PRESERVING THE PAST AT EMANCIPATION PARK
Juneteenth debut of $33.6M restoration is a tribute to its history in Third Ward
Emancipation Park, the city’s oldest public green space and the soul of the Third Ward’s African-American community for 145 years, suddenly looks spectacular.
At dusk Wednesday, people in workout gear mingled outside the sparkling new fitness center. Slender light columns glowed across the fresh landscape as mothers and children wrapped in wet towels walked into the evening from the pool.
After a $33.6 million restoration that was a decade in the making, the park will be rededicated Saturday, with celebrations continuing through Juneteenth on Monday.
That holiday debut is an intentional echo of the park’s history. In 1872, the Rev. Jack Yates, Richard Allen, the Rev. Elias Dibble and Richard Brock — all former slaves — pooled $800 to buy 10 acres of open land to give their community a place to celebrate Juneteenth. The holiday marks the moment Texans finally got word that slaves were freed: June 19, 1865, two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
The city of Houston acquired Emancipation Park in 1918. Until segregation ended in the 1960s, it was the city’s only public park open to blacks.
Now, with Emancipation Park’s renovation, the green revolution that’s come to Houston’s best public spaces begins to look more equitable.
An uplifting feeling
Architect Phil Freelon has built his reputation designing culturally significant buildings across the U.S. Perhaps most famously, he collaborated on Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, which opened last September.
At Emancipation Park, the exuberantly refined, 16,000-square-foot fitness center creates a dramatic focal point for the Third Ward. It’s by far the most stunning building in the neighborhood.
Everything about the place feels uplifting, from the huge canopy at the entry to the verticality of the windows and the composite facade panels, which take their color cues from the earthy brown tones of the area’s brick homes and tin roofs. Their patchwork design suggests a contemporary interpretation of a quilt, a theme that also appears in pavers across the park.
Freelon has sensitively restored the WPA-era community center and pool house that complete the plaza’s frame, uncovering windows that were covered decades ago and reclaiming the small, unique Blessings Theater that opens to both the inside and outside. Each building was designed in the 1930s by the prominent Houston architect William Ward Watkin. Freelon said the challenges there were more technical than aesthetic; he wanted to keep as much of Watkin’s design as possible.
Area residents who have watched the construction for four years have been enjoying the fitness center’s lightfilled weight room and gymnasium and the aquatic center’s splashy new swimming pool for several weeks. Now, construction fences have disappeared from around the park proper, opening access to a new ballpark, a new playground full of complex-looking enticements, new tennis courts, a new basketball court, a splash pad and new picnic areas.
The park also now has a defined central axis, the Founder’s Promenade, between a new sculptural landmark and the Blessings Theater. The promenade has been a long time coming: It was originally envisioned in a 1939 plan by Hare & Hare.
The archway offers a reminder of the park’s original spirit. It’s open at the top, formed by a pair of quartz-composite panels that swoop jubilantly toward the sky. At night, lit at the tips, it glows like a pair of matchsticks. The reflective stainless-steel undersides are etched with inspirational words: Liberation, Opportunity, Creativity, Release.
Park memories
Alvia Wardlaw, a board member of the year-old Emancipation Park Conservancy, grew up coming to the park. She became emotional while visiting the refurbished grounds last week.
She was thrilled by the stately rearrangement of big oaks that were moved to make way for the fitness center.
Wardlaw remembers birthday parties and picnics under those trees, the reverberating voices of ministers during revivals and a lifetime of other family activities.
Now director of the University Museum at Texas Southern University, she is dispatching interns to collect oral histories about the park.
“We can take advantage of this as a teaching place in so many different ways,” she said.
Emancipation Park’s upgrade was intended to spur economic redevelopment, and gentrification is clearly coming. But some community leaders hope it can be better managed in the Third Ward than it was in the Fourth, where Freedman’s Town history has largely disappeared.
Most of the acreage immediately surrounding Emancipation Park is empty, available and tantalizingly close to downtown. Nonprofits and churches have acquired about a quarter of the land in the area, hoping to maintain a balance that includes low-income housing and preserves the character of the neighborhood.
Finding funds
As with all of Houston’s recent park projects, Emancipation would not have been resuscitated without the public funds of a quasi-public TIRZ and private partnerships.
Interim parks director Lisa Johnson called the Almeda-Old Spanish Trail TIRZ “the lifeblood of the project.”
The TIRZ helped fund the initial study, led public input sessions and hired Freelon, eventually covering 85 percent of the project’s cost, as well as a new parking lot and street and sidewalk improvements.
On the private side, the Kinder Foundation and Houston Endowment each gave $2 million for the renovation of the pool house and community center, respectively. A $1 million Texas Parks & Wildlife grant enabled the new outdoor recreational facilities, and Ohio’s Timken Foundation contributed $120,000 toward the fitness center.
The biggest missing link, until last year, was a conservancy. All of the city’s other marquee parks are operated and maintained by deeppocketed, philanthropic groups.
And Emancipation Park has bigger day-today expenses than most. One of the largest of the city’s 56 community centers, it employs a full-time staff of six for the fitness and community centers and a summer staff of about five for the pool.
Johnson said the city will continue to operate the park’s after-school programs, the summer enrichment programs, and pool, although she anticipates that the fledgling Emancipation Park Conservancy will eventually help with other programming. The conservancy has raised about $3.5 million to date.
District D city councilman Dwight Boykins knows the park will need more funds to succeed.
“Seed money is one thing. Permanent funding is another,” he said. “You can’t just have a building with no funding sources for programs.”
‘Nothing not to like’
Ellis Wilson lives across Hutchins Street from the park, and from his front porch has watched the park’s fouryear renovation.
He’s lived in Houston just 11 years but knows the history well. A Hurricane Katrina survivor, he found religion at the 137-year old Jerusalem Missionary Baptist Church catty-corner to his home and now spends time delivering clothes to the homeless.
“God put me on this corner,” he said.
On Wednesday, when he turned 70, the project’s completion felt like a fine birthday present. If he was concerned about losing his lease to redevelopment, he didn’t say so.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “There’s nothing to not like. I’m not getting in the pool or lifting 100 pound weights, but when I get ready I can go over there and work out.”
Wardlaw believes that if any community can keep its soul, this one will.
“The fact that we’ve renamed Dowling Street Emancipation Avenue is also symbolic,” she said. “You want a good mix. And you want new neighbors to be very aware of the rich history that they’re stepping into, so that they become a part of a community that has deep, deep roots.”