Sustainable Land Development Today - January 2008 - (Page 51) FINANCE (Top) The backstage area during an event houses tour buses, trucks and backstage support structures for dressing rooms and production staffing operations. The design intent is to use nautical-themed screening made of outdoor weather resistant fabric to soften the views from passersby during events. (Bottom) The new park’s layout calls for a variety of open spaces with interconnected pedestrian and vehicular pathways to provide circulation during festivals. The design focuses on major plaza areas that anchor the ends of the park with attractions, seating areas and stage locations. The streetscape along Waterside Drive will enhance the view of the Elizabeth River while maintaining the flexibility of the space during events. The streetscape consists of brick piers with ornamental fencing—some with fence sections being removable for event programming needs, while other sections are permanent with plantings, benches and lighting. One small park had quite an effect on an entire downtown district. Revival Twenty-five years after its creation, Town Point Park was slowly becoming a victim of its own success. As the city grew, the park began to show its age. The small, eight-acre site had never really been designed to accommodate up to 50,000 visitors every weekend. Growth in the surrounding neighborhood added the stress of daily use to the park. It had not really been designed as a neighborhood park. Once again, Norfolk chose to make the public investment necessary. Only this time, the concept of redeveloping a public waterfront open space was not the experimental proposition it was in the early ‘80s. The proposed $11 million upgrade for Town Point Park is seen as a modest investment in a vibrant, still-growing downtown. Its makeover will include four new performance venues, grass seating areas, paved entry plazas, water features, furnishings and plantings. In 2007, MMM Design Group was again called upon to redesign the park it originally designed in 1982. In the process, the firm incorporated a number of sustainable design practices as part of the renovation. Grass pavers will handle occasional parking and allow rain water to naturally percolate into the soil. The use of native plants throughout the park limits the need for full time irrigation systems, conserving water. Bio-retention swales Success of this type was a new phenomenon in the 1980s. Americans were flocking in greater and greater numbers to climate-controlled shopping malls, whose expansion across the suburban landscape was just beginning to take off. The concept that people would leave their homes, drive some distance into the urban core, and spend an entire day there was new. But it also pointed to the type of experience that Jane Jacobs said would make cities livable again. Town Point Park stimulated other redevelopment around it. The influx of weekend crowds created a market for restaurants and retailers to serve those crowds. Nearby, Freemason Harbor Park was developed and connected to it via a promenade. By the late 1990s, Nordstroms, a national retailer, had opened at the MacArthur Center, two blocks away. A $35 million cruise ship terminal was developed adjacent to the park in 2006. Simultaneously, residential rehab and construction began springing up in the vicinity. Town Point Park soon found that it had 5,000 fulltime neighbors - people whose primary residences were within several blocks. and filtration systems collect stormwater, cleansing runoff before it is discharged into local waterways. Wherever feasible, electrical systems in the park will be powered by solar cells. With little undeveloped land left in Norfolk, redevelopment represents the only sustainable option to continued sprawl. The willingness of the development community to make these investments is being demonstrated by the construction of numerous residential condominiums that have increased the downtown residential population by over 4,000. MMM has continued this model of successful urban parks in other Virginia cities like Charlottesville (Downtown Pedestrian Mall), Portsmouth (Portsmouth Harbor Center), and Newport News (Oyster Point Town Center). Town Point Park was not revolutionary, but its effect on downtown Norfolk was. Why did it work so well? Most Norfolk residents would answer in a word - water. Most of Norfolk’s historic waterfront had been privately owned. It served the needs of commerce tied to shipping and the military. Providing public access to water was a simple but new concept in American urban planning. It took a relatively small municipality working with an innovative design firm to add funding, music, history, and entertainment to a small stretch along the Elizabeth River, to think out of the box of time and place, and create the gem known today as Town Point Park. SLDT About the author: Taylor Gould, CLA, can be reached at tgould@mmmdesigngroup.com. www.SLDTonline.com 51 http://www.SLDTonline.com
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