Paul Groth Vernacular Parks, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 21
[p. 21] "Design professionals usually see urban parks as official places: special area reserved for aesthetic and spiritual refreshment, and for learning the ruling interpretations of nature and society. Washington D.C.'s Mall and its adjacent museums constitute an obvious example. Other official parks-such as the inevitable collection of pioneer structures rudely collected at the edge of a mid-sized city or the organized arrows pointing the tourist towards the "booster's" view of downtown-lead visitors and local citizens alike to preplanned conclusions. Even though such parks may not be "high style," in their forms they still suggest clear rules of behavior.
"However, if we look at ordinary American environments we can find a very different and very vibrant urban park tradition, one that we might call the vernacular park. The vernacular park is ad hoc. It is not focussed on a 'correct' visual style, on the adulation of certain types of geological or botanical specimens, or on a prescription for specific activities. It is not particularly urban or wilderness, but simply away from one's normal environment. Like other vernacular landscapes, it is not focused on the future or on abstract ideas, but instead on the present and the everyday. Vernacular park uses often take place where official order is beginning to crumble-in underused area of the city or out on the urban fringe. An uncharacteristically permanent but ubiquitous form of a vernacular park might be a temporary speedboat dock. Vernacular parks often exist within official parks: for instance, a dirt road behind a levee of an otherwise official urban park.
"Children innately create and use vernacular parks largely invisible to the adult population. For the eight-year-old with a tiny boat or model raft to float or to pull with a string, the chains of mud puddles along the side of a road form a public recreation space that can stretch for several blocks. Children of all classes and ethnic backgrounds know vernacular park use, but the adults who create and use vernacular parks most typically come from the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum. They are recent urban migrants, racial or ethnic minorities, or young adults: people whom the 'official' population might disparagingly categorize as 'working class,' 'low brow,' 'red nick,' or merely 'adolescent.' They often have access to a car-most often a used car.
"For many people, the vernacular park is not the covertly transformed nature of official parks, but brazenly commodified nature. The experience of nature goes hand and hand with buying, collecting, and using nature. An exuberant example of this commodification is [p. 22] the Reptile Center gift shop near the Luray Caverns in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Entrepreneur often run vernacular parks as a business; a brightly colored sign directing motorists to 'Buy Tickets At Gift Shop' is a typical announcement. How different are the announcements in the official park, where small tasteful signs might merely label the park and credit its benefactor or denote its memorial status (and thus falsely appear to be value-free.) In California's Humboldt Redwoods State Park, for instance, islands of official tall redwoods are discreetly denoted with woodsy log signs. California viewers of a sign saying 'Fannie K. Haas Grove' will automatically connect the trees and the park with the prominence of the Haas family, well known as part of the Levi Strauss fortune and of San Francisco's urban leadership. However, stretching between the official groves of Humboldt redwoods are long areas of private land. In these areas entrepreneurs have erected a vernacular redwoods park: coffee shops, redwood burl emporiums, dubious museums, and other overt tourist attractions all related somehow to the adjacent trees.
[p, 22] "Both the official and the vernacular are important and authentic parks of Humboldt Redwoods Park. Both zones are commodified. However, at only one of them can visitors buy a redwood burl to take home and make into a coffee table. To the 'official' eye, parkland trinkets are offensive. Yet, since Americans are constantly taught to buy material possessions for their membership in society, why should they not decide to buy into nature as well?
"Interviews and surveys in Jackson State Forest (reported in 1988 by Marcia McNalley and Randy Hester for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) show that the vernacular park is not a sacred realm but a scenic backdrop for ordinary and everyday activities, many of which ignore nature altogether. Hester and McNalley found that park users felt automobiles, trucks, loud radios, or a motor boat (in the case of water) were usually considered essential; park use could mean such mundane activities as fixing the transmission or watching television. Throughout the U.S. vernacular park use for teenagers can mean having a drinking party or just hanging out. The closer a vernacular park area is to the center of the city, the more likely its daytime social promenade will include waxing one's car in the shade while potential admirers cruise by on the nearby road.
"The easy juxtaposition of everyday activities with a naturalistic background reveals an attitude among these users that does not separate culture from nature-at least not nearly so much as do the people who design official parks. A few years ago a billboard at the entrance to Glacier National Park announced that an auto tape would permit visitors to "Hear Glacier Na- [p. 23] tional Park Come to Life!" Nature, in this format, was clearly something outside the car, separate from humans and separate from culture. Yet in the vernacular park nature is not only outside the car but also inside the car. The intervening educational program-if there is one-is commercial. In the vernacular park wilder nature is simply there [usually in the background0, admittedly damaged on occasion. Everyday activities are also there, scenically a bit better off than at home. In their own minds, vernacular users are not desacrilizing the park. For them, it was never particularly sacred in the first place.
[p. 23] "As a lesson for official parks in the U.S., the vernacular tradition reminds us that wherever park use thrives there the automobile is usually thriving too. To plug into the potential vitality of the vernacular park, landscape architects and planners may need to stifle their professional urge to eliminate cars or hid them in the background. In popular vernacular parks, seemingly random parking along the roadside and among the trees blurs the conceptual boundaries between road, parking lot, and park. Inside even Yosemite National Park (as official a park as one might want), the parking lots are dramatic in and of themselves and often see more pleasurable social activity than the hiking trails. Along the vernacular zone of the Humboldt Redwoods Park, the predictable roadside attraction of a drive-through tree and drive-on log also prove that parks can embrace automobiles and their occupants.
"Vernacular and official parks may be inherently contradictory; if so, we must ensure that urban park programs are pluralistic enough to allow both traditions. We must also find ways to mitigate the ecological damage of the vernacular traditions without undermining them with official control. We might, for instance, find ourselves designing shelters for waxing cars as well as shelters for picnic tables. If indeed we are to make an urban park for the future, perhaps we ought to start with the parking lot. [1991, MOMA]