How greenways define a place
September 4, 2004 • (0) Comments
Sixteenth century French explorer Jean Ribault wrote of a favorite landfall that there is “…no fayrer nor fytter playce” and promptly dropped his anchors to tarry a while.
Something of that spirit must have inspired the Lenape Indians and later inhabitants to claim our own countryside, marked as it is by protective hills, riverbeds and rolling meadows. Even today, when demand for housing is exploding across America’s most densely-populated state and farmers cultivate more building lots than hay, sojourners in the twin boroughs experience a distinct sense of place here, that familiar impression of having arrived somewhere, of standing apart from places astern or places yet to come.
Along our periphery, busy thoroughfares yield to woodlands that yield in turn to pastures and views of distant hills, discrete farmhouses, suburban enclaves, and—abruptly—a village center, gathering itself beside a brook. From every approach, travelers descend into this center and, joining the Peapack Brook, their rate of travel slows noticeably in the embrace of our hills. This experience stands in stark contrast with the endless sprawl of commercial frontage punctuated by municipal boundary signs that characterize that other New Jersey—the state of perpetual motion where The Sopranos and Weird NJ reside. What the Borough lacks in suburban conveniences, architects and residents alike applaud in the humane scale of places like this one.
It should come as no surprise then that a key objective of Peapack-Gladstone’s 1998 Open Space Master Plan—a free-market blueprint for municipal land preservation—was securing undeveloped “greenways” at strategic entry-points to the community. Greenways are streetscapes that are dense in tree canopy, buffering adjacent areas from noise, from traffic congestion, and from the visual oppression of unrelieved sprawl. Present in wooded parks, cultivated boulevards, or even undeveloped land, such collars promote and preserve our sense of arrival, of demarking what is and what is not Peapack-Gladstone Borough.
Last year, with help from Somerset County and state conservation authorities, our community took steps to preserve two major approaches to our suburban village. Thanks to a $22 million Somerset County Open Space initiative, Natirar, the former Kate Macy Ladd estate, will be preserved indefinitely as green space defining and burnishing our unique municipal border with Far Hills. Accounting for approximately 9% of the Borough’s land area, Natirar is a regional treasure preserved by aggressive, “tax-smart” Open Space planning.
Also in 2003, a separate project initiated by the Borough’s Open Space Advisory Committee brought public funding from three sources to bear on the busy intersection of Pottersville Road and Route 206. There, in December, we completed acquisition of almost 12 acres of wooded property belonging to the Brady family’s Millhouse Partnership. This parcel, which will be preserved as woodlands, includes a small wetland area that is believed to be habitat for endangered turtles as well as home to a portion of the original roadbed of the Rockabye Railway.
Topographically, the Brady parcel presents a continuation of the Borough’s Gateway Park acreage, acquired in 1999, and its purchase marks a key acquisition in the Borough’s strategy to link its existing parks and recreational facilities with public foot-, bicycle-, or equine trails. Merely a vision today, open space proponents foresee a rare opportunity to preserve a passive recreational corridor stretching from Liberty Park south to Gateway Park and then west and north to Rockabye Meadow. The implied trail yields a variety of terrains and will afford residents a unique appreciation of our vanishing New Jersey countryside. Originally zoned for new subdivision with a street and four houses, the Brady property was a strategic link that will be followed by others as we work to implement this vision.
Tax-smart Open Space purchases are a free-market response to developmental pressures and the consequent implications for our municipal tax rates. Residential development costs taxpayers money in higher schools tuition, demand for public services and municipal infrastructure costs. Yet, until recently, a community’s only remedies for these pressures were long-range planning and land-use regulation, including up-zoning, regulatory takings, and litigation.
In contrast, Open Space programs allow communities to re-purpose potential building sites through negotiated easements, free-market purchases or tax-advantaged gifts. Supporting these activities are an array of private, county, state and federal matching-grant programs that work in tandem with our local Open Space tax to create capital for new acquisitions and to pay down bonded indebtedness. Such programs can provide extraordinary leverage on taxpayer dollars, frequently multiplying our purchasing power many times above your Open Space tax contributions. The Brady property, for instance, cost Borough taxpayers just 5 cents on the dollar versus its appraised value, yet it eliminated a proposed subdivision that could have added more than 2 cents a year to our municipal tax rates. Buying this property was “tax-smart.”
So, the next time you travel out of the Borough and are privileged to return, try to imagine how differently our community would feel without its distinctive sense of place, without those green entry-ways and open spaces that mark our firm and tax-smart resolve in a vanishing landscape.