Today was a great day for fans of Schenley Park, as the Parks Conservancy received a grant of $1 million from the Richard King Mellon Foundation. Half the grant will cover the development of a watershed management plan for the Panther Hollow Watershed, and the other half will fund ongoing management and maintenance. This represents a huge step forward in the restoration of the watershed that we’ve been undertaking over the past ten years, and certainly in the life of the watershed as a whole. (You can read a great history of Panther Hollow Lake’s ups and downs in this morning’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
We’re often asked why we don’t just dredge Panther Hollow Lake to get rid of the pollutants and make it usable again. The answer, as in most questions regarding the watershed, goes back to stormwater. If problems with the lake’s tributary streams aren’t solved first, and the streams don’t slow down water and infiltrate it along the way, overflows and silting in the lake will just keep creating the same problem. We’ve made a lot of progress over the past ten years with things like redirecting the Phipps Run stream channel to handle a larger volume of water, creating catch basins to slow down water moving toward the lake, planting more trees in the canopy gaps in the woods (which slows down erosion and soaks up more water), and installing a rain garden at the Schenley Park Café. But because the lake is the final stop for so much of the water coming through the 780-acre watershed (and because it has such recreational potential), we need to employ some innovative management techniques to keep it clean in the long term.
We’ll be posting an RFQ on Thursday for firms interested in designing the restoration plan for the watershed. Watch this webpage for the RFQ and supporting documentation, including several research studies conducted over the past few years about things like macroinvertebrate counts and soil quality.
Panther Hollow Presentation
9/8/10 UPDATE: Our “What’s Going On in Panther Hollow?” presentation at Botany Hall on Wednesday, September 15 is completely full! We’ll take good notes and hopefully have them available for you to read shortly after the lecture. If you missed it, the Parks Conservancy staff will talk about specific restoration efforts, and we’ll also hear from Michele Adams, Principal Engineer and founder of Meliora Environmental Design in Kimberton, PA. Adams, a leader in environmentally sensitive site design, will share examples of innovative engineering solutions to stormwater problems in the watershed.
Laying new stonework on the WPA bridges
Meanwhile, along the trails…
Work is in full swing this week on the Hollow Run Trail in Schenley Park. The three signature Works Progress Administration bridges are being repaired and invasive plants are being cleared. Soon this trail, which has been impassable for years, will be returned to park users. It’s awesome to think that someone walking from Panther Hollow Lake toward the east end of Schenley Park a few years ago would have encountered a field full of tires and heavy equipment, followed by a trail covered in fallen trees and stones cracked from bridges. Now in a few short weeks, that walk will pass by the Panther Hollow meadow (now in its fourth season and thriving) onto a streamside trail.
The transformations happening in our parks are a great thing, and it’s support from funders like the Richard King Mellon Foundation–and from you!–that make every single project possible.
Aerial of Schenley Park by Hawkeye Aerial Photography
Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy Blog 
Will the PDF map of Schenley Park and Google Maps trails be udpated soon to reflect the restored trails?
The PDF maps were all updated on our website a couple weeks ago. Schenley doesn’t have any new trails, so it didn’t change much, but you can find the map at http://www.pittsburghparks.org/schenley-directions.
Unless I’m missing something, the maps reflect only the main trails and do not show the trails under restoration in the valley.
The one that’s currently under construction is the Hollow Run Trail. I’ll check around here to see if I’ve missed something, but I think this should be up to date.
I think I may have found it. It’s easier to locate on the “graphical” map than the Google map. What are the odds the Google map could be updated to include trail names?
That is #1 on my wish list. I think it would be possible to do a quick-and-dirty version where I just drew straight lines to represent the trails, but it wouldn’t be totally accurate. We’d like to map our GPS data into Google Earth and make a true trail map, but the GPS maps aren’t all finished. We actually have a request coming up on the blog later in the week for volunteer GPS help if you know anyone! 🙂
I’m really glad to see the Hollow Run trail take shape. One of the beauties of the Schenley trails, few as there may be, are their many connections.
There are days I’ll start on the Lower Panther Hollow trail, get on the Faloon trail, take the switchback path near the Westinghouse turn, take it down to the Tufa Bridge, get on the Hollow Run trail, do a lap around the lake, climb the steps to the Upper Panther Hollow trail, pass the pool, and finish up on the Bridle trail. Other days, I’ll incorporate the X-country path connecting the Upper and Lower trails. The Bartlett Street trail entrance offers a lot of choices.
When the Hollow Run trail is done and the stream work completed, that will add another layer of routes to explore the Park. Keep up the good work, and remember that the smaller goat path trails are a key part of the system; the more connections, the better for us regular trial bums.
You call this restoration? The parks Conservancy folks are destroying Schenley Park, from what I can see: ripping up the trails, cutting down tress by the dozens, filling in the ‘natural’ streams that empties into Panther Hollow with all sorts of man-made blocks and drains, a real travesty of nature. What kind of fools would donate money to a simple-minded project like this? If this is what you call restoration, then what my buddy Henry suggested years ago is starting to making sense. Henry said we should level the park and put in a housing development.
Paul, thank you for your comment. Our intention obviously is to improve the park, which sometimes requires intervention. The park itself is manmade—it didn’t occur naturally, and to keep it functioning properly we occasionally have to help it along by doing things such as routing stream water into a more sustainable path. The man-made blocks and drains will help to keep a historically important trail with several 1930s-era footbridges from continually washing out and becoming unusable. And you’re right, trees have been removed, but those are invasive species that are invading the forests and creating a monoculture, making the park inhospitable to other native plants and to the wildlife who use native species as habitat.
Maintaining a park over the long term is a never-ending process, and the positive results aren’t always visible overnight, especially when it comes to things like regenerating a tree canopy or solving a stormwater runoff problem. The Parks Conservancy and City of Pittsburgh are committed to balancing the long-term health of the park and the needs of the current park users. We’d like to invite you to come to our master planning meeting for Schenley Park on October 23, where you’ll hear about the progress that’s been made and upcoming plans for the park, and you’ll be able to voice your concerns. You can find more information at http://www.pittsburghparks.org/masterplan.