Downtown’s new park is small, but it comes with big ambitions
Developer looks to attract tenants who’d rather meet outside than in
As park spaces go, Houston’s newest urban oasis is a mere postage stamp, occupying just over an acre of privately held land, developed with private money. But in post-Harvey Houston, every inch of permeable space that serves as a living sponge seems more urgent and valuable.
Known as the Acre, the park is the signature piece of a $48.5 million transformation of the Allen Center complex on the west side of downtown, owned by Brookfield Property Partners. Opening to the public Monday, the new green space has a wide-open plaza, a central lawn that will seat up to 1,500 people for special events such as concerts and a paved promenade.
Brookfield created the
park prior to Hurricane Harvey, primarily to attract a new generation of tenants in innovative, collaborative businesses who would just as soon meet outside as in an office. Compared to the 9,200-acre Cullen Park near the Addicks and Barker reservoirs and the 1,500-acre Memorial Park, a single acre might not have sounded significant before the storm.
Now, catastrophic flooding has delivered payback for decades of rampant development across the Houston region. With once-vast prairies — nature’s original sponges — now largely consumed by neighborhoods, shopping centers and business complexes, the storm amplified an immediate need for more stormwater interventions of all types and sizes.
“Now Houston needs every opportunity it has to create more permeable landscapes,” said Adrian Benepe, director of civic park development at the Trust for Public Land, based in Washington, D.C.
No space too small
Grand, regional park improvements of the last decade or so, such as the Houston Parks Board’s Bayou Greenways 2020 project, have made the city a nationally recognized laboratory for public-private open space development. Some, including the 160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park, were designed to better contain storm water and functioned well during Hurricane Harvey, likely mitigating flooding around them that would have been much worse.
Yet even small civic gestures can have significant environmental benefits, especially when they are multiplied many times across cities. “There’s no space too small to create the benefits of parks,” Benepe said.
In New York and San Francisco, an acre is the median park size, and each city has many hundreds of them. The trust, with city funding, has transformed about 20 asphalt schoolyards in New York to permeable recreation spaces that now capture, slow or absorb as much as a million gallons of stormwater a year, Benepe said. And the trees in those small spaces enhance air quality and reduce heat islands.
Houston still ranks only 81st in the trust’s ranking of 100 U.S. park systems. According to the 2017 index, only 12 percent of Houston’s residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, the trust’s gold standard.
The trust recently has collaborated with Houston’s nationally recognized SPARK nonprofit to identify “park deserts” across Harris County. Since SPARK was founded in 1983, it has developed more than 200 community parks on public school grounds in 12 school districts, funded with public-private partnerships.
Private property owners have to be part of the solution, too, Benepe said.
Robert Eury, president of Central Houston Inc., a nonprofit corporation that fosters planning and redevelopment downtown, called the Acre “a very bold move” for Brookfield, “because it’s a lot of space that they’re turning over to the public.”
Eury sees the park as good for the downtown economy, too.
“It so much reflects changes in the nature of how we view work spaces today,” he said.
A number of the city’s corporate leaders would like to see Houston’s central business district evolve as an incubator zone for innovative companies, Eury said.
“Creativity and ideas happen when people bump into each other, when there are chance meetings in a space you want to be in,” Eury said. “We’ve all learned a lot about programming at Discovery Green, Market Square Park and Buffalo Bayou Park.”
Reduced building’s footprint
To squeeze out more space for the Acre, Brookfield reduced the footprint of One Allen Center’s ground floor, replacing the exterior walls of its two bottom floors with a dramatic “glass box” facade designed by Dallas’ Morrison Dilworth + Walls.
“It’s almost like a give-back to the city: taking building away to create an opportunity for outdoor space,” said landscape architect Chip Trageser, a managing partner with OJB Landscape Architecture, which designed the Acre and is consulting with Brookfield on the center’s master plan.
The Acre’s five landscape zones gain their colors and textures from a simple palette of only 12 common plant species, including ruellia, sandy fig, iris, dwarf mondo grass, creeping jenny and Asian jasmine. Trageser’s team saved 63 existing trees and planted 171 new ones that were cultivated for Houston’s urban climate — including pistachios, elms and overcup oaks.
“As everyone in Houston knows, you’ve got to have shade to have any chance of being outside,” Trageser said. “It’s really about creating a microclimate that feels great in July and August.”
He estimates that the trees will reduce the temperature of the plaza by up to 10 degrees and will sequester more than 26,000 pounds of carbon per year, offsetting about 35,586 miles of average car driving.
Adding to the cooling effect, the promenade is hardscaped with light-absorbing gray pavers. And because the Acre sits atop an underground parking garage, some plants are growing in custom-designed, raised mesh structures that form water-capturing green mounds.
Brookfield has hired a new arts and events manager to program the Acre. Travis Overall, the executive vice president who heads the company’s Texas region, expects to see the flexible space utilized for fitness programs and a farmer’s market as well as entertainment, depending on the community’s desires.
Eventually, all four buildings around the Acre, including Two and Three Allen Center and the Doubletree Hotel (which Brookfield bought last year), will appear more open to street level activity and the park. One Allen’s new lobby will hold a chefdriven restaurant overlooking the park, and Brookfield has commissioned a major art installation by Japan’s Tokujin Yoshioka for the lobby.
City’s first ‘super block’
The seven-acre Allen Center holds a unique place in Houston’s architectural history as the first downtown office complex within streets that were closed off to create a “super block.”
Dallas’ Trammel Crow and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company opened the 34-story One Allen Center designed by Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson in 1972, but their vision for a connected landscape at street level went by the wayside after Houston’s Century Development Corporation bought the property.
Century added the 36-story Two Allen Center in 1977, and the 50-story Three Allen Center and the Hotel Meridien (now the Doubletree) in 1980 — connecting the office buildings with airconditioned pedestrian bridges that traversed an original courtyard. Hidden from the street by large berms that discouraged access, the courtyard’s large fountain and concrete planters seemed to exist only for the benefit of those walking above. Those features were removed to make way for the Acre, and Brookfield re-clad the skybridge between One and Two Allen Center to make it more transparent.
Eury said Brookfield has a “remarkably great track record” of programming arts and cultural events in its buildings. Art consultant Sally Reynolds has organized exhibitions in Brookfield’s various Houston lobbies for years. In other cities, the company also hosts performances, aiming to make its properties dynamic destinations for community activities.