The Frick Environmental Center Director James Brown seeks to make Frick Park more accessible and engaging for all.
The Frick Environmental Center is Getting Everyone Outdoors Through Accessibility Initiatives at Frick Park
James Brown had a babysitter who maintained a very earthy collection.
She was a mushroom person, he says. “Everything in her house — the pot holders, the magnets — everything was mushrooms.” Together, they would search her large backyard for mushrooms, pick them, and look at mosses and other wild things. “She’s a naturalist, not by training but just by being one of those people that loves to be curious in the woods behind her house.”
To jumpstart one’s interest in the natural world, “You just need one person,” he says.
Brown is now that one person for visitors to the Frick Environmental Center. He joined the organization in 2023 as both director and director of education.
How Frick Environmental Center Supports the Community
The Frick Environmental Center, a flagship program of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, celebrates its 10th year in 2026. (Look for festivities to begin in April.) As a second decade begins, Brown asks, “How do we bring new people into the Environmental Center? What kinds of initiatives can we take on? Frick Park is a premier space in Pittsburgh, our city’s largest park. We want everyone to feel welcome and know they belong here.”
Having previously worked as the senior program director of creative youth development at the Homewood-Brushton YMCA, Brown brings a community-first mindset to address these questions. At the YMCA, he says, he appreciated the diversity of engagement; with a recording studio, arts-education programming, a swimming pool and a gymnasium that offered basketball in the day and roller skating at night, “There were all these different people in a community center that felt normal and fun and interesting.”
Brown brings this ethos to the Environmental Center. “What does it look like,” he asks, “for an environmental center to be a true community center, in that not everything has to have this direct connection?”
The Connection Between Art and Nature
One example is the Environmental Center’s previous art exhibit, Maxo Vanka: Gift to America 2.0: New Voices. New Walls. Four local artists and artist groups were asked to create works inspired by Maxo Vanka, who in the 20th century created dramatic murals for St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale.
Alongside religious stories, Vanka explored themes of justice, immigration, and motherhood — often within a backdrop of landscapes, open spaces, and flora.
New Accessibility Initiatives
Meanwhile, the center is getting more accessible. The 0.3-mile Sensory Nature Trail opened in May 2025. “It was a watershed moment,” says Brown. The paved, looping trail, which is lined with stations to encourage engagement, is “tucked in the woodlands — it’s pretty significant for some people to be able to get into the woods.”
It’s a great addition — but for Brown, it wasn’t enough. “What about the rest of the 600 acres of Frick Park?” His team brought in Trackchairs, which are all-terrain, battery-powered wheelchairs for users with limited mobility. With large treads inspired by a snowmobile’s design, the chairs can navigate “all types of terrain — over tree roots, off trails, almost anywhere in the park that anyone else would be going.”
Come this spring, the center will have a fleet of four free-to-use Trackchairs.
A Celebration of Everyone
The From Slavery to Freedom Garden, created in collaboration with an exhibit at the Heinz History Center, will reopen for the growing season with enhanced accessibility, including garden boxes of different heights. The garden features native plants that freedom seekers used for food and medicine as they traveled north; Brown calls it an interdisciplinary space that connects nature and land to culture, history, and art.
“We want the garden to be a tactile sensory experience. You want to be able to touch, to pick from the vine, to taste and use your senses.”
For the Freedom Harvest Celebration, held in the fall, “We bring music and culture into the space,” says Brown. “We celebrate Black diaspora musicians, so usually something in the hip-hop vein, something jazzy, something soulful.”
Encouraging Others to Step Out From Behind Their Phones
At the YMCA, Brown — who earned a master’s degree in musicology at the University of Pittsburgh — worked with kids creating digital music, podcasts, and films. “I love all those forms of creativity,” he says, but when the pandemic hit, Brown was “teaching these things on the screen, through the screen.
“What if we just stopped doing the screens? What if we just take a walk? Or, what if we take the kids to the garden? … I started to feel like there were maybe some other ways I could offer or connect with things that were important to me.”
Brown began to think about things he loves about the outdoors: hiking, kayaking, camping, and gardening. Those loves led him to the Frick Environmental Center.
“That’s what I try to bring to this role. It’s not so much about expertise, but about curiosity and the love of the outdoors.”
2005 Beechwood Blvd.
Pittsburgh, PA 15217
412.586.4576
Open Daily, 10 am-4 pm
Story by Lauri Gravina
Photos courtesy Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy
Subscribe to TABLE Magazine’s print edition.