Volunteers uncover South Park’s lost Vale of Cashmere
Harry Funk
Max Bader points to features in a 1930s photograph that match today’s appearance of the Vale of Cashmere in South Park.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Max Bader speaks about the Vale of Cashmere.
This channel once carried water between pools of the Vale of Cashmere.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Part of the Vale of Cashmere
The black-and-white image portrays a pristine pool of water ringed by hefty blocks of hewn sandstone, flanked by a wooden bridge and surrounded by a grove of young trees.
The Vale of Cashmere, designed by landscape architect Paul Riis, in its glory days
At least eight decades, perhaps closer to nine, have passed since the photographer captured the scene, representing the fulfilled vision of landscape architect Paul Riis in creating an idyllic spot for visitors to enjoy at Allegheny County’s then-new South Park.
“The county parks were known as the ‘people’s country clubs,'” Max Bader explained. “Remember, if you live up in Homestead, you don’t have a place to sit out and enjoy the sun and enjoy the birds. So this was kind of a refuge for people.”
As senior ranger for the county parks’ South Region, Bader leads a corps that has education as one of its top priorities. And he enjoys spreading the word about a once-stately South Park feature that essentially had been lost to the ravages of time and nature: The Vale of Cashmere.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Anne Oyler speaks about the Vale of Cashmere during a group walk to the site.
For the sake of clarity, that’s not another name for the Cascades, the Riis-designed network of waterfalls and wading pools off Stone Manse Drive. The Vale is its own entity, not far from East Park Drive and even closer to a hiking trail or two, but its presence remained hidden to modern-day passersby until fairly recently.
On a summer day in 2014, South Park Township resident Anne Oyler and a friend, Lynn Rethi, were taking a walk in the park when they met two people who asked if they’d ever heard of the Vale of Cashmere. Their curiosity piqued, they decided to look for it.
“We basically had to bushwhack our way through here,” Oyler said during a group walk on Saturday to the Vale, explaining that they had to return the following winter, when the overgrowth wasn’t so pronounced, to find what they sought. “We decided we wanted to dig this out because of the historical value of it.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Michele Kowalski stands atop a Vale of Cashmere rock that she took particular interest in uncovering during volunteer work parties: “I just kept digging, and there was more rock and more rock.”
With guidance from the park rangers, the created-for-the-purpose Paul Riis Legacy Preservation Volunteers started uncovering the rocks that form the Vale’s five pools connected by winding channels, using only hand tools to clear away decades’ worth of soil and vegetation. The group organizes work parties at least once a month when the weather cooperates, with the next one scheduled for 9 a.m. to noon Oct. 27.
The long-term goal is to maintain the Vale as it appears today, rather than trying to restore its 1930s-era glory days.
“We’re in a sensitive ecological area as compared with the Cascades,” Bader said. “That’s in the middle of basically a parking lot and a picnic grove and a mowed field.”
Plus with regard to attempting to secure state Department of Environmental Protection permits for what would be involved: “Who could even fathom that?”
Regulations weren’t nearly as stringent when Allegheny County hired the Switzerland-born Riis in 1927 to design the original county parks, North and South. Not all of his plans came to fruition prior to his dismissal five years later.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Some Vale of Cashmere volunteers have their favorite rocks, and this is Ray Walton’s.
“They fired him because they thought he might have been spending a little too much money, and also because he wanted to bring in another landscape architect from Chicago,” Oyler explained. “And the local unions were upset because he wasn’t thinking of using local Pittsburghers.”
Bader didn’t mince words as he elaborated a bit more.
“He got booted, and then somebody who was more on the public works side of things came to be in control of decision making. And that’s why we don’t have a lake,” he said about Riis’ intent to emulate North Park. We have what was a four-lane road, where Corrigan Drive is, because from the public works side of things, traffic was an issue. Lines of cars would be backed up trying to get to the fair in the ’30s and ’40s.
“And so there was this kind of disjointed execution of what originally would have been a very well-integrated plan.”
Some discussion about South Park’s future has centered around constructing a nature trail connecting the Vale of Cashmere, the Cascades and other Riis-designed features, including the onetime site of a naturalistic swimming pool that opened in 1931 off Corrigan Drive.
“We’re trying to not let that history get lost,” Bader said.
For more information, visit paulriis.org.
The Vale of Cashmere as it appeared in 2016, as volunteers were starting to work on uncovering what lay beneath
Efforts are in progress to restore the Cascades, a Paul Riis-designed feature off Stone Manse Drive in South Park.