Reflections on Pack Square Park

Written for Laurel Magazine, October, 2010 Edition

It’s almost 7 p.m.

Issuing forth from the microphone at the front of the Lunsford stage in Pack Square Park, as the evening sun rakes the county and city buildings in yellow gold: “All humans in the trees—please come down.”

And, with this pronouncement, and with the passing of day into night and summer into early fall, all the hopes and dreams, squabbles and resolves, landscape reshapings and art installations—all the everything that has gone into five years of creating a central park for Asheville—all of it suddenly pours and crystallizes into a timeless moment.

By way of a pops concert, four or five thousand of us are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. More than that, we are part of an official salute to Pack Square Park, acknowledging the sheer august pleasure of it--maybe for the first time.

“It took me a while,” says park designer Fred Bonci, speaking from his office in Pittsburgh, “but I really felt like we were there, like we really had it, when someone told me after the second Shindig performance that the people in charge completely loved their new space.”


“For Pack Square Park, just like for Central Park, there are principles that Frederick Law Olmsted brought to life that hold sway. A park should be democratic. It should be for everyone. It should be diverse. It should have wide open fields and intimate, small spaces. It should be sunlit and shaded. It should have a certain quality of design, a quality that engenders pride. It should connect man with nature and nature with man.

“Well, there you are,” Fred says, “there you are with the mountains and the sky that come down to greet you. So we created these very definite borders so no matter what happens with the buildings around the park, you have this beautiful, defined space. And it will just get better as the trees grow—the rows of London planes, for example. It will mature. And it will always be this central place—this central park—for everyone to enjoy.”

It’s almost 8.

Sitting here in this natural amphitheater in front of the two courthouses as Daniel Meyer conducts Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty and the stars pop out, it seems crazy that this lush 6.5 acre lawn with its water features, garden areas, new trees and public art was once a “spaghetti bowl” of streets so confusing it was hard to negotiate even on foot.

Even crazier is the will and the outpouring of ideas and energy—some 27 public charettes—that helped shape the space, bring form and native design to it, and, against all odds, birth something inter-generational, timeless and consequential.

“It was easy to take the plunge into a park of national significance,” Fred says. “Why? Because the people behind it, the people of Asheville, had a vision in the very beginning and they wouldn’t let go of it. They wanted a great park. Nothing short of that would do.”