Houston Chronicle LogoHearst Newspapers Logo

Memorial Park proposal bridges history and ecology

Long-range plan calls for 'performative' landscape

By Updated
Thomas Woltz, principle of the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, perches on top of the living bridge, a pedestrian structure built in 2005 in Memorial Park. Woltz envisions a pPark in which the long divided north and south quadrants are reunited with an 800-foot long land bridge that crosses a large stretch of Memorial Drive. (Billy Smith II / Chronicle)

Thomas Woltz, principle of the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, perches on top of the living bridge, a pedestrian structure built in 2005 in Memorial Park. Woltz envisions a pPark in which the long divided north and south quadrants are reunited with an 800-foot long land bridge that crosses a large stretch of Memorial Drive. (Billy Smith II / Chronicle)

Billy Smith II/Staff

Centuries ago - before the Reinerman family's cattle grazed at what's now Memorial Park, before soldiers at Camp Logan trained there on the way to the trenches of World War I, before the Hogg family gave it to the city - Karankawa people lived on the land. They knew a very different landscape - not a forest but a swath of bottomland savannah, prairie grassland and wetlands along the banks of Buffalo Bayou.

Today Memorial Park is a land divided.

The city's premiere park stretches across 1,500 acres, almost twice as large as New York's Central Park. But to Thomas Woltz of the internationally renowned landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz, it feels much smaller. Over time the land has been divided into 24 tracts by roads, an elevated railroad, a power easement and recreational amenities.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

That could change during the next 20 years if a long-range master plan being proposed by Woltz's firm is adopted next spring by the Houston City Council. Hired in 2013 by the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, the Uptown Houston tax increment reinvestment zone and the privately funded Memorial Park Conservancy, the firm is nearly three months into a 10-month design process.

At a public meeting Wednesday, Woltz presented his firm's initial design strategies and the reasoning behind them - ideas 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 shared 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. He's 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.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

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."

That's just the most visible aspect of a plan that would also restore the damaged ecology, enhance recreational amenities and optimize the park's potential to be what Woltz calls a "performative" landscape. A natural pond system, for example, could be used to irrigate the golf course, saving 68 million gallons of water a year.

Urban wilderness

Houston has a palette of parks with unique characters that provide balance to the city, Woltz said. While Hermann Park's classical design and location in the Museum District make it seem Parisian, Memorial Park has long been perceived as an urban wilderness.

But humans have impacted the land since native Karankawa tribes roamed the area. Their controlled burns helped to create the soil that supports the ecosystems there now, soil scientist John S. Jacob said.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

"Humans have been part of the nature of this park from the get-go," Jacob said. "The Karankawa would have seen a much more open place with motts of trees here and there, with grasslands among them - a much more complex mosaic than today's forest of thickets."

Jacob found charcoal buried in the soil, evidence of the Karankawas' controlled burns. "They were fire-stick people," Jacob said.

More modern disturbances on the land have been steady since the early 1900s. The railroad came through in 1915; Camp Logan operated from 1917 to about 1919.

The Hogg family bought the property after that. When they donated the land to the city in 1924, it was named Memorial Park to honor the many soldiers who died in the war. The family stipulated the land had to remain parkland, which led to the prevailing attitude that Memorial Park should remain "untouched."

But Memorial Drive was under construction through the middle of it by 1930. The golf course was built soon afterward; and in a land swap, a patch of 20 city blocks was cut off to build homes.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

The drive for a master plan began after Hurricane Ike, followed by the 2011 drought, decimated much of the tree canopy.

The park may look sick to many Houstonians now, but the experts who have studied it say the disasters pressed nature's reset button.

"The drought wasn't the tragedy we might think. It was a gift," Jacob said.

"It looks to us like the park is trying to reset itself," said Susan Alford, president of the Houston environmental-science consulting firm Berg Oliver Associates. "A habitat is just like any other community. It needs young, middle-aged and elderly species. This park did not have that until it experienced a loss."

Opportunistic non-native plants, including Chinese tallow and privet, have significantly reduced the landscape's bio­diversity and are taking over, Woltz said. "Once you know the science of it, the dynamics, and what this landscape could hold as it relates to biodiversity of plants and animals, it's not beautiful anymore. It's not pretty at all."

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

The master plan comes at a critical time for the park.

"It's an eminently restorable piece of land," Jacob said.

Woltz envisions a landscape more like what the Karankawas knew in some places, but also with improved recreational amenities. High-activity areas currently on the park's south side could be relocated within the park to protect the least-disturbed, fragile ecologies along the bayou - an area Woltz sees as a preserve for people on foot or on bikes.

For future generations

Project director Sarah Newbery of Uptown Houston said the Uptown Houston TIRZ is committed to spending $100 million to $150 million on the restoration projects and infrastructure; a figure that could change with property values. Memorial Park Conservancy executive director Shellye Arnold said her group is studying how much it can raise in the next 10 or 20 years toward the effort.

"But we think of this in terms of a 100-year or 75-year plan. We'll execute large parts of it in the next three to 15 years; but there can be a road map for the next generation as well."

Woltz expects to reveal designs that incorporate Camp Logan remnants at the next public meeting on Nov. 10.

"We're looking for ways the landscape could function as a memorial to the soldiers and maybe even reveal some of the grid," he said.

A Jan. 12 meeting is titled "Spaces and Places: How Will It Look?" The final March 9 meeting promises a more comprehensive revealing of the plan.

"Lots of places think about master planning and long-term visions, but they don't necessarily have a budget for making those things come true," Woltz said. "Thanks to the unique partnership here we actually can plan to implement something that can really happen."

|Updated

Molly Glentzer, a staff arts critic since 1998, writes mostly about dance and visual arts but can go anywhere a good story leads. Through covering public art in parks, she developed a beat focused on Houston's emergence as one of the nation's leading "green renaissance" cities.

During about 30 years as a journalist Molly has also written for periodicals, including Texas Monthly, Saveur, Food & Wine, Dance Magazine and Dance International. She collaborated with her husband, photographer Don Glentzer, to create "Pink Ladies & Crimson Gents: Portraits and Legends of 50 Roses" (2008, Clarkson Potter), a book about the human culture behind rose horticulture. This explains the occasional gardening story byline and her broken fingernails.

A Texas native, Molly grew up in Houston and has lived not too far away in the bucolic town of Brenham since 2012.