‘For Them, Not To Them’
As the ground breaks on the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park, Millennium Park vet offers critical words of advice.
As much as a groundbreaking shows the first physical signs of progress towards the realization of a dream, it also reflects the closing gap in time before a project realized is set in stone. Ground was broken on the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park yesterday, September 14, amidst the usual political pageantry of photo-ready smiles, handshakes, and lame jokes. The park, which only a year ago seemed to be sliding shy of its scheduled completion at the end of 2010, was given a jumpstart by federal stimulus funds. Deemed shovel ready, the shovels are now flying, and the dream of capping the highway that slices through downtown – a dream that stretches back to the very design of Woodall Rodgers Freeway – is becoming a reality. A rendering of the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park Dallasites hardly need an explanation of the distinction. The day after the Woodall Deck Park groundbreaking saw the ground break on the controversial convention center hotel, a project that (whether it turns out a financial success or not) was thrust upon the residents of Dallas with such suddenness that it provoked a knee-jerk referendum in a effort to squash the project. In recent years, the Trinity River Project, which once promised a pastoral vision of a grand green space for Dallas, has largely lost public confidence do to delays, huge projected cost overruns, an expanding vision for a tollway in the park, and fears that the signature Calatrava sculptural bridge is a really a high-dollar bridge to nowhere.
The morning before the ceremony, The Real Estate Council hosted a membership breakfast featuring speaker Tony Jones, Chancellor of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who was heavily involved in the planning and design of the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park’s figurative godfather: Chicago’s Millennium Park. Built over a busy railroad yard inconveniently plopped dead center in Chicago’s downtown, between the museums and green space of Grant Park and the hubbub of Michigan Ave. and the Miracle Mile, Chicago’s park was envisioned as a solution for an urban planning quandary, a way to lure residents back to downtown Chicago, and an architectural playground.
That park’s success has also boosted the boosters of the Woodall Rodgers Park. Millennium Park’s usage has exceeded everyone’s expectations. Numerous developments – including many residential – have sprung up around the park, and billions of dollars in economic activity can be attributed directly to Millennium Park.
But this isn’t what most excites Jones about Millennium’s success. For Jones, it is the ownership Chicago residents have taken of the park that is the measure of its merit – from Crown Fountain, where thousands of kids splash about in the water during the city’s few warm months, to the sporadic unplanned yoga and tai chi classes that spring up on the park’s great lawn. Jones said that Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor was less than enthused when he heard his memorable polished steal sculpture Cloud Gate had been lovingly dubbed “Da Bean” by Chicagoans. But Jones explained to the artist that nickname was an honor – locals had embraced his work and made it their own. Everyone who visits the city needs a picture with “Da Bean,” and musicians have discovered that the bottom side of the sculpture, while boasting an incredible illusion of reflected infinity, the sensation of the world rising to the heavens, also has fantastic acoustics. Buskers abound.
All this has happened, Jones said, because of the orientation of the park’s fundamental vision. Despite hope for its economic and aesthetic impact, the park was envisioned as a gift for the city’s residents. And with that admission, Jones offered advice to the real estate professionals, politicians, and park planners gathered to hear him speak in Dallas: “Build it for them, not to them.”
This fall will see the opening of the Dallas Arts District and DART’s Green Line, two decades-old projects, and yet some still talk about Dallas’ dream projects as being the product of self-interested (read: moneyed, or Park Cities) individuals, willing to bankrupt the city for the benefit of the upper classes. This suspicion is branded on our character, fueled by decades of social inequality, powerful meddling, and political corruption. “This is Dallas,” goes a line of argument, “things don’t get built for us – they get built on us.”
This is why the history of the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park offers some hope that the project can uproot some of these perceptions. Largely overshadowed by the years of squabbling over the Trinity River Project, the deck park’s recent progress has come quickly thanks to the federal stimulus program. Though much smaller in scale, plans for the Woodall Park offer similar amenities to Chicago’s gem. There will an outdoor amphitheater with a great lawn, a “water feature,” and a children’s garden. It will abut the Arts District, itself shaping into a large public park space. But what will it take for Dallasites to buy into the park – to begin to dig in and use it, take ownership of the space so that it becomes fertile ground for casual, impromptu displays of lively leisure?
Tony Jones said park planners did not predict much of the activity that has made Millennium Park such an enjoyable setting for life and leisure, but his comment is a little misleading. They did not know that thousands of children from all over Chicago (and the world) would flock to Crown Fountain to play, but they did make sure the design of the fountain was shallow enough so that children could play in it. They did not expect so many business people from surrounding offices would rent ice skates on their lunch breaks during the winter and skate in the park, but they did build an outdoor ice rink with a skate rental facility. In other words, what Millennium Park provided in its design were a number of low-cost or absolutely free things to do that appealed to a broad spectrum of individuals.
The Woodall Rodgers Deck Park plans to offer some similar attractions, but with funding for the park’s amenities not yet set in stone, there is still opportunity to return to the park’s plan with a set of simple questions inspired by the spirit of Millennium Park: Where will the children play? Where will the adults play? Where will the teenagers play? If the only answers are: eat a sandwich on a bench, play on a playground, walk a dog , or watch a performance in the amphitheater, then the vision for the park is not quite there yet. Don’t worry, there’s still some time left to dream.
Thank you for the splendid thoughts. Another question will be how do we get there. With the closing of Harwood street, there will be an opportunity to have some pedestrian friendly walks into the park area. It is not much fun to walk around the neighborhood of uptown around the Ritz or The Crescent. Let us have some pedestrian amenities to lure us in. Harwood might even be used to bike in from the Katy Trail and through downtown to the Farmers Market.
15 September 2009 at 12:59 pm