If any American city is properly harnessing the transformative powers of good landscape architecture and improved public greenspace, it’s Houston.

Newer spaces such as decade-old Discovery Green and the beautiful Buffalo Bayou Park, which unspools across 125 acres on downtown’s edge, are giving soft, green edges to a region long marked and carved by concrete.

Now chalk up another win: The newly transformed Emancipation Park. Officially opening this year after a spectacular $33 million redesign, the 11.7-acre park is set to become the showplace of the predominantly black Third Ward. And when Mayor Sylvester Turner said in a January news conference the newly renovated amenity “will take its place among our city’s most cherished and respected parks,” it’s difficult to argue otherwise.

Led by the acclaimed North Carolina architect Philip Freelon, director of design at architectural giant Perkins+Will, the park’s three main buildings now give a handsome salute to the newly-renamed Emancipation Boulevard, while the acreage behind the buildings has been reshaped as well.

East elevation of recreation center. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Recreation center entry. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Looking north towards aquatic center. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Aquatic center entry. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Recreation center interior. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Western entrance off Hutchins leads to the new Founder’s Promenade. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Looking through "porch" to the east. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Recreation center detail. Lee Bey Architectural Photography.

 

Two of the buildings — the WPA-era pool house and a drab community center — have been smartly renovated inside and out. But the eye-catching new recreational center is the building most evocative of Emancipation Park’s transformation.

The big building is a dazzler, with its wide, glassy, canopied entry facing a new pedestrian court framed by the pool house and community center. As a result of this siting, the building turns its two-story side to Emancipation Boulevard. This could have been a most unneighborly move, but Freelon respected the boulevard and passersby by giving this elevation a bold, show-stopping facade of earth-toned composite panels with jazzy geometric patterns.

“The panels add a visual texture and a modern aesthetic to the building,” said Freelon, who was picked for the project before his company, The Freelon Group, merged with Perkins+Will in 2014. “The rust and earth-tone colors of the panels were chosen to compliment the brick masonry found in the neighborhood.”

The park is the result of years of advocacy by residents and the non-profit Friends of Emancipation Park. By 2010 the Old Spanish Trail/Alameda Corridors Redevelopment Authority and Houston Parks and Recreation sought proposals and money to make it happen. The park is funded and endowed through public, private, and philanthropic partnerships.

Emancipation Park was created in 1872 when the Rev. Jack Yates, and a group of fellow formerly enslaved people raised $800 to buy the land to make a space to yearly celebrate June 19, 1865 — the day Union General Gordon Granger, backed by 2,000 federal troops, read the presidential order at Galveston that freed a quarter-million black Texans from forced bondsmanship. (The Emancipation Proclamation that outlawed slavery in Confederate states was signed in 1863, but it took two years for the news to reach Galveston.) Emancipation became a city park in 1918, effectively making it Houston's oldest park; its creation predates Sam Houston Park which opened in 1900.

By the 1930s, Emancipation Park served a burgeoning black population in the Third Ward. Tennis courts and volleyball facilities were added. A 1939 site plan by Kansas City-based architects Hare & Hare, who also planned Hermann Park and many other iconic Houston landscapes, gave order to the park and added a central spine that runs between Emancipation and Hutchins. The now-renovated swimming facility had been the only public pool in the city where black people were allowed to swim.

“I remember there was a dentist, Dr. John Davis, and he’d show movies there,” Carroll Parrott Blue, a Houston writer, filmmaker, and historian who grew up in the Third Ward, said of the park. “And I remember going to the carnivals there in the 1950s.”

Blue also said the park was also a source of jobs.

“I found an article that says my mother, Mollie Parrott, worked at Emancipation Park in the 1920s,” she said. “That park was a place for black people to work … to get jobs that were decent.”

After the mid-century, jobs in the area began to dwindle and more affluent black people began to move to other areas. Federal, state, and local officials routed highways through the neighborhood which fragmented Third Ward and isolated the park.

Park maintenance and general city services slacked off as well. Emancipation Park was perceived as a bit dangerous. The park was also a key site for peaceful rallies during the heyday of Houston’s civil rights movement as well as tense standoffs with police, including the killing of Black Panther Carl Hampton on an adjacent block.

“It tells the stories of African American communities all over,” Blue said.

Yet the park remained a center of the community. Neighbors still gathered on its lawns and under its shade. Kids played basketball in the old gym inside the community center and on courts outside. The old tennis courts were in use. Juneteenth Fest happened yearly. It wasn’t a dead park. But it has been reborn.

The new recreational center houses a pretty impressive weight room on its first floor, with floor to ceiling views onto the entry court and Emancipation Blvd. There are also community spaces and a competition-sized basketball court with removable seating.

Though it looms over the older buildings, the center is sensitive to its context, with well-turned facades on all elevations. The pool complex now has air conditioning, new lockers and a new lobby. The outdoor pool is visually shielded from Emancipation Blvd. But rather than throwing up a blank wall, Freelon provides screening that matches the louvered windows on the recreational center. As a result pedestrians can hear the action within the pool — a nice foil to the sounds of passing car traffic. And the screen bears the name of the park.

Meanwhile, a new park unfolds behind the buildings. Houston landscape architects M2L Associates gave the park a new topography that includes small hills and even moved existing large oak trees within the park to make room for new amenities. The western entrance off Hutchins leads to the new Founder’s Promenade into the park. A sculpture now also marks the entrance. The Hare and Hare axis through the park is delineated with a new paver scheme that visually links the park’s buildings and spaces. The wide path also leads to a new outdoor theater behind the cultural center.

“The idea of connecting or stitching together many different parts to create a harmonious entity harkens back to African and African American traditions such as quilting,” said Freelon, an African American architect whose work includes working with David Adjaye on the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington DC.

The paving scheme, though attractive, has a potential demerit: it gives the park a lot of hardscape. Whether it’s too much will depend on how the park is used, what activities are planned, and how the materials perform. How much heat will those pavers radiate during hot summers?

Another noteworthy design elements are two open air pavilions that sit near Hutchins. Designers and parks officials call them “porches,” created as informal gathering places for park patrons to sit or gather. The porches are exceptionally well-done and could hold their own design-wise in Discovery Green, Chicago’s Millennium Park, or New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park. But here, they are just right.

“The porches are yet another connection to the community and African American cultural traditions,” Freelon said. “Conceived as a multi-generational gathering space, the park provides shaded seating areas for the elders to observe and visually supervise children at play. We know that public spaces that are frequented by the community elders are respected and cared for. Vandalism and nefarious activities tend to disappear when grandma is watching.”

A new baseball diamond and a children’s playground are also among the renovations. Again, the test of a park isn't just its buildings and structures, but how they are used.

Artist and Third Ward mainstay Jesse Lott said he wonders if the park’s new form will detract from its historic function as a place where black people celebrated their freedom.

“We can know exactly what was supposed to happen in the early days because [the founders] had intent before they put their money together to buy the land,” Lott said. “They had a real intent for the function. But as a witness, it seems to me this particular rendition of the park has more of a focus on the form. What it is. It’s like you have a crown for the emperor — but the emperor has no clothes.”

Larger economic forces are reshaping the edges of the park as well. On the park’s western side, new multi-story single-family houses, the Houston “townhouse,” are bringing an influx of new residents. To the south, Project Row houses has achieved international recognition for rehabilitating shotgun houses and other historic buildings for the last twenty years as spaces for artist installations, affordable housing, business incubators, and community gathering. A newer collaborative effort, the Emancipation Economic Development Council, seeks to revitalize and preserve the Third Ward’s historic and culturally-rich African-American community.

Carroll Parrott Blue, who has written an article about the park and was among the many of those working for its renovation said she’s proud of what has been built, particularly now the neighborhood is experiencing residential redevelopment and an influx of new — and non-minority — residents.

“I’m proud of the beauty and the architecture,” she said. “I'm proud of so many who have struggled from slavery to the present to make this park happen. Emancipation Park is Houston's oldest city park. This demonstrates to me what Black people have done and continue to do to create community for themselves --- and leave grand legacies for everyone in Houston around
what we have created.”

The Emancipation Park rededication celebration will take place Saturday, June 17th and the Juneteenth Celebration on Monday, June 19th. Both events are at Emancipation Park from 10 am to 5pm.

Lee Bey is a writer and photographer of the built environment whose work has appeared in Forbes, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Architect, and Chicago Architect. Bey's past positions include five years as architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and a three-year stint as deputy chief of staff for architecture and urban planning under Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.

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