Memorial Park takes shape
TxDOT could learn a lot about blending gray highways with green spaces from this longtime master plan.
Thomas Woltz teared up as he watched the scene unfold.
It was a crisp November afternoon in Memorial Park’s new Eastern Glades with Houston’s diversity in full bloom. Children ran along the main path to the piers overlooking Hines Lake. A young woman sat on a balustrade along the water’s edge where Woltz watched as a man asked for her hand in marriage.
“I’m sure they looked over and thought, ‘Who is the weird dude sitting there crying?’ ” Woltz told the editorial board recently.
The dude is the principal of the landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz and the designer behind Memorial Park’s recent transformation. He’s been awarded some of the biggest, thorniest projects in Houston — ambitious outdoor spaces where big donors, flood management, racial politics, history and our highest aspirations for the future all collide. Rice University, for instance, recently announced that Woltz is figuring out where to move the statue of its slaveholding founder in a redesigned central quad.
At Memorial Park, Woltz has earned our respect, and we believe that agencies managing major infrastructure projects, such as the Texas Department of Transportation, could learn a thing or two from his process.
For the 2015 Memorial Park Master Plan, Woltz’s team spent years doing their homework, taking part in community meetings and research collaborations with soil scientists, engineers, historians and archaeologists. Until recently, what’s now the park’s Eastern Glade — the spot where the lovers promised themselves to each other — lay in the center of a roadway. In the 1910s, it was the site of a massive World War I training facility called Camp Logan; in 1917 Black soldiers based there grew furious about abuse by Houston’s white police force, and marched on downtown; a gunfight broke out, and 19 people were killed. Further back, Karankawa people used fire to manage a mix of prairies, woodlands and bayou.
The master plan relocated the roadway that cut through the spot and reclaimed 100 acres of land for the Eastern Glades at a cost of $35 million. The Camp Logan history is in the bones of the design. The central path aligns with the route soldiers took toward downtown, and the architecture of the pavilions takes cues from military encampments. Subtlety was intentional, although we’d like to see more signage to mark the history, and educate curious visitors about it.
The Eastern Glades opened in July 2020 when pandemic lockdowns prevented a public celebration, even as demand for parks surged. So the new space appeared without fanfare and instantly became part of the fabric of Houston, as if it had always been there.
The next big attraction at Memorial Park opens this weekend. This time, there’s a party. On Saturday, the public is invited to an event billed as “The Biggest Picnic in Texas” to celebrate a $70 million land bridge and prairie that connects the two sides of the park across Memorial Drive.
Not everyone will be celebrating. Susan Chadwick, who started Save Buffalo Bayou, calls the land bridge a “seventy-million-dollar vanity project” and argues the master plan alters rather than preserves nature.
This board believes that the transformation of Memorial Park is a remarkable public good, though we’ve criticized one of the funding sources. Tax increment reinvestment zones, or TIRZs, are like shadow governments that benefit only some parts of Houston, often concentrating benefits in the most affluent areas. In 2013, the city expanded the Uptown TIRZ to include Memorial Park, authorizing $150 million in park funding over 20 years. The Kinder Foundation added $70 million to the pot that catalyzed a publicprivate partnership that is raising additional federal and private funds. This move illustrates both the upside of bold investments and our frustration when other parts of the city struggle with getting a decent sidewalk.
Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told us that the new Memorial Park master plan is a “gift to the citizenry of Houston” and “an extraordinary opportunity for the city to make good on an act of patronage that was unfulfilled almost a century ago” when the land was acquired but a master plan was never completed. He also noted that places such as Freedmen’s Town and Olivewood Cemetery are “waiting to be made visible for a much larger populace and to be afforded the kind of research, planning and analysis that Memorial Park has been afforded through Nelson Byrd Woltz’s work.”
We agree. Houston’s leading foundations and city leaders should accelerate and fully fund efforts in long-neglected parts of the city, not lavish resources on a collection of signature destinations.
Even so, there is no denying people from all over Houston come to Memorial Park. Surveys show visits from farreaching ZIP codes. People move to Houston full of aspirations, and sometimes that means driving the family across town to the big park nestled against the Galleria and River Oaks.
The new land bridge — more accurately two bridges that merge on both ends — will elevate that public and give us lookouts to collectively take in a vast expanse of verdant parkland with skyscrapers in the distance to the east and west. The experience for drivers gliding through the gently sloping parabolicshaped tunnel entrances nestled into the earth isn’t shabby either. The motion of the cars, the sweep of the bridges, the curve of the benches: It all forms an elegant totality that’s both dynamic and peaceful.
A service road to the side of Memorial Park was cut out, expanding the available land for a restored prairie, and carved-up chunks of concrete have been repurposed into a “scramble” for children and adults to climb up as an alternative to the gentle paths up the mounded earth.
Woltz showed members of the editorial board a large pipe below both the land bridge and Memorial Drive that serves as a wildlife corridor and drainage conduit from the north side of the park into a basin on the south side, slowing occasional floodwaters down on the way to Buffalo Bayou. As he talked, a hawk settled among the new native plants. The bird of prey refuted any notion that nature is something to merely preserve rather than actively manage. A “tended wild,” said Woltz.
Future phases of the master plan will extend universally accessible paths along elevated boardwalks through five forested ravines teeming with birds.
Woltz’s team attempted to frame as picturesque a view as possible, but standing atop the land bridge tomorrow’s picnic goers will still sense that they are in the middle of infrastructure — that big parks in Houston are also about building parking lots, that highways are also about flood management, that flood management is about parks and housing. Here, infrastructure and green space come together as a beautiful, functioning whole.
The engineers who run the Texas Department of Transportation are currently in a new round of negotiations to rebuild I-45. It’s been a contentious, decades-long process. They employ landscape designers to work on the green edges of the vast grayness that, well, drives their plans. The greenspace atop proposed caps or highway deck parks isn’t including in the $9 billion budget.
The Memorial Park master plan started off with wildlife connectivity, human connectivity, improved the human experience and public access. It’s an infrastructure planning process that could be transformative here and across our country.
We dare imagine a day when TxDOT projects are so safe and beautiful as to draw families with children playing freely, and nervous lovers with rings in hand.