Revising the Riverfront

Working with urban strategists from Chicago and New York, Carol Coletta leads the charge to revamp Memphis’ front door.

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Two centuries ago, Andrew Jackson, John Overton, and James Winchester agreed that the Memphis riverfront was a remarkable place with great potential. We still say it today. But agreeing that it’s a wondrous thing doesn’t mean there’s consensus on what to do with it. In 1924, a celebrated city planner came up with the first comprehensive vision of what was then, as it had always been, a location defined by whatever it took to get river traffic in and out. The riverfront then wasn’t pretty, yet the plan didn’t get much traction. There have been more than a score of other studies and projects since, and while Tom Lee Park and Mud Island have become established, there’s never been much in the way of a unifying concept.

Now, however, there’s a vision that has legs. Two years ago, a plan commissioned by the then-Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) was presented by Chicago-based architecture and urban design firm Studio Gang that proposed a way to connect five distinct zones along the six-mile stretch with bike trails, playgrounds, parks, performance areas, and plazas. The concept was comprehensive and intended to come to fruition in short-, medium-, and long-term stages. The major component was a makeover of Tom Lee Park designed by the New York-based landscape architects SCAPE, the details of which were revealed last month. The resulting discussion continues, with passion.

At the center of Memphis’ ambitious $70 million reimagining of the riverfront is Carol Coletta. As president and CEO of the Memphis River Parks Partnership (the upgraded replacement to the RDC), the urban revitalization expert has been instrumental for some years in pulling together the resources necessary to make the project succeed: She’s had a role in eliciting money from foundations, support of politicians, participation of civic groups. She’s also championed the work of the two architectural design firms behind the concept.

To understand how these elements have come together, it helps to know what it is that drives Coletta. 

She was born here, growing up in Longview Heights in South Memphis, and has always had a fascination with what makes a city tick. That goes back at least to high school when she wrote a letter to Mayor Henry Loeb advising him what to do with Beale Street. 

Shy, she is not.

Since then, she’s delved deeply into urban issues, researching how municipalities are affected by economics, the arts, community development, technology, and planning. Coletta’s passion is seeing how all those components can be made to work together to bring about vital, sustainable communities. 

Coletta was an early believer in living and working downtown. An abridged list of associations shows she’s been involved with the Memphis Arts Council (now ArtsMemphis), the Downtown Neighborhood Association, Tennessee Leadership, the 911 Emergency Communications Board, and the Memphis Jobs Conference in the early 1980s. Her public relations company counseled firms on corporate giving, and she received the Initiative Award at the 1989 Women of Achievement ceremonies. In 2001 she started the Smart Cityradio interviews with urban experts, a show that was picked up by the Public Broadcasting System and ran nationally for years. She was an organizer of the 1980 and 1981 Memphis Jobs Conference, and part of the 2003 Memphis Manifesto Summit. All this was a prelude to the last several years when she’s been executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, head of the public-private collaboration ArtPlace, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities, vice president of Community and National Initiatives for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation.

These connections have been crucial to shaping what is being presented through the Memphis River Parks Partnership. In fact, Coletta still has the position with Kresge, which is paying her while she’s at MRPP. 

In 2016, Coletta was helping launch “Reimagining the Civic Commons,” an initiative that aims to make the most of public spaces to encourage connection, equity, economic development, and environmental sustainability. The three-year, five-city effort is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and local partners. The five municipalities are Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Akron, Ohio. The project investment of $40 million includes $20 million from national foundations and $20 million in local matching funds. 

The Memphis portion was the Fourth Bluff project that would bring new lighting, amenities, and events to the area that includes Memphis Park (formerly Confederate Park), the Cossitt Library, River Garden at Mississippi River Park (formerly Jefferson Davis Park), Court Square, and Main Street. November’s grand opening of the River Line trail and River Garden was a key element to the Civic Commons project and dovetailed with the MRPP plans.

So when Coletta was named president and CEO of the RDC/MRPP a year ago, she was already up to speed, not only because she was already on the board, but she also knew the players involved in the plan. 

The two architecture firms that have presented the evolutionary vision for the Memphis riverfront are top-tier, innovative enterprises, both headed by women with MacArthur Foundation Fellowships. Jeanne Gang (a 2011 MacArthur Fellow) founded Studio Gang 20 years ago in Chicago and has built a reputation for projects that are often daring but always grounded. Her big breakthrough was designing the Aqua Tower in Chicago, a striking 82-story building with curving concrete floor plates that protrude past the glass to give the structure a wave-like look. 

Studio Gang has also done the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. One project in particular — the one that got Coletta’s attention — was Polis Station, a project that rethought the architecture and space of a Chicago neighborhood police station. If a typical police station is where you go only if you’re in trouble or have had trouble happen to you, the Studio Gang concept turned it into a welcoming neighborhood center. The firm consulted with police, community leaders, and aldermen to create recreational space with the idea that such a station could be at the core of community activity.

Coletta has always been deep into the issues of making the most of public space and realized that she and Gang shared that interest. “It was natural to explore with Studio Gang how we might think about the riverfront,” Coletta says. “Not just from a design standpoint, not just from a planning standpoint, but also how design planning supports programming, how you maintain what you do, how you think about this as a connected whole.”

Coletta says Gang not only understands how to design sports programs, particularly in parks, but also knows what it takes to maintain parks. “So it all added up to Studio Gang being a really smart choice for the work we were trying to do on the riverfront,” she says. 

The Studio Gang team in Memphis is led by Gia Biagi, whose title is principal of urbanism and civic impact at the firm, and who, Coletta says, knows as much as anyone about the Memphis riverfront.  

“I grew up in a family that cared deeply about community development and engagement,” Biagi says. “My father was a small-town mayor and community activist and I grew up really seeing the power of how communities can come together and make decisions about what happens in their world and their neighborhood.”  

Biagi’s worked for the City of Chicago Park District in planning and policy and is struck by the possibilities of the Memphis riverfront. “There’s the great potential of connecting those spaces to one another in a north and south way, but then also connecting it east-west,” she says. “How do you stitch the city to its riverfront and the riverfront to the city? It’s rare to have that much real estate on your waterfront next to your downtown area that isn’t already repurposed, whether it’s a working waterfront or whether it’s been taken over by industries.”

The landscape architecture firm SCAPE is charged with giving Tom Lee Park a new look. It’s led by Kate Orff (a 2017 MacArthur Fellow) who has written Toward an Urban Ecology, which has the same philosophical underpinnings that Gang and Coletta share: Cities and landscapes can be created to bring together social and ecological systems. 

Orff was studying to be an artist but was also fascinated by ecology, biology, and environmental sciences. In her twenties, she discovered landscape architecture and realized it was her calling. 

Studio Gang and SCAPE have collaborated elsewhere, notably on the redesign of Little Rock’s Arkansas Arts Center. The $70 million project is reimagining the 81-year-old museum into a more functional and welcoming venue. Construction is to begin this year and be completed by 2022.

BRINGING IN THE OUTSIDERS

There are, inevitably, voices that complain of importing outside talent to change our city. But Coletta staunchly defends bringing in Studio Gang and SCAPE. 

“There are a limited number of firms in the country with a reputation for designing iconic parks,” she says. “This isn’t a knock on Memphians, because we have firms that are recognized nationally for their abilities, and we are pleased when they work in other cities. Just like Shelby Farms Park, the riverfront deserved the best design firm possible for this job, and that’s what we have with the team of Studio Gang and SCAPE. And the construction of a new park will be a big opportunity for Memphis companies, including MWBEs [Minority and Women’s Business Enterprise].”

She further argues that there are compelling reasons that go beyond their expertise. Successful cities that maintain their vitality can absorb out-of-town thinking and ideas while not giving up what makes up their character. For Memphis, it’s maintaining the grit and grind while welcoming guests to the table.

“If any city becomes a place that does not welcome outsiders, I think you are clearly on a trajectory as a city for decline,” Coletta says. “What we ought to be saying is everybody who comes to our city should be able to do their very best work in Memphis. What’s the competitive advantage we have in making projects like this? It ought to be our size. It ought to be the fact that you can get things done easier, faster, cheaper, and do them brilliantly.”

And then there’s the argument that an outsider can bring a perspective not always visible to those who have been around a long time.

“We really needed specialist eyes on the park and we needed fresh eyes,” she says. “I have a lot of imagination and can imagine things that aren’t. But honestly, when you’ve looked at something for as many years as many of us have looked at our riverfront, it’s hard to see it sometimes as something else, and something dramatically different. To appreciate what is really Memphis and special about it, but also to be able to push beyond what we see and let the greatness come out. And there’s a real advantage to having people with fresh eyes that have worked in really difficult circumstances — our riverfront is challenging, mainly because of the rise and fall of the river, 55 feet a year. It’s a real bear.”

LISTENING AND LEARNING

At the heart of proposing something new for such a highly visible part of the city is the need to hear what people think — and to make sure those observations are given proper consideration.

The MRPP says that more than 4,000 Memphians have been surveyed so far, plus another 800 visitors from outside Memphis who were passing through on Riverside Drive. More than 50 community meetings were held as well as other kinds of surveys. Last month, the Tom Lee Park plan was announced at Beale Street Landing, where the public engagement center has a large model of the proposed park and considerable information on the proposal.

Coletta says the riverfront concept was not only built with respect to public comment but is consistent with other ongoing initiatives. One is Memphis 3.0, a collaborative effort of government and citizens to formulate a 20-year plan for the city. The plan, in the making for more than two years, involved interviews with about 15,000 citizens on which directions they think the city should go.

“The riverfront concept is held up in Memphis 3.0 as a model for open space opportunities,” Coletta says. “In many ways, the riverfront is a case study for Mayor Jim Strickland, and 3.0’s mantra of Build Up, Not Out. With 3.0 predicting ‘modest growth’ for downtown and eastward, it calls for reinvestment and intensification downtown. The riverfront is critical to stimulating more development and investment.”  

 Memphis 3.0 has identified “anchors” to be leveraged for growth, “and downtown is identified as the anchor for all of Memphis,” Coletta says. “3.0 calls for undervalued and underleveraged land to be capitalized on, and there’s no better example for this than the riverfront project.” 

Orff describes the design challenge for Tom Lee Park as figuring out how to “make a park that is beloved.”

SCAPE, Studio Gang, and MRPP have painstakingly listened to the comments that have cascaded in. “Our job is to be more synthetic and visionary and try to address those comments in the best way we can,” Orff says, “while maintaining a kind of holistic and purposeful vision of a park.” And that vision is how the park can best serve the community for the next century. “How is it going to help catapult Memphis forward? How can it meet the needs of individuals?” she says. “But also, how can it serve a whole range of different stakeholders with frankly different priorities? So we take these comments and suggestions and fold them into the design process in a very direct way.”

Studio Gang’s Biagi says the successful process of creating a connected network out of disparate parks, trails, and spaces downtown is hinged on building relationships. “It’s about how we listen really well to people who live in the environments where we’re doing work,” she says. “How do we do a good job of getting someone to sit at the table who has high stakes, maybe low influence? How do we reach out and get a lot of voices? We use any number of methods: one-on-one meetings, small focus groups, meetings far away from the riverfront. We made sure we were accessible, even going to a Grizzlies game and setting up a table and getting feedback that way. There’s an intentionality behind it, and the fundamental ethic of our work is that people who live and work and commute have their voices at the table early and often. This is meant to be a park that lives up to all of those aspirations.” 

Biagi says one thing they do is identify points of convergence in what people are saying. “Where people are saying a lot of the same thing, maybe it’s an issue to investigate more deeply,” she says. “We’re trying to really sift through and make sure we’re really addressing big concerns and learning from the inside.”

MEMPHIS IN MAY

One stakeholder that has a lot to say about the proposed riverfront changes, particularly in Tom Lee Park, is the Memphis in May International Festival. The 30-acre park has been home to the Beale Street Music Festival and the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest for decades.

Coletta says that MIM was involved even before the design was being developed and that there have been numerous meetings and communications with them. It was not always so with past proposals to redo Tom Lee Park.

“Memphis in May has opposed changes in the past because they were not involved in the process,” she says. “We have made sure they have been involved and spent $100,000 just to respond to their questions about the park. As a result, the design has three huge lawns essentially created for Memphis in May, with built-in logistical and operational improvements to the park that will result in less damage to the park and ought to save the festival money in remediation costs.”

She says MIM “will have the best festival site in the country and the park should be a competitive advantage for it.”

The proposed timeline for the park makeover would begin this summer and be completed by December 2020. This would mean that the 2020 MIM events would be held elsewhere. There is precedent: In 2011 the barbecue event had to move to Tiger Lane because of slow-rising river flooding.

Biagi says the expectation for Tom Lee Park is to not only make it better for MIM events but to bring in people the rest of the year. “We can combine what they’ve been doing on the site with how we can make it operationally better for everyone,” she says. “And I think that’s the long term goal that they have and that MRPP has, and I think everybody has, which is how can this be a great signature park, 365 days of the year, and how we can do that in a way that makes operating big events or small events or medium-size events throughout the year in a way that’s both economically feasible and helps the park recover quickly.”

BY THE NUMBERS

  • MRPP says the $70 million campaign includes four projects on the most visible piece of the riverfront between Jefferson and Georgia. Of that $70 million, Tom Lee Park is about $60 million.
  • Funding is expected to come from city, county, state, and federal governments as well as from philanthropies, corporations, and individuals. The breakdown would be about 60 percent public to 40 percent private.
  • The MRPP maintains 250 acres of riverfront under contract with the city, which, it says, is essentially the same cost to the city as when the RDC was formed 18 years ago. Last year MRPP signed a 13-year management agreement with a 10-year extension. The level of city funding will continue to be set by the city council each year.