Phil Hardberger Park in San Antonio, Texas is a park and nature preserve named after a former San Antonio mayor who used his leadership to champion parks in the city’s urban core.
During his time as mayor, Hardberger created a nature preserve in Voelcker Ranch, one of the few remaining undeveloped parcels in the city. The city purchased 311 acres (which has since grown to 330 acres) to establish a park and conservation site amid a densely developed city. It officially opened in 2010.
“With Phil Hardberger Park, we are creating a park not just for ourselves and our children, but for the centuries,” Harberger, who is now the president of the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy, said.
Ten years later, the conservancy debuted another ambitious project: A first-in-the-country land bridge designed for both human and wildlife passage. Named Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge, it acts as the centerpiece of the park, coming in at 150 feet wide and crossing a six-lane highway.
The bridge connects both sides of the park, which were originally bisected by the highway.
There is a 1,000-foot-long elevated “sky walk” that starts at the base of the park and winds upwards until pedestrians are walking among the tops of trees. Entry points are extended deeper into the park with increasingly elevated walkways to remain accessible to all visitors.
“You can have either a squirrel’s eye view or a bird's eye view as you come up through the trees,” Hardberger told Texas Public Radio.
And as for the animals? Designers created the bridge in layers, with a steep berm and native plantings to buffer wildlife onto a separate trail from humans.
Wildlife biologists helped designers execute a wildlife passage by installing 3,300 feet of barrier fencing, which directs animals upward, where they are covered by berms and plantings, separate from the human walkway.
According to Texas Public Radio, since its opening, the bridge has diversified park habitat with over 50 reintroduced species of wildlife, restoring a “major ecological sanctuary.”
“Before the first anniversary of the bridge, every mammal species known to reside within the park was captured on the land bridge’s trail cameras,” a statement from the conservancy explained, “including bobcat, white-tailed deer, and ringtail cat.”
In addition to being filled with native wildlife, a 1-acre wetland next to the bridge also collects rainwater and acts as a wildlife watering hole. A 250,000-gallon underground cistern harvests rainwater and irrigates the land during standard San Antonio droughts.
Last year, the land bridge won the Honor Award for General Design from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
“A great case study in possibilities,” the Awards Jury wrote of the design.
“This project makes an incredibly difficult task of building a functional landscape on structure; creating a welcoming space over a highway; balancing the needs of humans and non-humans alike; and connecting ecological fragments look easy.”
They also described the bridge as “more than infrastructure,” calling it a “continuation of the land itself,” to allow restored scrubland and savanna to “unfold over a cityscape.”
The bridge ultimately cost about $23 million to construct, using a 2017 voter-approved city bond of $13 million and $10 million in grants and donations. These days, it sustains about 750-1,000 visitors per day, according to the conservancy.
Wildlife crossings have grown in popularity as other states across the United States see conservation success and steep drops in wildlife-vehicle collisions.
The Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge expands on that, creating a space where people can connect to the natural world in a whole new way.
“Connectivity is an extremely important part of ecology,” Gregory Tuzzolo, an associate principal at Stimson Studio, the landscape architecture firm that worked on the bridge, told The Guardian.
“You can make a conservation area over here and a park over there, but if wildlife can’t pass from one area to another, we still have a degraded landscape. So, being able to really have this signature piece and this park means so much to this landscape.”
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Header image by Justin Moore for Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy
