Tom Lee Park — Renewed: Carol Coletta and the Memphis River Parks Partnership

We caught up with proponents and opponents of the big-ticket project. Part One of this three-part feature examines Carol Coletta’s riverfront vision.

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The day before Tom Lee Park officially opened in September after a complete makeover, Carol Coletta met with the media on the site, poised and prepared. After decades of being in the public eye and being no stranger to controversy, helming an event or facing reporters was not daunting.

But this was a different occasion. The stakes were high, the results dramatic, and the road to realization bumpy. For several years she’d been pushing to get the 31-acre riverfront park changed from a flat pasture to a vibrant destination with attractions galore.

In the past, Tom Lee Park brought in huge crowds two weekends every year as the Memphis in May International Festival (MIM) presented the Beale Street Music Festival and, several days later, the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest.

The wide-open space was ideal for those events. But before and after the month of May, public access was limited due to preparation and cleanup. And the nearly treeless park wasn’t much of a draw when the weather got particularly unpleasant, as it will do in Memphis.

There was general agreement that the park could be improved, but alarm bells began ringing when it looked like MIM’s popular activities might be adversely affected. Public reaction was decidedly mixed, but there was hope that differences could be resolved.

MIM officials, however, continue to feel disrespected and have some things to say about the situation. (More on that later.)

Meanwhile, Coletta pressed ahead with developing the park’s concept, working the political angles, and raising the target of $61 million to make it happen.

She brought on Studio Gang from Chicago, headed by Jeanne Gang as the master planner and architect, to come up with a concept of not only changing Tom Lee Park, but also connecting several parks along the riverfront. And Kate Orff of SCAPE, based in New York City, was named landscape architect and park designer. The result was the planting of more than 1,000 trees, new topography, ADA access, public pavilions, playgrounds, and art installations. The Tom Lee sculpture remains in the park and acclaimed Chicago artist Theaster Gates created A Monument to Listening, a permanent grouping of 32 sculptures.

As Coletta looked around at the park, with just a few last-minute elements being installed, she was pleased and reflected on her long connection with Downtown.

“I grew up in Longview Heights in South Memphis,” she says. “I took a 13 Lauderdale bus by myself at age 12 to come Downtown. I fell in love with Downtown as an adolescent, and in a lot of ways the love affair never stopped.”

She bought a building in the neighborhood in 1976 — many years before the area’s later revitalization — and she still lives there.

Coletta was drawn to Downtown not only to make her home, but to work as well. Early on, she participated in the Court Square Task Force, which led to further involvement with Downtown development under Mayor Wyeth Chandler. It wasn’t always smooth. She had the idea of installing a sculpture exhibit with abstract pieces by a young local artist. “We put them on the mall,” she says, “and the mayor was quoted as saying it looked like something had fallen off the building.”

That bit of mayoral art criticism didn’t slow her down, however. In fact, as Coletta sees it, “I’ve been cooking up controversy for decades just trying to make things interesting and better.”

After that, she continued working with the city and would become the first employee of the Center City Commission, now called the Downtown Memphis Commission.

She later was involved when the Riverfront Development Corporation was formed in 2000 during the administration of Mayor W.W. Herenton with Benny Lendermon as founding president. She was a consultant with RDC in those early years, and, as she always does, observed carefully. “I went on to do other things, but I always saw the potential in what the riverfront could become,” she says.

In 2017, Lendermon retired and the RDC morphed into the Memphis River Parks Partnership. Coletta, who by now had accumulated significant expertise in urban issues, took over as president in April 2018.

That expertise accumulated through a series of jobs and initiatives. They included her Smart City radio project in 2001 where her interviews with urban experts were widely distributed on National Public Radio.

She would also become 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.

Coletta was working for much of that time in Chicago but always maintained her Memphis residence. And Memphis was often a beneficiary of the projects she worked on.

“I can’t ever remember a moment where I was not looking at whatever I was doing through the lens of how would that work in Memphis,” she says. “So even when we were doing things at a research level, I was always thinking about it too from a practical level.”

And her work with the Knight and Kresge foundations that was focused on bettering the urban experience further shaped her view of how a city could rise to the occasion.

I believe very strongly that place matters,” Coletta says. “It matters to low-income families because they need the proximity to people and the assets that people at higher incomes demand. I also saw that if you were trying to attract and keep talented people — people who could live anywhere — you needed great place.”

Coletta’s foundation work included cities with significant waterfronts, including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago. A trip funded by Kresge was put together in 2016 to tour those waterfronts and included various local officials, including the RDC board (of which Coletta was a member) and staff. At the end of the four-day trip, Coletta says, the group was asking itself why more couldn’t be done with the Memphis riverfront. How ambitious could Memphis be?

Talks were held and Mayor Jim Strickland appointed attorney Alan Crone, who has long been involved in civic affairs, to helm a task force. Coletta knew about Studio Gang, the Chicago-based architecture and urban design firm, and commissioned the group to research all the past proposals, stretching over several decades, and determine what could be done.

In 2017, Studio Gang delivered its concept. Coletta hastens to note that it wasn’t a plan, per se, knowing that the only sure thing would have to be flexibility to meet the inevitable changes and adjustments. Part of the concept was to connect several existing zones along a six-mile riverfront stretch with bike trails, playgrounds, parks and plazas.

But MRPP had to prioritize. The reimagining of Tom Lee Park was not necessarily a given. Mud Island was considered as it was clearly — and remains — in need of upgrading. But three factors pointed to Tom Lee Park.

“One, it’s the most visible piece of real estate in town,” Coletta says. “It’s right at the city’s front door. Number two, it does not have the access issues that Mud Island has. It has more opportunity to leverage activity Downtown. And the third thing was that Mud Island is a property designed in the 1970s and was out of date 10 years after it opened. It’s a wildly expensive project to run with elevators, escalators, a monorail; it had a museum, water, water, and water. You would’ve had to make a lot of decisions there quickly because you couldn’t bring back a 1982 program that was dated when it was unveiled and deal with all the access issues that remain.”

So, it was decided to put the focus on Tom Lee Park. That being determined, the work then turned to community engagement.

Studio Gang and MRPP spent considerable effort talking to the community about what it wanted. Some 5,000 people were surveyed, mostly locals but also visitors. The design to reshape the sprawling park was developed and presented. And it was met with varying degrees of delight and outrage.

“There was some very organized opposition from the Memphis in May International Festival,” she says. “Of course, when you could animate that blank canvas with the festival, it worked. But what didn’t work was the other 355 days a year when it looked like kind of a sleepy river town. Where are the people? I’ve been asked that more times than I can count by visitors. I get totally why it worked really well for the festival. I think it’s fair to say, though, it worked pretty miserably the rest of the year.”

Memphis in May officials felt the redo of Tom Lee Park would limit performing areas, cut into precious parking space, and result in diminished attendance for the long-popular Beale Street Music Festival and the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest. “We went to mediation to resolve those tensions,” Coletta says. “We did come out with an agreement after about six months of mediation required by Mayor Strickland.” MIM was asked to provide its specifications: how many lawns were needed, how big they had to be, how many linear feet needed for the barbecue event.

“Those would then become new constraints, new challenges for the design team,” Coletta says. “But that was okay — we were working with lots of constraints. For example, the [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers said no cut, no fill on the west side of the property, no cuts on the east side of the property. We thought we had a good agreement.”

MIM officials signed the agreement, but didn’t like it. Jim Holt, president and CEO of MIM, says, “MRPP officials have often repeated that the park was built to our specifications. That is not true. … They built the park they wanted to build, whether or not it was suitable for large-scale public events. And based on the damage bill we got this year, it looks like it isn’t.” (A lawsuit filed by MRPP in September seeks $675,000 in damages done to Tom Lee Park after this year’s music festival and barbecue contest. Part of the $1.425 million bill was covered by a damage deposit paid in advance from MIM and the City of Memphis.)

Nonetheless, the parties had struck an agreement in 2019’s mediation, and the revised design was to be unveiled in April 2020. But then came Covid.

Presenting a plan for a significant change to a local institution was always going to be a tough sell. The situation wrought by the pandemic made it even more difficult.

“During Covid, people were tense, they were mad, they were confused, they were scared,” Coletta says. “All of that converged on social media. Some people saw that something was changing and that it couldn’t be good. They might not like the status quo, but they liked change even less.”

But she and the advocates for the new park weren’t surprised by the opposition. “We’ve always said we’re playing a long game and we understand that change doesn’t come easy,” she says. “We knew FedExForum — and everything ever built that is of a civic nature — gets debated and debated vociferously, and you’ve got people on both sides. I think people don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they haven’t seen.”

And Coletta says that’s entirely understandable. “There are lots of people, particularly those who’ve intimately used the park in such joyous and emotional ways during the festival. A lot of people came of age during the festival. There were such powerful connections to what it was, that it’s easy to understand why people wanted to hold onto that.”

The next crucial step for MRPP was to get a better sense of what people wanted beyond kneejerk social media posts. The team decided to do a statistically valid poll that would dig deeper into attitudes toward a newly redesigned park.

“We had, like, a 90-plus approval rating,” Coletta says. “The most positive responses were from African Americans, which is good because we’re a majority African-American town; and young people who want a future and are not as invested in what’s here today as trying to see the potential. They loved it. People in distressed neighborhoods around Downtown were very supportive, as were women. The most negative group were older white men, but even they were in the high sixties in terms of approval. So that gave us the confidence to say we were on the right track and wouldn’t be distracted by the noise.”

Fundraising, Coletta says, always takes longer than you expect. The challenges were already significant; the fundraising effort was taking place in the middle of design development and construction. Add to that an uncertain global financial market, and the pandemic-related job losses. But there were contributions large and small.

At the beginning, the key support for the revamp of Tom Lee Park came from J.R. “Pitt” and Barbara Hyde, who contributed $5 million from the Hyde Family Foundation. In the past they had supported such Memphis landmarks as the National Civil Rights Museum and FedExForum. “They do ambitious things,” Coletta says. “And if they had not thought this was an important project, I don’t think it would’ve happened.

They really made the first substantial commitment. And then the city came on, thanks to Jim Strickland. We got a commitment of TDZ [Tourism Development Zones] funds very early.” Governor Bill Lee was encouraged to push for the project in part because of members of the Shelby County delegation in the General Assembly such as Rep. Antonio Parkinson and Sen. Raumesh Akbari. That resulted in a check for $10 million. Additional involvement by the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission smoothed the way.

On that day in September before the park officially opened, University of Memphis basketball coach Penny Hardaway took a few media-friendly free throws under the 20,000-square-foot Sunset Canopy, an open structure that offers protection against the elements. He marveled at the park and said he couldn’t believe it was happening in Memphis.

It’s something Coletta has heard many times from many people, boosters and cynics alike. “We have to show ourselves,” she says. “This is not an extraordinary project. It turned out to be an extraordinary place, but it’s not an extraordinary project.” She is quick to recite the hotels going up all around Downtown, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art project along the riverfront, the cranes sprouting up.

She is clear about the good and the bad: “We’ve got problems. Guess what? Every other city has problems,” she says. “It’s almost as if we believe that we’re stuck in place. But no, we’re not. Who makes Memphis is us. It’s what we do every day, it’s what we choose to do, what we choose to say, where we choose to invest. We’re persistent, we’re determined, we’re bold. We’re not going to let anyone turn us around.”

That was the approach she had in mind when taking on duties at MRPP. The organization is more than Tom Lee Park. She says that what came before was a series of parks here and there but without having a sense of being a riverfront. There was no particular riverfront destination.

“Now we’re creating a new river district, which leaps into Downtown. And all of a sudden you park once and you’ve got 20 restaurants to choose from. You’ve got 20 things to do to entertain you. You park once and go discovering. That’s what visitors want and I think increasingly that’s what locals want. You can see it all coming together, but we need a lot more people in Memphis to believe in that, to see the possibilities and believe in the possibilities.”

A Walk in the Park

On a recent sunny Sunday morning, unseasonably autumnal for mid-September, Tom Lee Park was busy. Small children and their parents cavorted on the imaginative play structures, including, yes, the giant river otter. Teens and adults alike shot hoops on the vast, shaded basketball courts. Dogs on leashes greeted each other with tail wags. Sleepy folks moseyed up to the new outpost of Vice & Virtue Coffee within the park. The river looked peaceful, belying its power, its magnetism to draw all this life to its banks.

Come festival season, next May, the park may look very different. Or not. It’s too soon to say what the parties will decide. It’s too soon, also, to know how Tom Lee Park will age. Will Memphians continue to use the space like our collective front porch and front yard? Will the newly planted trees take happy root and grow into shade-givers for the next generations? Will the courts and playgrounds fall into disrepair after two years, or be kept vibrant and healthy? Opinions, clearly, differ. But regardless, we will all be paying attention.

Part Two: The Studio Gang unveils its plans for the riverfront.

Part Three: Memphis in May officials express their concerns.