Category: parks

Whither crumbling Modernist plazas?

Minneapolis has its own version of Charlotte’s Marshall Park, a vintage mid-century plaza of aging concrete that few love or visit. In Minneapolis it’s Peavey Plaza. “Minneapolis Tussles Over a Faded Plaza,” is the New York Times’ article.

It’s another example of the dilemma over how much unloved, unpopular mid-century Modernism should be preserved. Ardent historic preservationists point out that 50 years ago people were tearing down Victorian houses because they were so “ugly,” only to wait a decade until people began to love them. Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Historic Landmarks Commission has posted a study of the city’s post-World War II  buildings to recommend which were worth National Register designation. Note, Marshall Park is not on the list.

However, the Times article recounts, in 1999 the American Society of Landscape Architects recognized Peavey Plaza as one of the nation’s most significant examples of landscape architecture, along with Central Park in Manhattan and the Biltmore estate in North Carolina. (That, alone, may offer more insight into what’s wrong with landscape architecture in America today than any other single piece of evidence.)

Built in the early 1970s (Peavey Plaza dates to 1975) after urban renewal razed a historically black neighborhood, Marshall Park is frequented most often by Canada geese. It had a moment of national glory as a stand-in for Farragut North in the Showtime series “Homeland,” filmed in Charlotte.

I don’t think every park adds value, especially in a city downtown with so many blank spaces from parking lots, empty lots, corporate plazas and such.

At the same time, I don’t think beauty alone, or popular opinion alone, should determine whether a building or other place should be preserved, or torn down and replaced. Even though I find almost all  Modernist architecture bleak, depressing and anti-human, I still believe examples should be saved. If for no other reason, they may serve to remind us of the awful ideas some so-called designers can come up with.

At long, long last, a park for Romare Bearden

Bearden collage: Maudell Sleet’s Magic Garden (1978)

It took years, multiple political strategies, a bond vote, patience, weathering a brutal and ongoing economic downturn, more patience, and – finally – a multimedia event under a tent on a hot asphalt parking lot. But Friday, ground was broken for a new park in uptown Charlotte: Romare Bearden Park.

It’s notable for many reasons, including being the first significant honoring of  a major 20th-century artist, Bearden, who was born in Charlotte. It’s also the first major public park built in the heart of uptown in years. I am not counting Polk Place at The Square because it’s tiny and because I’m still hacked off that the city knocked down the oldest retail buildings downtown for a not-so-wonderful park modeled on what looks like the U.S. Northwest mountains. The late Al Rousso’s fight against the city to save his store got him elected to City Council. But it didn’t save his store. Nor am I counting The Green because it is private space. Lovely, but private. Just try standing and taking photos of the condos, and you may find yourself getting kicked out, as I hear happened to some architecture students.
 Romare Bearden Park is named for New York artist and Charlotte native Romare Bearden, born 100 years ago today about two blocks from the scene of Friday’s ceremonies, in his great-grandparents’ house at 401 S. Graham St. on the corner of what was then Second Street and is now Martin Luther King Boulevard. Bearden’s parents moved North when he was a young boy, but he visited frequently and some of his later works evoke (and are named for) Mecklenburg County and the people he knew here, including Charlotte neighbor Maudell Sleet (above).

St. Michael’s now-demolished church. Photo: www.bearden1911.org

That “multimedia” part refers to the agenda for Friday’s events. Of course you had politicians present and past, governmental officials and reading from ceremonial proclamations. But we were also treated to the choir from St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church – where Bearden was baptized. The church, founded in 1882, was formerly at South Mint and West Hill streets (where the Panthers’ stadium now sits) and is the oldest traditionally African American Episcopal church in the state. (For more information about Charlotte in 1911, at the time of Bearden’s birth, visit www.Bearden1911.org.)

After the pols came playwright/poet Ruth Sloane reading dramatic excerpts from her original play, “Romare Bearden 1911-1988,” commissioned in 2003, and accompanied by flautist Michael Porter. Then we followed the Johnson C. Smith University drummers out to watch Mecklenburg county commissioners’ chair Jennifer Roberts knock out a section of the back wall of a row of buildings that until now had, miraculously, survived on Church Street between Third Street and MLK Boulevard.

I chanced to sit next to Charlotte developer David Furman, who recalled, “When we started marketing the TradeMark [condo tower on West Trade Street] we were marketing this park.” That was six or seven years ago, he said. The park site was part of a multipart, still controversial land swap deal that was expected to bring a minor league baseball stadium uptown, to a neighboring and larger parcel that was the original site for this park. That deal has been mangled by the recession and long-running lawsuits.