Consensus Reached: Design Workshop to Reopen Heritage Park Plaza

The City of Fort Worth closed Heritage Park Plaza in 2007 for reasons of public safety. Concerned citizens have since been working with City officials to address the issues in a manner consistent with the vision of its designer, Lawrence Halprin.

Today, the plaza remains closed, removed from public life. The Heritage Park Steering Committee, with financial support from the Amon G. Carter Foundation, invited Laurie Olin, of the landscape architecture firm OLIN, to lead a workshop consisting of local design professionals to develop recommendations on reopening Heritage Park Plaza. By reopening the plaza, the Steering Committee hopes to generate enough local and national interest to raise funds for restoration.

Heritage Park Plaza site visit

In the late 1960s through the 1970s Lawrence Halprin completed a plan for the Central Business District of Fort Worth, provided professional guidance to Streams and Valleys on the future of the Trinity River in downtown, and, at the request of Ruth Carter Stevenson and Phyllis Tilley, designed Heritage Park and plaza. During his time in Fort Worth, Halprin created a ground breaking community participation process called “Take Part”.

With that precedent in mind, in January 2011, under the guidance of Laurie Olin and Molly O’Neill Robinson of OLIN, the design team met at the plaza for the awareness tour. Design workshop participants were given a workbook and were asked to spend five to ten minutes (in silence) at sixteen locations in and around Heritage Plaza. Participants studied each location and listed their impressions in their workbooks in the form of notes, sketches, and diagrams. The workbook notes became the foundation for recommendations made the following day.

The Steering Committee, including representatives from the Texas Historical Commission, was impressed by the careful attention paid to temporary design recommendations. They expressed their pleasure with the recommendations and voted to move forward. In response, the Amon G. Carter Foundation has agreed to fund the initial step; a full structural assessment including a geotechnical investigation and tree assessment/survey.

Images courtesy the author.