Designing Heritage Park – Inside the Halprin Archives, Part One – Alternate Sites and Designs

Recently, we noted the city’s planned public meetings on the restoration of Heritage Park. The city is working with Laurie Olin, noted landscape architect who worked with Heritage Park’s original designer, Lawrence Halprin, to come up with an effective and respectful restoration plan for the long-neglected and intimate park on the Trinity Bluff just west of the courthouse and Paddock Viaduct.

Now, in celebration of the newfound interest in the park, we’ve got something special to share. Fort Worthology is very proud to present a series of posts showing ultra-rare original design and concept sketches by Lawrence Halprin during the design of Heritage Park. These images are from the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, and aren’t available online anywhere else. Thanks to District 9 City Council representative Joel Burns, we can share these treasures of the city’s architectural legacy with our readers.

We’ll be presenting the Halprin sketches in a series, starting today and continuing next week. Today, let’s take a look at some conceptual sketches that show that Heritage Park wasn’t always intended for the west side of the Paddock Viaduct – and that the desires behind the Trinity River Vision were around in the ’70s as well.

First, some background:

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Heritage Park sits atop the Trinity Bluff just west of the Paddock Viaduct and north of Bluff Street, near the Tarrant County Courthouse. A small, intimate space of concrete paths, outdoor rooms, water features, and an overlook extending from the bluff face, Heritage Park was the design of famed landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who designed quite a few urban spaces like Heritage Park. One of the most notable is Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon. Halprin designed Heritage Park to be a reflective, meditative space. In the years that followed, the park fell into disrepair and became overgrown with plants, and the city finally closed the park not long ago. Recently, the city embarked on a plan to restore and re-open the park.

Heritage Park’s location wasn’t always just west of the Paddock Viaduct, though. Early design sketches reveal that the park was at one point intended to go to the east of the bridge, roughly in the location of the current Tarrant County College campus project.

In this Halprin sketch, the area of the bluffs east of the bridge is examined, and various issues surrounding its then-current design are explored. Numerous notations point to the potential of the bluffs as a recreational area hampered by a lack of access – a problem to this day. Further notes read “water oriented activities?” It’s easy to read this as one of the seeds of today’s Trinity River Vision and Trinity Uptown project. The little-utilized land past the bluffs on what will be the TRV islands is noted, and the area from the flat land to the water’s edge occupied by the levee system is marked with the note “high potential use – how to develop?” This was 1977 – it would only be today that we launched a project (the TRV) to enable the development of this waterfront land. Perhaps even more interesting from a hindsight perspective is the caption over the Samuels Avenue neighborhood – “What is the future of this residential area to be?” In the last few years, that area has become the hot Trinity Bluff development:

The sketch is remarkably prescient in its details relating to the TRV and Trinity Bluff.

With the site initially having been east of the bridge, some early design concepts were put together showing a very different Heritage Park than what was actually built.

One of these initial sketches reveals a more sprawling and open design that terraces down the bluff and does not have an “overlook” setup like the finished park. This design features a pedestrian overpass crossing Bluff Street from the courthouse area. This is roughly in the area of the present Tarrant County College project:

At some point thereafter, Halprin created this sketch with another radically different design:

In this design, the park becomes a large hexagonal pod jutting out from the bluff face. A smaller hexagonal pod extends above it to the east. A larger pedestrian overpass crosses Bluff Street from the courthouse. What might be windows indicate an interior to the structure of some sort – perhaps a restaurant or visitor’s center?

As indicated by these sketches, Heritage Park could have turned out very different indeed. The location east of the bridge, in retrospect, may have given the park a more prominent location than it has now, where it wound up tucked into the shadow of a huge county parking garage. Plans for TCC’s campus would have been quite different with an eastern Heritage Park as well. In the end, though, Heritage Park’s western site may give it a more noteworthy view as it looks out over what will be the downtown lake in the completed TRV.

In our next installment, we’ll take a look at more sketches, including a rendering of some sort of riverfront train station & recreation development, and a sketch showing an overview of Downtown with a TRV-esque downtown lake, a freeway ringing the bluff area, and North Main closed to car traffic. Afterwards we’ll get into sketches showing the design of the final park coming together.

A big thanks once again to District 9 City Council representative Joel Burns for providing these sketches.