Mayor’s gift kick-starts drive for more park endowments
Dropping for a moment his persona as a public figure, Mayor David Holt on Friday created a living legacy to his parents with the first private gift to the MAPS 3 downtown park.
A space designed for open-air gatherings will be known as the Mary Ann and Stroud Holt Garden.
“The real headline today is that the efforts have begun to create a private endowment to fund the operations and maintenance and further improvements to this amazing park,”Holt said.
Holt’s gift is to the Scissortail Park Foundation Endowment Fund at the Oklahoma City Community Foundation. The nonprofit park foundation has a contract to manage Scissortail Park.
Mary Ann Fuller Holt died unexpectedly at the age of 49 in 1993, when her son was 14.
Stroud Holt attended Friday’s event but was using a walker after undergoing knee surgery a weekago.
So details werekept quiet until 10 minutes before the announcement.
“This is a total surprise to him,” the mayor said.
Holt said his parents were married in 1976. Their only child, he was born in 1979.
“Everybody’s got the same story,” Holt said. “The sacrifices that your parents make for you, and the love that they give you, the amazing things they do for you.
“If you have the opportunity to thank them and in this case to create a special place that you can go, I wanted that for them, I wanted that for me, I wanted that for my kids.”
The endowment will become a key to helping the foundation manage the park to the “highest of standards,” said Maureen Heffernan, the Scissortail Park executive director.
“You don’t see it but it’s quietly working, it’s growing, it’s providing the energy,” she said.
The Mary Ann and Stroud Holt Garden is in the northwest corner of the 36-acre upper park, near the intersection of the Oklahoma City Boulevard and Hudson Avenue.
It is one of two circular “trellis” gardens included in the park. About 40 feet in diameter, itis designed to seat about 65 people, with room for about 95 standing.
The upper park includes a cafe, lake and boathouse, fountain and playgrounds, and concert stage, along with extensive gardens and woodlands.
Under construction between the boulevard and Skydance bridge, it will open in June 2019.
Final designs will be completed in the next year for the 32-acre lower park, between Skydance bridge and the Oklahoma River. It is to open in 2021.
Under its lease agreement with Oklahoma City, the Scissortail Park Foundation can raise money by selling or licensing naming rights for park facilities.
The foundation has set a number of tiers, ranging from $1,000 for adopt-atree to $2 million for naming rights to such things as larger gardens, buildings, fountains.
Naming rights for smaller gardens are in a $50,000 to $99,000 tier. Holt declined to say how much he gave.
Stroud Holt sat with his grandson for Friday’s announcement, on newly repaved but still-closed Hudson Avenue along the west edge of the park construction site.
The mayor said the Mary Ann and Stroud Holt Garden would become a place for weddings, for reading a book, for “fascinating things.”
And addressing his father, Holt said, “I can’t wait to ... take you there, Dad, in the years ahead.”