Memorial Park proposal bridges history and ecology
Memorial Park could dramatically change if a long-range master plan being proposed is adopted by Houston City Council.
The long-range plan was commissioned by the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, the Uptown Park tax increment reinvestment zone and the privately-funded Memorial Park Conservancy. The internationally-renowned landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz is nearly three months into a 10-month design process, and should have the master plan complete by April, when it would go before the council for a vote.
The city's premiere park stretches across 1,500 acres, almost twice as large as New York's Central Park. But to Thomas Woltz, Nelson Byrd Woltz principal, it feels much smaller. Over time the land has been divided into 24 tracts by roads, railroads and recreational amenities.
At a public meeting Wednesday, Woltz presented his firm's initial design strategies and the reasoning behind them - which were driven by previous public input and a year's research by a team of about 70 local experts in fields like soil science, ecology, history and archaeology.
He used maps, drawings and aerial views to explain the park's ecological and cultural histories, also unveiling a dramatic solution to one of the landscape's biggest problems. Woltz is proposing a grass- and tree-covered land bridge, 800 feet long, that would rise gently across Memorial Drive, over a tunnel, to reconnect the park's north and south sides.
While it's not realistic to remove the street, which is crucial to Houston's traffic circulation, the land bridge is "a kind of triumph ... the park wins," Woltz said.
The current pedestrian bridge on the park's western side, completed in 2009, was an important first gesture toward stitching the park's landscape back together, Woltz said. "This land bridge builds on that beginning at a much larger scale."
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