Key Idea 1: Maximum flexibility
Bryant Park’s 1.4-acre open lawn being utilized for various events. (Ken Bowen)
At the heart of Bryant Park lies a 1.4-acre open lawn that acts as a blank canvas for recreation, programming and events. All park amenities (some permanent, some seasonally rotating) border this key central space. Bryant Park’s year-round vibrancy stems from the flexibility and wide variety of uses this design allows.
Plentiful lightweight movable furniture allows visitors to truly make Bryant Park their own. During the spring, the park is as hospitable to friends gathering to catch up over coffee as it is to sunbathers or families wanting to throw a baseball. On select Saturdays, you might find free lunchtime Picnic Performances. On summer evenings, the flexible design allows Bryant Park to host outdoor movie nights, concerts, or theatrical performances. During the fall, you might find a sponsored event ahead of football season or a makers market with dozens of vendors. During the holiday season, when frigid temperatures make the lawn too cold, Bryant Park’s flexibility allows it to stay active by transforming into a seasonal, sponsored winter village.
For a local example of these principles in action, look no farther than the most successful urban park in our city’s long history, Memorial Park in Riverside. Its flexible nature and central lawn have allowed it to stand the test of time when so many of our other parks have not.
In contrast, JWJ Park in its current “plaza” design is handicapped by a rigid layout that is more conducive to passing through than to hosting a wide range of events.
Key Idea 2: Maintain clear sight lines
Visitors can view the Empire State Building and the Bryant Park Hotel due to clear sight lines being maintained in Bryant Park. (Ken Bowen)
In addition to maintaining flexibility, the open nature of Bryant Park enhances safety, both real and perceived. No matter where you are in Bryant Park, you are within sight of a security officer, and a security officer is within sight of you.
Additionally, the clear sightlines allow those on the lawn to enjoy the surrounding world-class architecture free of visual obstruction. In the view above, visitors in the park can easily take in views of the Empire State Building and American Standard Building (now the Bryant Park Hotel).
JWJ Park, similarly, is surrounded by some of Jacksonville’s most iconic, historically significant architecture. From the St. James Building to the Main Library, Western Union Telegraph Building (now MOCA), and Hotel Roosevelt (Carling) to the South; the Independent Life Building, Seminole Club, JTA Skyway, and Federal Courthouse and the Snyder Memorial and Bank of America tower all nearby. With such incredible surrounding context, there’s simply no reason to overdesign or over-decorate JWJ Park.
Key Idea 3 - Physical boundaries and placemaking
The wrought-iron arch at New Orleans’ City Park (left) and a view of James Weldon Johnson Park (right).
For decades, JWJ Park has lacked identity. Without clear boundaries or a primary entrance, this key block has become nothing more than a passthrough courtyard spilling onto the sidewalks and streets surrounding it. Nothing about the existing design encourages you to stay.
To better establish JWJ Park as a destination, the park should be given a proper entrance on Laura Street. As an example, the wrought-iron arch at New Orleans’ City Park visually orients visitors, while subtly reinforcing the historic nature of the 180-year-old park.
To reinforce a sense of place, branded JWJ Park shade umbrellas for tables and ample in-park signage should be included in the redesign, like we see at Bryant Park. And, in terms of enhanced security, an unintimidating wrought-iron fence surrounds Bryant Park, creating a clearly defined perimeter while still allowing full visibility into and out of the park. Secondary entrances are present along all sides.
JWJ Park, conversely, lacks physical boundaries, making it prohibitively difficult for security and staff to enforce the park’s rules and to keep bad actors out.
Wrought-iron fences on their own aren’t glamorous, but by building physical boundaries around the park, we are better able to:
1) Establish JWJ Park’s identity as a unique destination, not a pass-through 2) Remove rulebreakers from the park, and keep them out 3) Secure the park after closing, reducing the need to store movable furniture and discouraging after-hours crime, littering, and vandalism 4) Leverage the park for private events on a limited basis, with proceeds going toward upkeep and programming at JWJP
Key Idea 4: Activate the retail bays fronting the park
Examples of retail bays along Laura Street, fronting James Weldon Park.
When discussing the challenges of creating a vibrant JWJ Park, we often hear that the park is handicapped because it is surrounded by limited retail space and too much 9-to-5 municipal and private use.
What we rarely hear, however, is that four underutilized retail bays exist directly fronting JWJ Park.
The Main Library contains two retail bays fronting Laura Street. Though these slots once housed a coffee shop and bookstore, they now contribute nothing to Downtown vibrancy at street level. Similarly, MOCA Jacksonville contains two retail slots, one of which is currently occupied by Setlan Coffee.
Activating these four storefronts with outdoor patios to the wide Laura Street sidewalks would add immediate vibrancy at JWJ Park’s entrance without sacrificing any of the limited acreage within.
Key Idea 5: Avoid turning the park into a passive museum
An example of an active, informative art installation. (Ken Bowen)
There’s been a lot of discourse around dedicating a portion of the park as space to solemnly reflect on Ax Handle Saturday. In this guest author’s opinion, the cowardly racists who incited violence that day don’t deserve to be recognized in depth within the park for the violence they inflicted. It only gives more power to their actions.
We should instead use the park to celebrate the multi-year battle that Jacksonville’s NAACP Youth Council fought, and ultimately won, to desegregate nearby Downtown lunch counters. After all, the true story of the park isn’t that the protestors were victimized. It was that they overcame, even when everything (including the local press and police) was rigged against them.
In the spirit of creating an active, rather than passive, JWJ Park, we should look to Wichita, Kansas’s interactive lunch-counter protest installation, which leaves open seats for visitors to “sit in” themselves, imagining what it must have felt like to be in the shoes of these brave protestors.
Active, informative art installations (perhaps fronting former department stores where sit-ins took place), along with a proper celebration of James Weldon Johnson, gives power and positive recognition back to a community that, for too long, couldn’t walk through JWJ Park without passing under a statue that declared Confederate enslavers to be Jacksonville’s “heroes.”
At the same time, focusing too much in-park space to tell the story of Jacksonville’s history greatly undermines the park’s true purpose as an active event and recreation space. Bryant Park accomplishes this balance by placing its eight sculptures and monuments on the outer periphery of the park, which allows for maximum flexibility at its center.
With ample space on all four sides of the park, including wide sidewalks and streets that may be able to be recaptured for the park, there’s plenty of room to honor the park, city, and James Weldon Johnson’s history without turning the park proper into a solemn museum.
What do we know about the proposed redesign?
An example of incorporating Bryant Park design concepts into a redesign of James Weldon Johnson Park. (Ken Bowen)
If you, like me, believe that the key to returning JWJ Park to its rightful place as Jacksonville’s true civic and cultural epicenter will best come from a flexible design; clear sightlines; a safe, policeable layout; and a holistic approach to not just the park but the entire block, we might have a problem brewing.
Of the 16 designs proposed for the park (taken from a blurry Twitter photograph), almost all the designs appear to be densely filled, hard to secure, and lacking large-scale flexibility. There may be more to them than we can see from a single snapshot, but again, without concepts being shared with the public, it’s hard to know.
The three designs assumed to be finalists – screenshotted below from social media – all appear (from what can be read) to position the park once again as a passive, inflexible space rather than our city’s active town square.
The “Commemorative Circuit” relegates the lawn to a small, awkward, hard-to-program fraction of the overall design, focusing instead on what appears to be a circular history lesson.
The “Commemorative Grove” is even more egregious, cutting the park in half with a massive reflecting pool and shrubbery fronting City Hall. Though the pool may be lovely, it will greatly limit the utility of the park for events and recreation.
The third finalist, titled “¼ Acre Spaces,” carves JWJ Park into nine separate micro-spaces, each just a quarter of an acre large. Sensitively speaking, though this design might give the transient community 50 extra places to panhandle out of sight from security, it doesn’t leave enough space for large-scale events or community gathering.
Why is this so important?
A recent event at James Weldon Johnson Park. (Ennis Davis, AICP)
As a city, we are at risk of backing ourselves into another 50-year corner if we don’t learn from our past and our peers and again overdesign JWJ Park into a tight, passive labyrinth that’s as hard to police as it is to program.
With surplus vacant retail space begging to be reactivated on the park’s periphery, sprawling sidewalks and roads available for historic commemoration, and opportunities for revenue generation on all sides of the park, there’s just no need to try to cram everything into the 1.5 acre boundaries of the park proper.
Instead, by maintaining maximum flexibility for numerous seasonal uses, we can restore JWJ Park to its original 1866 purpose as Jacksonville’s premier civic gathering spot. Though Riverfront Plaza may ultimately play host to our largest city events a few weekends a year, the more resilient, more historic JWJ Park will always be our everyday workhorse long after the riverfront is underwater.
A smart redesign will drive engagement and activity in our urban core 365 days a year, feed visitors into surrounding restaurants and shops, make residential living more attractive, increase property values, spark new development, and maximize the public investments that we’re making on all sides of the park.
With real estate this important, literally on our city’s front steps, no one organization should be making multi-generational decisions in the dark, even if they’re all awesome people. The way forward must instead be anchored in widespread communication and best practices already established by world-class parks with similar characteristics.
The decisions we make here are either going to propel Downtown toward reaching its full potential or handcuff the urban core for another 50 years.
If you feel the same way and believe that we need to have a wider conversation about the future of Jacksonville’s most important city block before proceeding with a redesign, please let Friends of James Weldon Johnson Park, the mayor’s office, and your local City Council members know.
*Ken Bowen is a Jacksonville-based data scientist. Author of Big League City! 100 Years of Football in Jacksonville. Downtown Jax worker. Opinions are his. KenBowen242@gmail.com *