The Heritage Park bluff as seen from the river.

I promised last week to try to find out more about the Heritage Park situation, in which the cultural landmark designed to commemorate the founding site of Fort Worth has been padlocked and its fountains turned off. Now, through calling local organizations and surfing the web, I think I”ve gotten a thumbnail sketch of the reasons for the City’s abandonment of the park.

(Late breaking update … I just received a call from a City of Fort Worth Communications Officer outlining that the City has just announced that it will be taking action on the Heritage Park redesign issue.  The city will appoint a landscape architect sympathetic to the original design to assess options for restoration. There will be a community workshop. More on this in tomorrow’s blog.)

Background on Heritage Park: There have been complaints, it seems about the cost of maintaining Heritage Park, partly due to the design and partly to our well-known Fort Worth soil’s tendency to shift and damage pipes and foundations. Another concern the city has mentioned is been general maintainance costs and an ongoing problem with transients, including a murder which took place in the park in 2006.  But the main controversy, I believe, is centered around one particular issue that only Fort Worth Weekly (yes, the paper that yesterday’s blog battle centered on) has been willing to address. That has to do with a new generation of councilmember’s assessment of the value of the work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who designed Heritage Park, and the legacy of the architecture themes which go back to the 70′s, when the park was built.

According to Wikipedia, “recently many of Halprin’s works have become the source of some controversy. Some have fallen victim to neglect, and are in states of disrepair. Critics argǔe his pieces have become dated and no longer reflect the direction their cities want to take.”

There you have it in a nutshell. Halperin was based in San Francisco and his designs have become synonomous with the “California Style” of landscape design. His best-known project is perhaps the famous Sea Ranch on the central California coast. He also did a number of public squares in cities such as San Francisco, Portland, and across the country. His Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco is quite popular, while his United Nations Park, in the same city, has become a magnet for transients.

This may be due to Halperin’s stated interest in creating private spaces in public places, which he wrote about in his memoirs. The optomism, the trust, implicit in offering privacy in public is emblematic of the types of free-spirited ideas, including, one might say, the sexual revolution, that epitomized the 70′s, and infused its archetechture, its clothes and its music. In some areas, the idea of preserving these themes has been more popular than others. 

In conserverative Fort Worth, the expensive maintenance on a park which may seem to some a shrine to the cultural ideas of the free love generation and was also a magnet for street people may have just seemed a little bit too much. Water flow to the park’s fountains was stopped in 2007, and the park was closed, with the city citing  “safety concerns.”

How do I feel about this? I am of two minds. On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the historic preservationists. Certainly, the 70′s was a fertile time in landscape design and I grew up, in California, with the experience of rounded cement walkways and walls of water and a burgeoning optomism about human potentials.

However, I am also in understanding with the City Council if they feel that these ideals do not really reflect the historical or the current Fort Worth. “The Queen City of the Plains,” as it was originally called, is essentially a traditional place, much more well-represented by our Victorian Courthouse than a park full of watercourses.

I am pasting in, for those who wish to agitate for maintainance and reopening of the park, a list of phone numbers of City staff and other NPO’s which may be able to bring about a change in the park’s status. They come from the Cultural Landscape Foundation website.

Get Involved

Contact the following organizations and city leaders and let them know that you are interested in becoming involved in the maintenance and preservation of Heritage Plaza:

Jerre Tracy, Executive Director
Historic Fort Worth, Inc.
(817) 336-2344

Daniel Carey, Director Southwest Office
National Trust for Historic Preservation
(817) 332-4398