when it was on my watch. We got the private sector to put in, so that when I left, I think and it wasn't, this is, I don't mean, this was all me, but, oh, I think we had about twenty million dollars that we'd infused back into the park or gotten commitments to do.

But interestingly enough, I, I'm going to tell you about, a, about, a, both a positive and, a, and a, and a probably a failure. One of the things that I was actually the most excited that, I did, was not make it prettier, which we certainly did. But the east side of the park along Almeda had long been neglected.

There was, what do you call it, a maintenance facility. The Parks Department decided well, it's only Almeda, we can, we can put it on that side of the park. There was a beautiful stand of of post oak savannas that was there that were dying. People lived in them. There were it it was, there were tons of homeless people, but not just homeless people.

Most of these people took, had services at the Veterans Administration, so they were trained in guerilla warfare. And when you'd go in there and we were trying to clean it up, they had all kinds of booby traps. It was, it was actually kind of amusing after a while.

But I think one of the things that I did is I got a grant from the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fund and it was one of the first big grants that K.P.that the Friends of Hermann Park got that didnt just look at the physical aspects of it, but it looked at trying to program the whole east side of the park as a wilder, more natural place.

And it looked at the importance of not mowing the grass along Brays Bayou all the time, but actually letting wildflowers grow. And we convinced the Harris County Flood Control Division, which took care of the banks, and other things. We trained their personnel to make sure that when they looked atthey said those are weeds. Cut them down. No, theyre wildflowers growing.

We convinced our neighbors that they were really beautiful. We, we cleaned up the post oak savanna. We had trails going through it. We identified why things were important. Poison ivy may be awful to dogs and to humans, but did you know that it serves as food and, for like a hundred and fifty-five, I'm going to say this wrong, but it was an incredible, I think, fifty-five different species that aren't allergic to its wax.

It just amazing kinds of things. We brought school groups through all the time. We did wallet water quality morning monitoring in Brays Bayou and I think that nobody had paid much attention to that side of the park and it began to bring people back to the park that felt disenfranchised.

And I think if I said anything about my legacy, I think the master plan is beautiful and I'll, I'll tell you in a minute about some failures. But I think that one of the things that I made people realize is that everybody had a voice.

There was a huge African American population that used that park who felt they had no voice in it, and they were, they were runners, they were users of Miller Theatre. There's a huge Hispanic population that used to cruise the park in their low riders, have a wonderful time and they didn't feel welcome in the park.

And I think we brought back a sense that Hermann Park is really, truly every mans park and that it ought to be used by every man. So yeah, I think the plan was wonderful and I think it was great, but I think that I would tell you my real legacy is that I I helped make sure that lots of people reclaimed it as their park and that it wasn't just little fiefdoms but everybody saw Hermann Park is mine.

Even if I only use the golf course, even if I only use that trail, I love it all, I want to protect it all.

Failures, I think there were failures from that and that was that it was really hard to get some of the big institutions to recognize that their own self interest had to be sublimated.

It had to be, you know, less important than than Hermann Park as a whole. And you know, I think probably there are, you know, Hermann Park today is very different than I was there, a lot more projects were finished and and that's wonderful and I think that, though, people still think that it's their park and that's pretty terrific.

And I don't think it's just my legacy, it's, it's everybody's. But I think that Friends of Hermann Park, and now the Hermann Park Conservancy, has tried to do a good job at, at, marketing it to, to everyone, and, and that's important because if everybody doesn't love it, then no one will save it.

DT: I guess one of the things that I understand about the park as being always a challenge and you touched on this before, all these multiple users and institutions of and the golf course has always been problematic in my view in that you've got, you know, a special use.

It's somewhat exclusive on public land, but it's controlled by a concessionaire and I think some of these problems came to a head when you were there. Can you talk about that?

MAP: Probably is the reason that I left. Well, you know, we actually looked at the golf course in a positive sense is that at least it kept things green for a while. We looked at it, though, really for its potential to be put to other uses and there was an amazing but small core of people.

African American and Anglo who came out and said you got to keep it. It's important to keep it, but it shouldn't be so shabby, it shouldn't be so awful and it was hard to argue with them.

I think that we had hoped that what would happen is that the city would actually buy a new facility for them. And at the time, when I was there, I was very interested in expanding the park and there was land to be had. The, the, hospital that Saint Anthony's, the retirement home across Almeda.

There were places that were available that had the city been aggressive, had Friends of Hermann Park been aggressive, we could've bought them. And I, I, so wanted them to move the golf course because Hermann Park is landlocked in some ways, and it, it doesn't have enough for all the activities that it needs there or that people want.

And it gets crowded and it, you know, at some point, they're probably going to have to ban driving in it totally and just have some sort of system where you can park at the edges and just go in.

But you know, hindsights perfect. People then thought no, letslets make the park better. Lets expend our time and our energy and our money on making the park beautiful and what we should have been doing is land banking so that even if the golf course wasn't removed then, it could be removed later because there'd be land for it. And it was just there were powerful forces. But you know, I've, I've found and, and this is the case, you sort of learn something late in life.

But I found that, you know, it's amazing what a few influential people can do if they don't want something done. And I think that's kind of what happened. There were a lot of forces to play. Economically, the golf course was not particularly good for the city. I think the new deal is better,

but we had, we had actually brought in economic real, es, whatwhat is it? There was an economic group, an analysis group, ERM was their name and I can't remember what their name, what it really stood for now, and they were going to do an economic analysis of moving the golf course, keeping it there, privatizing it, having the city run it and do that thing. And I think when I left, they just decided not, I mean,

I, you know, in retrospect, and you, you do what you believe in, but you know, I was probably a lot more aggressive than I think some people would've liked. And that's because, you know, I had a vision that I think was more people oriented and I think other people had visions, even including my own board members, that was just, it was a nice, pretty place, and that's all they wanted it to be.

And frankly, if it didn't have too many people, even better. And mine was that it ought to be a Central Park, it ought to be for everybody. And Central Park isn't just for rich people, there are certainly some neighborhoods that are rich that ring it, but there are very poor communities that take advantage of it and Hermann Park, in many ways, is the sort of thethethe most accessible park for much of what were traditionally disenfranchised communities.

And I really like that. You know, I'm, sort of a, you know, kind of aprobably atat heart, I told you I wanted to be a social worker, so there's sort of that bleeding heart and, it was, it was a wonderful opportunity to do some things.

But ultimately, you know, you had people who were, you know, friends of friends and they felt that, you know, having the the golf course was fair. The one thing they did do and I think that was good is, you know, move the clubhouse and they built a new one on Almeda and they spiffed it up and they put more resources into the golf course. I think they continue to have a good base among African American golfers and the clubhouse itself is now more historic and used for, I think still, Hermann Park Conservancy.

DT: This sounds like a good chance to shift gears and talk to you about your next phase, this chapter in your life that took you from a large, but urban park, you know, five hundred and forty-five acres, whatever Hermann Park is, to the Katy Prairie Conservancy, which maybe a thousand square miles.

Shrinking, but still very, very large. And I'd be interested in hearing about your work for the Katy Prairie Conservancy, which began I guess almost ten years ago now.

MAP: Well, actually it's fifteen years old. It started in 1992 so I guess this were in our sixteenth year, but I wasn't involved with it. But I came in 1999 and before me, in 1997, Carter Smith started it, who's now our new Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Director, fabulous person.

And truthfully, sad to say, and I think, we've, we've been extraordinarily successful in what weve accomplished, but probably we should've started in the seventies and we would've benefited greatly from the bust years in the eighties to buying land on the Katy Prairie because at that time, land was plentiful. It was cheap, it was still a lot of sort of agriculture was going on. There's a lot of floodplain, floodway out there.

But and, and, and, tons of geese, tons of ducks, lots of wildlife and there were a lot of hunters and conservationists who really cared about it. But they never thought that it was imminent, that it was going to be lost.

They, they, they were worried about some wetland loss and they knew that maybe, you know, eventually something would happen. But you know, because of the eighties, a lot of people weren't buying land.

They were actually for, you know, defaulting on land and loans, so they, they didn't get started till 1992 and they didn't buy their first property until 1997. When I came on board, they owned about thirteen hundred acres and they had about six hundred acres of land that had been donated to them.

So there was about, you know, two thousand acres. Today, we actually control thirteen thousand acres and we have easements and public ownership of about another forty-five hundred.

Our goal, which is seeming harder and harder to reach, is fifty thousand acres and the reason we have that goal is that biologists say that you need anywhere between thirty and fif, sixty thousand acres to sustain the wildlife that are found on the Katy Prairie.

And most people would say to you, oh, the geese are going away. Why are you trying to save it? And the geese actually are kind of Johnny-Come-Latelys to the Katy Prairie. All of us think its the geese that, they are, that are important, but if you should happen to meet an old rice farmer, he would tell you that there were ducks on the Katy Prairie when they moved there.

It's only with the advent of rice farming, and especially when it was mechanized in the, you know, seventies, that we had the skies blackened with snow geese, Ross goose, White Fronted goose and Blue the young Blue goose. No not the Canada goose, excuse me.

And so so you have four species of geese and in our heyday, we had probably one of the densest concentrations of migratory water foul in North America, because were on the central flyway and that's kind of like highway for, you know, birds. Goes all the way from way up north down through Central America and the geese came down from their, you know, summer home to winter on the Katy Prairie and some moved farther south, but a lot of them stayed. And at one point, there were so many geese, there were, you know, traditionally they really felt like there should be something like two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand geese and, at one point, there were eight hundred thousand geese and it was way too much.

Not for us, Katy Prairie could handle it, the problem was when they went back to their summer home, they were destroying the Tundra, which takes forever to replace itself. So but but the geese now, there are fewer of them. There're still a lot of them, but its theone of the reasons that there are fewer of them because theres so much more habitat for them.

Everybody up and down this central flyway has developed wetlands and they're farming corn and they're doing all kinds of stuff and the geese, you know, hey, they're smart. They'll stop the first place they can to get food and to get cover and to just rest. And as long as it's, if its really cold, they move down to us.

If it stays mild and temperate, say, in the north, they're going to stay up there because they've got water, they've got food, they don't need us.

But anyway, when I started, it's just, it's sort of amusing to me that they actually hired me because I'm not a birdwatcher. As, as I told you earlier, my children think of me as a city girl and they kept going why are you going way out there? Mom, do you realize that it's thirty miles from downtown Houston? Why are you doing this? But they didn't care that I wasn't a birdwatcher, that wasn't what they were hiring me for.

But I'll also tell you that one of the most wonderful things about the Katy Prairie is the amazing solitude out there, the quiet. You don't, I, I have a board member who every time we have a tour out there, hey say okay, everybody stop talking, and that's really hard for me, as you can tell and everybody'll stop for a minute, and then hell raise his hand and hey say okay, what did you hear?

And invariably, a little kid pipe up and say well, I don't know what I heard but what I didn't hear is traffic. And you can't imagine how much traffic bears down on you after a while, what a, what a burden it is to hear it all the time and how terrific it is to have that quiet.

But then you start to, we have little exercises where we ask people to cup their ears and they they start to hear a frog croak or they hear a whippoorwill or they hear a killdeer, and it's so wonderful to see their little eyes light up or even grownups to see it. And it's amazing to be able to do that.

And, and in this particular case, you know, people have often asked me, well, what are you going to do if itsare you going to consider yourself consider it that KPC failed, the Katy Prairie Conservancy failed if you don't get eighteen thoun you know, your fifty thousand acres? I said well, I'll be sad but you know what,

Probably twenty years from now, even if we only have eighteen thousand acres, somebody's going to be flying over the Katy Prairie and they're going to go wow. What is that green space down there? How come there's this huge swath of green, and nothing's developed around it?

Maybe there'll be twenty-five thousand acres and maybe fifty years from now, someone's going to say thank you. I don't know who was smart enough to do that but I sure am grateful.

And I, kind, think of us as, as, maybe the rural pioneers, like the people who helped found Memorial Park and and buy it from the city, buy it from the Hogg brothers to, to give it to the city.

And I I kind of think of us asas maybe the people who ultimatelyandand not me, personally, but all the the volunteers and the the founders of this who who worked against, I think, almost unreasonable odds because they didn't have any money, and nobody was going to give it to them.

It's not like its Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where people think oh, this is so beautiful.

Of course, I must conserve it, and I'm really rich. I want to put an easement on it. I'm happy to do it. Or there are ninety-seven percent of the the lands in Jackson Hole are public. In Texas, ninety-four percent of them are private. And so I'm grateful that we've even done as much as we have.

But I'm also grateful that in the last few years, what weve recognized is that certainly we want to ensure that sensitive habitat is maintained, that areas that are degraded are improved and that we make sure that invasive species don't take over, and, and we do the best we can to help the three hundred species that currently live or winter on the Katy Prairie.

But ultimately we will not have done a very good job if what we don't do is to make sure that parts of the Katy Prairie are accessible to the public. And and one of the things that were working on desperately andand probably more slowly than we should've is to to look at all of our lands that we have right now, and, and we have plans to, to get bigger, and, and were still working on that, but is to to recognize that okay, let's, let's determine where's the sensitive habitat?

We know where it is but let's map it. Let's find out where we can put a path, where people might be able to see some things but they won't really, you know, force, the, the, the wildlife to move away from that area, but that they'll actually come back.

And I, I, think a perfect example is we've got this wonderful woods that is, a, a stand of pine trees. It was planted, really, for a moneymaking venture. But we had Barn owls in it and birdwatchers named it Barn Owl Woods because they always saw them there.

Well, in the beginning when we were first there, we would have tours come in and then we realized we shouldn't be having people come in here because if we do, the barn owls are going to be gone. And sure enough, the Barn owls went.

But now we have Barn owls, we have Screech owls, we have Great Horned owls and one of the things we've realized that it's okay to be a mile away or half a mile away and set up scopes and it's okay to hear them, but you cant be on top of them and still have it. So were finding you know, and I talked to you before about balance.

You know, you know, how much is too much and, you know, and and I think one of the things that were finding right now is balance and how can we have people recognize that this could be a wonderful anchor park for all of, not just Houstonians, but for Texans. It could be a destination, and yet it also needs to maintain its capacity to house these these wildlife.

And were working, you know, with a lot of people to do that, and what I bring to it is maybe Im not a biologist, but I have this sense that, that, that land use can help you divide up those uses.

And so now that's, you know, were working with different groups to try to do that now. (misc.) [End of Reel 2414]