Portland’s Mt. Tabor Park named first ‘Urban Quiet Park’ in the U.S.

Mt. Tabor Park in southeast Portland was recently named the nation’s first “Urban Quiet Park” by Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit that aims to “save quiet for the benefit of all life.” The organization has recognized nine other Urban Quiet Parks around the world, including Hampstead Heath in London, Yangmingshan National Park in Taipei and Parc del Montnegre i el Corredor in Barcelona.

Jacob Schmidt is a volunteer technician with Quiet Parks International. He took audio measurements in Mt. Tabor Park and joins us to explain how the park was chosen, what the designation means and why it’s important to preserve quiet spaces in urban environments.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Mount Tabor Park in Southeast Portland was recently named the nation’s first Urban Quiet Park. It got that honor from Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit that aims to “save quiet for the benefit of all life.” The organization has recognized nine other Urban Quiet Parks around the world, including in London, Taipei and Barcelona. Jacob Schmidt is a volunteer technician with Quiet Parks International. He took audio measurements at Mount Tabor Park, and he joins us now to talk about quiet. Jacob, welcome.

Jacob Schmidt: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Miller: It’s great to have you on. When did you first start being really conscious of places that don’t have loud human sounds?

Schmidt: I think it was once I was put into those places with loud human sounds. I grew up somewhere fairly quiet and then went to college in Chicago, and was quick to realize how much I cherished that quiet I had at home.

Miller: Where did you grow up?

Schmidt: In a small town near Dallas, Texas.

Miller: At night at, at home, what would you hear?

Schmidt: They get a lot of migratory birds, so I’d be hearing all kinds of owls. My parents just sent me photos of Mississippi kites outside the house. And I think with how spacious and open and flat Texas is, it was surprising to get so much quiet. But I’ve noticed in the last 10 years visiting there how much noisier it’s gotten, how much louder the highway is, how many less trees there are to block some of that noise.

Miller: Just in ten years, you’ve noticed an uptick in decibels?

Schmidt: Definitely. Just from the back door of the house, you can hear the highway noise from much further. It was interesting at night, you could hear the noise of the highway ten miles away, but now the highway has gotten closer.

Miller: When did you start getting involved with this group, Quiet Parks International?

Schmidt: In school I tried to learn about acoustic ecology and environmental acoustics because it piqued my interest with audio work. I learned about Gordon Hempton and his book “One Square Inch of Silence,” read it quite a few times and made a pilgrimage to the One Square Inch a couple of times in Olympic National Park. And I actually contacted him to be an advisor for some projects of mine in school. That’s when we started connecting real well and learned a lot more.

And then I moved out to near Portland, Oregon, in Corvallis, and I know that they had some parks up for nomination through Quiet Parks International, which he was able to help start a few years ago. And then just started hitting the ground running as a volunteer trying to get work done, get parks awarded, and connect with those folks at the top of Quiet Parks.

Miller: What kinds of quiet places have they recognized in the past?

Schmidt: If anybody was ever interested, quietparks.org has an interactive Google map with the overlay of all the nominations and awarded parks. But it’s been a lot more concentration in Europe: Italy, Spain, Sweden. And then a couple of wilderness areas that are in motion to be awarded soon, like Glacier National Park has been awarded as a Wilderness Quiet Park, the US Boundary Waters also was able to be awarded. So there’s quite a few nominations, and just need volunteers to start awarding.

Miller: Although a lot closer than those are what’s called the One Square Inch of Silence in Olympic National Park, which you mentioned. What’s it like there? What did you experience when you went there?

Schmidt: It’s tough because it’s in a national park and it’s a very busy trail, the whole rainforest trail. So it’s not particularly the quietest place in the world, just as Tabor isn’t the quietest urban park in Portland. But it’s a pilgrimage that people make, kind of an idea of bringing quiet. Gordon always professed the idea that if noise propagates from one area, if noise spreads out logarithmically around itself, then why not try and spread quiet in the same property. It’s more of a human behavior than it is literal. There’s not something out there absorbing noise and taking noise away from the environment. But those that know about it can go out there and bring quiet. And it is definitely one of the quietest places around. That river is roaring usually in the spring, so it can be a little noisy.

Miller: That’s a key point here, right? What you’re focused on and what Quiet Parks International is focused on is human noises. So it’s ok to have a waterfall be thundering. What you don’t want to hear is a plane overhead or somebody walking through with a Bluetooth speaker.

Schmidt: Right, the speaker in the backpack always gets me.

Miller: That’s a relatively new thing to be so common?

Schmidt: Yes, it is. More people have been getting out of the outdoors, especially since quarantine and COVID. And some people can be uncomfortable with that kind of quiet, especially being in a wilderness area where you think the only thing around you is big bears and mountain lions. So I totally understand using a speaker like that. But I think it’s becoming comfortable with that quiet when you could hear a much further distance. Gordon always talked about at One Square Inch, that you could hear much further out around you when there’s a lot less anthropogenic noise around you. The whole book is about him trying to get the OSI as a no fly zone. And it didn’t quite work at the federal level, but he went to actual airlines and asked them to treat it as a no fly zone, and it was very successful with most airlines flying over there.

Miller: So now planes, they go around it in general?

Schmidt: Yes, a lot of planes choose a different flight path to try and get around that area. I think there’s a couple of airlines that weren’t able to, but I know Alaska, American, and a few others were. I visited it before when trail work was heavy in June, and they were flying bridge building pieces up the trail with a helicopter. There is noise inherent in just running a park, so it’s not escaped completely. But it is nine times out of ten gonna be one of the quieter places you’ll be able to visit.

Miller: What’s special to you about quiet parks or places in the middle of an urban area, as opposed to a designated national park or a designated wilderness area?

Schmidt: It’s a much more accessible escape. I really struggled in Chicago to try and find some of those quiet places. It took me all four years, and I nominated lots of them in the Chicago area, so hopefully they’ll be awarded soon enough. But just thinking of someone that has no transportation means other than public or just their feet, they need to be able to get some kind of quiet accessible to them before they start facing some of the side effects of too much noise, like agitation, stress that’s just induced from so much noise.

And Tabor being on the eastern side of Portland, it’s more accessible to a bigger group of people that probably need that kind of quiet, that might be facing noise regularly every day.

Miller: So that’s why you’ve focused there as opposed to a much larger, and I assume potentially much quieter park, I’m thinking about Forest Park, that has pockets that are much further away from people noise. That’s why you didn’t go to the west side?

Schmidt: Yes, definitely. When you look at a map of Portland, you see how much green space is on the west side. I love American Forests, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen their website before, americanforests.org, they have a tree equity score that you can take a look at. And it’s very interesting to see how in city planning, be it intentional or not, a lot of the more lower income and impoverished areas have the least amount of green space. And that greenery can absorb noise, of course, but also absorb heat. And as we’ve been having these heat waves every summer in the PNW, a lot of the lower income areas are gonna be the most hit when they’re just in a concrete building with no trees around them because they’ve all been taken down when it was originally built. They’re gonna need some kind of place to escape to on that side of town.

Miller: We’ve definitely talked in recent years about shade equity or tree equity, but I don’t think we’ve ever talked about sound equity. But you actually see those as connected?

Schmidt: Definitely. And in my acoustics background, learning at school and learning about possibly working construction companies that want to build new airport runways, for an example, you’ll find that around the airport is usually the cheapest housing and typically lowest income people end up having to live there because it’s the only place they can afford. And now they’re hearing airplanes all hours of the day flying overhead or landing. And without some kind of natural or human built noise abatement structure, a tree is a natural one, or some kind of large wall, to try and block some of that noise, then they’re taking the brunt of it at all times.

Miller: So what did you do? How did you actually go about measuring the quiet in Mount Tabor Park?

Schmidt: Luckily, with my day to day work, my 40 hours a week are Monday through Thursday. So I had Fridays and the weekend open to try and get up to Portland. I live in Corvallis, so just driving an hour and a half up. Spend a lot of time is really the goal. Spend time, record what kind of noises you are hearing, even just writing them down. But I would also use the NIOSH NSLM app on my phone to take LAeq, and other decibel measurements. And then take recordings on a digital recorder, I have a Tascam DR-40. It’s really easy, it’s more about time and noting what you’re hearing and how many noises you are hearing than it is having some kind of expensive professional equipment to tell you if it’s quiet or not.

Miller: It almost sounds like meditation the way you’re describing it.

Schmidt: It truly is. And that’s what we’re trying to seek in these urban parks, is a place for people to find their own peace and quiet, be it meditation or whatever else they may want to find when they’re in a quiet space. One of my favorite things that I saw in Tabor was people in the little nooks and crannies sitting under a large old growth, just reading their book or taking in the peace themselves.

Miller: There are nooks and crannies for that, but Mount Tabor is big and diverse, it also has people playing basketball or walking dogs or having dance parties, or once a year at the soapbox derby. Did you have to seek out a relatively unpeopled part of the park?

Schmidt: It was pretty different every time I visited. An awesome thing about it being a cinder cone volcano is that if there’s too much noise on that one side, climb up and over the top and drop down the other side and you’ll find a different spot. So I measured all around, from the very top, and then had four different spots outside of the top, basically the cardinal directions around the park itself, to try and measure. And so some days were different at all of them. Wednesdays at the park are very different whenever the dance group is out there. But that’s also a part of what we want to see is that they are a community space, and community makes noise. We as humans do. And it’s kind of accepting that that occurs where we can find peace. If we’re just trying to push out every single noise, then you’re gonna have to come out to the coast range of Oregon to actually find that kind of peace. But that’s way more inaccessible than right in the middle of Portland with Mount Tabor.

Miller: How quiet was it at its quietest? I think most people who are listening, don’t understand or don’t speak in decibel numbers. So if you can put it in terms of comparative noises.

Schmidt: So it is around 43, I heard under around 38 DB. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s logarithmic, so any three decibels is a doubling to our perception. It’s far distant highway noise was probably the biggest noise generator that upped my numbers. And then that one person with a muffler they took off their car that’s blasting down the road, that usually is pretty loud. I guess in comparison, maybe not the high powered AC unit you gotta kick on when it’s 90 degrees, but just a fan running in your home was typically the quietest I found.

Miller: What are the effects of quiet on you and on other people?

Schmidt: Me personally, my brain can run a lot more when there’s less stimulus. I can kind of dig deep and think about some of the things I may have been pushing away. And that’s just personally. It is therapeutic for everyone in some ways. Some people I know have taken into an anechoic chamber, which is where we do any kind of testing when we want zero noise in acoustics world. And they can kind of go a little crazy usually, because they aren’t used to such quiet. So it’s the practice of trying to get into it more and more, make it a regular part of your week or your day where you can find that quiet, you’re gonna start finding your own sense of peace.

And it will reduce stress levels, reduce agitation levels, and hopefully bring people an ability to listen as well, listen to what’s around you, listen to those as you’re speaking to, understand that quiet’s okay, even in a conversation. That awkward pause is just fine, just like the quiet out in the woods. You might really find some peace and enjoy it.

Miller: You mentioned a tree as a natural way to absorb sound, or maybe a wall separating a freeway from a neighborhood. But how would you socially engineer a public space to be quieter?

Schmidt: Tabor is lucky being at that volcano. It’s almost naturally already built to allow an area to be quiet, or for people to find peace on the other side of the mountain itself. In design, there’s been all kinds of failed designs where there’s just walls put up and it creates almost a safety issue because it’s a hard part to see into with all the walls. And seasonally, you might not have many leaves on the tree so it can block a lot less noise. But I think vegetation is one of the best ways to do it, shrubs that are evergreen, that can stay up.

Guiding, like with the trails on Tabor, you follow a trail and it can connect you to another and just lead you to a certain direction. So there’s groups that may be making some noise, the dance group per se. If they can be guided with the natural trail, the natural flow of the area to a certain space that’s much more communal and larger, like they do have above the reservoir, then that’s a good way to not allow the noise to spread everywhere.

And then if you’re using shrubs on some of the other side or some of the smaller areas, not let it be as large of a big opening, then that would probably deter big groups from wanting to make a, a bunch of noise there, and allow some smaller groups or individuals to find peace in some of those areas.

Miller: Jacob, thanks very much for your time today.

Schmidt: Thank you.

Miller: I wish you a quiet day.

Schmidt: Yes, have a great day. And if you’re interested, anyone’s interest in being a volunteer for Quiet Parks, we’d love to find the quiet that you know of.

Miller: Jacob Schmidt is a volunteer technician with Quiet Parks International. He joined us to talk about quiet in general, and Mt. Tabor Park in SE Portland, which was recently named the nation’s first Urban Quiet Park.

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