Kleiner's Blog

They let the grass grow near the creek – just after the WPA stones…

That grass should be emblematic of now and of the future as far as park management is concerned in Allentown Pennsylvania. Seeing the long blades of grass bend in the breeze – seeing children run, arms outstretched to feel the tickle of the grass on their skin — I was seeing a city park manifested the way it should be.

And yet, this site remained a rarity as I completed the familiar loop from Robin Hood to Earl’s Bridge and back again. Three years after writing my first park log in the Lehigh Parkway, little has changed for the better. The “Grow Zones” are good things and I hope that future management strategies make them better, viable habitat and keystones to ecological restoration in the Parkway.

I better not get ahead of myself though. The great lawns will remain. Recreational excess will still be permitted. As long as every individual sees a place like the Lehigh Parkway as solely theirs and meant solely for their own purposes, the Parkway’s future will remain bleak. Our parks are products of the way that we, as citizens, view the world around us. We do not think like mountains. We do not see and celebrate the vital interconnectedness of everything.

Instead, we are a society of ecological abusers and the eroded path banks cutting down to the Little Lehigh at sub 90 degree angles show it. The thick fragments of forest full of invasive multiflora rose, honeysuckle, garlic mustard and the like show it. The parks are our products folks – we choose what we wish to see, what we wish to care for and it is the way those two things are managed that gives our parks their identity.

The Lehigh Parkway needs help – it needs our help. The situation hasn’t changed in three years and I believe it is on account of the silence of every parkgoer who ignores the sickness around them. Us. It all falls back on us –it always has and it always will. The identity of the Lehigh Parkway is that of something calling out for help. Hell, you would think when stumbling into some woods and receiving a regal greeting of Solomon’s Seal that the Parkway could be okay again someday – someday soon. It needs our help.