Four Must-See Parks Opening in Fall Herald a New Golden Age

The greening of Seattle’s commercial waterfront could not happen until a blighting highway was ripped down and a crumbling sea wall replaced.

Impatient ice skaters await the replacement for the Lasker Rink and Pool in Central Park, and its restored setting. Called the Harlem Meer Center, it is the largest restoration ever undertaken by the Central Park Conservancy.

At Olana, the home of the 19th-century Hudson River painter Frederic Church, a painstaking restoration has brought back the artist’s lost Romantic landscape.

The venerable Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley has “reimagined” itself with a playfully swaying greenhouse rising from a shallow pool. It opens as 200 acres of outdoor displays settle into winter slumber.

This is a golden age for parks, with cities sprucing up waterfronts, transforming abandoned industrial sites and bringing some green space to neighborhoods where treeless cracked-asphalt sports courts are the rule.

These eagerly awaited, high-ambition park and garden projects will open when trees are bare and people are choosing indoor pursuits. If this seems counterintuitive, consider that each took more than a decade to come to fruition and navigated construction complications and supply-chain delays. Opening at the perfect moment wasn’t an option. All will offer distinctive experiences to the intrepid cold-weather patron — and will be visitor-tested by the time crowds flock in the spring and summer.