Portland’s Forest Park is the largest forested city park in the United States. Covering 5,000 acres, it provides a hushed and peaceful environment of a varied and evolving forest ecosystem. Overlooking the Willamette River, the Park stretches for nearly eight miles along the northeast slope of the Tualatin Mountains between NW Skyline Boulevard and NW St. Helens Road (Hwy. 30).
This is from the Friends of Forest Park website
I keep hearing on a special that Central Park in NYC is the largest urban park in the world and as recently as today.
Al
I edited your interesting question. You originally posted too much information from that website(I also aded a link to the website).
The Chicago Reader, our host, takes copyright violations seriously. They don’t want people lifting wholesale amounts of material from them, and also don’t want our posters lifting too much material verbatim from anyone.
I’ve been told that Indiana’s largest city park is Prairie Creek Reservoir. It lies just southeast of Muncie, and it includes a manmade lake about three miles long and about one mile wide.
Another notable city park (though certainly not the largest) is Garden of the Gods, in Colorado Springs. Judging from Cecil’s other mentioned parks, its 1340 acres would put it somewhere between 7th and 11th largest, but lemme tell you, it’s a very impressive 1340 acres.
While we’re on the topic, what’s the largest munincipal park system? The Cleveland Metroparksencompass over 20,000 acres, most of that forested, but they’re divided into a dozen or more separate (but mostly connected) parks.
From the Trust for Public Lands, New York City & El Paso, TX tie for the largest, with each nearly 50,000 acres. But El Paso is far ahead on an acres per capita basis, almost 47 acres per resident. New York City’s 8 million people result in only 6.2 acres per person. (NYC is also near the bottom in spending per resident.)
The article also cites El Paso’s Franklin Mountain State Park, at 24,000 acres as the largest park in the cities studied (the 55 larges cities in the US).
It also notes that San Francisco & Washington DC have nearly 1/5 of their land area in parks or open public lands. Here in Minneapolis, we are 4th on that list, with about 1/6th of our land area in parks. Supposedly, every house in the city is within 6 blocks of a park.
Their official name is something like Columbus and Franklin County Metropolitan Park District (but that no longer makes sense because they have parks in seven counties, so their Web site now bills them as Central Ohio Metroparks),
They haven’t been that big for all that long; they’ve acquired much of their land in the past few years,
Some third reason I’m not thinking of…
There’s some really cool parks in the system - lots of variety.
Spent my first night in Chico skinny dipping in the park! It’s quite the place. Just one of the reasons Chico State is a such a fun place for the college crowd.
Winter Park is/was a Denver City mountain park, still owned by the city and county of Denver (they’re conincident). I don’t see a total acreage in that media kit, but it says there are 2,770 acres of skiable terrain and trails. Surely more in total.
Most of this is recently acquired, and isn’t necessarily “urban” per se. It’s largely preserved marshland at the fringe of the city limits, and not really surrounded by development. It is however, within the municipal boundaries and counts.
Some years ago when I first read Cecil’s column and noticed the absence of Forest Park, I called the Portland Parks Dept and asked them what the exact size of the park actually was. I figured if I was going to help Cecil fight ignorance, I’d get all my ducks in a row first.
Well, it turns out that no knows exactly how large it is. The Parks Dept has never actually measured it, even though such measuring is usually done with maps rather than going out and surveying. They just couldn’t be bothered to do it.
That being the case, I quietly dropped the issue. After all, it would only have been number three in the list and a somewhat questionable number three at that. Hardly worth interrupting Cecil’s afternoon nap for.