|
 |
| Omaha is home to 1,800 acres of highway landscape that greet out-of-state visitors and local residents each day. The Urban Design Element recommends improving this important component of the city’s green space. |
Support Sought for
Highway Landscaping Project
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a continuing series of entries from the first Omaha Catalogue of Urban Design Philanthropy, a compendium of strategic giving opportunities that focus on the city’s natural and built environments. The Omaha Catalogue was published in December 2007 by Omaha by Design and the Omaha Community Foundation. It has attracted donations from Omaha’s philanthropic community at both the foundation and individual level, including a $10,000 gift to the Big Garden and a $25,000 gift to the South 24th Street Tree of Life Project. For more information on how to donate to a project, contact Connie Spellman, director of Omaha by Design, or Sara Boyd, vice president of the Omaha Community Foundation, at 402.342.3458.
Omaha is home to 1,800 acres of highway landscape that greet out-of-state visitors and local residents each day. These embankments, edges and land area within cloverleafs are the ideal setting for showcasing the unique textures and colors of Nebraska’s native grasses and wildflowers.
The Urban Design Element recommends improving this important component of the city’s green space. With the appropriate design, long stretches of freeway could be transformed into landscapes. Separate species of wildflower could be planted to bloom at the same time featuring different colors during different seasons. Native grasses could provide visual interest during Nebraska’s cooler months. In addition to softening the coldness of the highway concrete, wildflowers and native grasses – once planted – are an economic asset, requiring less maintenance and water.
Unfortunately, landscaping – although the incremental cost is not high – is often cut from both capital and maintenance budgets for highway design.
Keep Omaha Beautiful Inc., a major force in the maintenance of Omaha’s public spaces, has begun a project to address the issue of highway landscaping. The project’s first phase, located on the northwest corner of 72nd and Center streets, has been completed.
The project’s second phase focuses on the I-680/Center Street interchange. In conjunction with Lanoha Nursery, Keep Omaha Beautiful Inc. will transform 196,000 square feet of unused land on the northeast corner into a haven for wild prairie grasses.
Once completed, the project will serve as a cost-effective yet beautiful approach to highway landscaping, one that could be duplicated at other Omaha interchanges and could lead to the development of a master landscape plan for the city and state.
The estimated cost for phase two of the project is $160,000. In the future, Keep Omaha Beautiful will look at landscaping other Omaha interchanges based upon donor support.
|
|
