Conservation, Recreation A Balancing Act For Memorial Park Renewal In Houston

As it nears the century mark in 2025, Houston’s 1,500-acre Memorial Park is implementing a master plan of changes intended to preserve, restore and enhance the highly used urban asset.

Part-wilderness, part-recreation hub, the busy city park is located four miles west of downtown Houston, bordered by heavily traveled freeways (and flood-prone Buffalo Bayou), and enjoyed by an estimated 4 million users a year, including a daily average of 10,000 runners on the popular Seymour Lieberman Exer-Trail.

A comprehensive master plan to balance the nature-human intersect was approved unanimously by Houston City Council in 2015. Its components strive to optimize, renew and better connect the multi-use property, infuse it with its historic and cultural underpinnings, and incorporate its important role in the ecosystem as a healthy habitat, city air filter and absorbent sponge for storm water.

Price? An estimated $205 million from a public-private partnership forged for the project. City council approved the budget in 2018, soon followed by a $70 million lead gift from Kinder Foundation, considered the largest single parks grant in Houston history.

The multi-phased project, expected to take 10 years, is considered one of the largest urban park restorations underway, according to Memorial Park Conservancy (MPC), which manages and operates 1,100 acres of the park. Project collaborators include Houston Parks and Recreation Department and Uptown Development Authority, with landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz (NBW). The Virginia-based firm, which has opened a Houston office, spearheaded public input and expert research in determining and designing the transformative master plan. It’s a  foundation for the in-depth design phases now in the works.

At an informal info session with project leaders, MDC President and CEO Shellye Arnold said the project’s support came quickly. She appreciates just how unusual that outcome was and hopes it sends a message to other cities facing similar projects that such partnerships can net results.

“Without the public (component), the private wouldn’t care,” she said.

Thomas Woltz, NBW principal, noted that while other park projects have comparable complexities, they’re not on the scale of Memorial Park’s (which is nearly double the size of Central Park in New York) — and have nowhere near the buy-in.

He attributed the latter to how many different constituents can find their story somewhere on the park grounds, whether it’s on the trails of its natural world (which includes Houston Arboretum and Nature Center) or at one of the recreational amenities (which includes a golf course that also has a reboot in the works).

From the ground up

Woltz is a storyteller who expresses in landscape design the narratives gleaned from the land itself. Land has a voice, he said, and it conveys its prudent, logical use.

Taking a design approach from the ground up rather than from the plan down is a more modern attitude in urban park design, he observed, particularly when compared to the orchestrated public spaces of yesteryear. Today, landscape architecture for urban parks needs to involve stewardship of their transformations over time and to present them “not as exhibits but as immersion experiences,” he said.

Memorial Park’s early planning process, for example, assessed the grounds acre by acre — and down to the soil — to uncover layers of narratives to consider. Among the findings: there are several types of forests, prairies and soil environments to accommodate in future park design and several periods of history to incorporate, from the hunting use by Karankawa tribes, to cattle-raising by early settlers, to a role as training grounds for World War I soldiers, hence Memorial Park’s name.

There are also lingering reminders of how Mother Nature has hammered the park with periods of drought and with flooding. Repeat.

As an example of the master plan’s intent, the first phase of the inaugural project, known as Eastern Glades, opened last fall in a section of the park that had been rendered inaccessible over time. With park roads re-aligned as part of a related infrastructure project, the available contiguous parkland expanded by 30 acres, extended the very popular jogging trail, and now serves as an eastside entry point for leisurely outdoor use, be it reading a book on a bench or picnicking. Phase 1 also added parking, potties, plantings and lighting.

Phase II, with a 2020 completion estimate, remains behind the construction fencing that has become part of the park’s scenery. Behind it, a five-acre pond and adjacent wetlands are in the works as part of a water management system that adds some bucolic scenery and improves drainage while improving habitat for the estimated 79 species of creatures already calling the park home.

Making connections

As the plan’s dramatic signature element, now in the design phase, a land bridge the size of several football fields will reconnect a wide swath of the park’s north and south sections, currently separated by busy roadways running between downtown, Uptown Houston and west-side neighborhoods.

The massive land bridge will provide safe passage for wildlife and people while restoring prairie ecology, noted Jeffrey Aten, senior associate at NBW.

The pair of tunnels, aligned east-west, is at ground level, not below grade, he said, pointing to renderings. Some of the soil that will cover the concrete tunnel tubes will come from what is excavated for the Eastern Glades pond.

Other future projects include Memorial Groves, described in press materials as “a 90-acre living memorial to WWI soldiers” who trained at Camp Logan, which occupied a section of the site before it was a park.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.