Image of David Fisher
By Jeannette Batz Cooperman
Photograph by Scott Rovak
At 35, David Fisher was already superintendent of parks and recreation in Minneapolis. Decades later, urban planner Alexander Garvin called the result of Fisher’s collaborative leadership the “best-financed, best-designed, best-maintained public open space in America.” Now he’s here, as the first executive director of the Great Rivers Greenway District. He arrived in fall 2001 and started gathering citizen input to shape a regional plan for the River Ring, a system of interconnected greenways, parks and trails that will join two states and cover 1,216 square miles. Fisher and his wife, Carol, bought a house in Lafayette Square and fell in love with the neighborhood; they have no intention of leaving, ever.
You've said that each greenway project grows exponentially—why? People will live where it's most beautiful.
Why leave Minneapolis after such success? Government’s a sine curve; you have ups and downs. We were at the pinnacle of getting things done, and I could see the money flow heading downward.
Did you shine up your golf clubs? No, I went to the Bureau of Land Management in Utah and said, “I can do just about anything; is there anything you need done?” They asked me to do a master plan for 275,000 acres, so I lived up on a mountain in my Airstream with my laptop, my cell phone and Mupps, our Cairn terrier.
When you got a call about the opening in St. Louis, what was the appeal? I could walk in, set my own business model and steer it the way I wished I could have in all the other bureaucracies.
Do people even know what a greenway is? Not always, and that obscurity has helped us. Everybody has this preformed idea of what a park is. Framing it in a new language, we could start from scratch.
Was there a turning point? The River des Peres greenway. We’d had all this difficulty with permits. Then, at the dedication, an alderman walked up and said, “If I’d known this was what you meant ...”
Every greenway's different, right? We have 38 projects, but it’s all really one project in different phases. The Chouteau greenway will drive an office park. The St. Vincent’s greenway goes from Forest Park to St. Vincent’s Park through 16 different communities. Millions of dollars are going into St. Charles County and West County: 16 miles of levee trail in Chesterfield, a new riverfront park in Bridgeton ...
And you're leading the riverfront partnership, too. The riverfront is the image, the icon, the origin of our city—and we can capture it. In Minneapolis, people had always turned their back on the river. We put $80 million worth of parks on the riverfront, and when I left in ’98, there had been more than $1 billion in reinvestment.
What has to happen for these projects to work? They have to be connected. That’s what the human psyche wants: to be part of something. All the individual greenway projects are pinpricks on the master plan, but they are all driving toward connection. It’s an aesthetic thing, a sense of place, of belonging and interaction and nurturing nature.
That's pretty ethereal—where's the bottom line? If you go back far enough, parks were built for economic purposes. Boston’s Emerald Necklace and Back Bay were just as polluted as Chouteau’s Pond. Rather than do what St. Louis did and just drain the lakes, they built all their systems into parks with the understanding that there would be development around them.
Will the riverfront be your biggest challenge? It’s not going to be easy. There are 20 different permitting agencies, and we have to go through them all—the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife, the state historic preservation office ... And the National Park Service has design guidelines all the way out to the middle of the river; they can stop anything.
What made you and Carol choose to live in Lafayette Square? We wanted a neighborhood that felt like a neighborhood. We’d been living in the country—I like birds and stuff, but eagles were swooping and the fish were jumping, and I kept saying, “What the hell am I doing here?”
How do you know when a neighborhood has what planners call "social capital"? By fat dogs. I was walking our dog, and it was dark by the time I got to the end of the street because I kept stopping to talk to neighbors.
You restored all the windows and crown moldings in your 1878 house yourself? Ah, yes. We had wanted a little project. But in these houses there is no such thing as a square plane.
What else do you do for fun? I’ve been hunting for Phyllis, who is the sister of Sue [the largest preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered] for about 30 years. I’m a self-educated geology and paleontology nut; I look through Texas and Utah, out in the desert, searching the rock formations. It’s OK if I never find her.
