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Bearden Park in Third Ward, Uptown Charlotte


dubone

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Yes, Greensboro's Center City Park is indeed a nice model for what Charlotte's can become--on a slightly larger scale.

The plans for 3rd Ward Park actually remind me a bit of the plans for the 5.2 acre Woodall Rogers Park in Dallas (which will be built on a deck over a freeway):

WoodallRodgersPark2006.jpg

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At some point in about 100 years, a visitor to Charlotte's 3rd Ward park is going to comment that the park must have been conceived around 2005-2010, as it looks just like every other park from that period.

I'm not sure that is bad...we all tend to enjoy recognizing architecture from the past and identifying its era. As long as it isn't overdone or bad to begin with

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  • 3 months later...

The way it is right now, none of the land swaps occur until the baseball lawsuits are resolved. Primarily because the lawsuit is saying that the park should go on the original site as their way of trying to prevent baseball from going there. They can't just exercise the non-baseball part of the agreements and start building the park on the new site until they know if the courts are going to require them to go back and build the park on the old site.

All of the county lawyers seem to be confident that their legal argument will win in the end, but obviously anything can happen, and the process takes time. Also, Reese seems to have a decent amount of funds to keep throwing the lawsuits, so it is hard to imagine that they will end soon.

If the lawsuits didn't include the stuff about the park money, then it would seem that the county would and should do the other components so that they own both the old and new park sites. Then, if the baseball thing were disallowed by the courts, then they'd just sell or do something else with the old site. However, this cannot happen because of the fact that one legal argument by Reese and Diehl is that the park MUST go on the old site. Personally, it sounds like a faulty logic to me, but at this point, it is up to a judge, so we must wait and see.

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  • 4 weeks later...

http://www.charlotte.com/209/story/729086.html

Looks like the court has thrown out Jim Reese's lawsuit, the Observer talks about this at least meaning good things for the baseball park, hopefully it will also bring some movement in on the park itself. This is a big selling point for a couple projects in 3rd ward and it really needs to happen pretty quickly.

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So...can they move forward now? It really appears that they can, but you never know if Reese and Diehl have other tricks up their sleeves.

It is simply amazing that they were able to cobble together the complex deal in the first place. I know that plan is not universally liked on here, but at this point all the parties have agreed and the courts have said it is legal. So, lets get on with it already!

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So...can they move forward now? It really appears that they can, but you never know if Reese and Diehl have other tricks up their sleeves.

It would appear they can move forward on the whole thing...

But I wouldn't put it past Reese and Diehl, they just don't know when to stop. You got to imagine Reese has sunk a lot of money into this fight, either that or Diehl is just on his payroll.

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  • 1 month later...

There was a more detailed presentation of Bearden Park that outlines the smaller and detailed parts to the project. It can be viewed here. The site plan is still the same, but it paints a better picture of all of the interactive aspects and qualities- like the fountain, signage, dance pad (?!), and wind chimes amongst other things.

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There was a more detailed presentation of Bearden Park that outlines the smaller and detailed parts to the project. It can be viewed here. The site plan is still the same, but it paints a better picture of all of the interactive aspects and qualities- like the fountain, signage, dance pad (?!), and wind chimes amongst other things.

Thank you Andy, we its great seeing even more on whats going to prove to be the signature park charlotte has needed downtown for years. Boy I hate Jim Reese.

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What about the linear park? Since building plans have been put on hold, will the linear park be built at the same time Bearden is built? Does the buildings construction have an impact on timing? Is this park funded along with Bearden or was this part privately funded by the developer?

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I pushed the case for saving the building which now has the House of Jazz during the public meetings about designing the 3rd Ward Park. The bottom line for them was that saving it would hurt the ability to widen the pedestrian environment along MLK and Church and would take away from their primary purpose to add open space uptown.

The building was built in 1932 during the Great Depression, and had facade changes a few decades ago. It isn't historical in the strict sense, but it is an interesting pre-WWII building that has existed through dramatic change in Charlotte.

I'm much more interested in saving the Polk/Coddington Building on Trade Street than this small old storefront whose facade has already been significantly altered. However, it says a lot about our city that despite having only a dozen or so pre-WWII commercial buildings uptown, the powers that be are continuing to wipe them out.

The initial design of the park included a fairly large building for bathrooms. It also showed only a grass lawn in the space currently occupied by the House of Jazz building. I was very frustrated, and shared my thoughts during the public meeting, that they would tear down an existing 1930s building on their land to build a small barely-useful lawn, and then spend park money building a new building for bathrooms. My thesis was they could retain 1 or 2 sections of the House of Jazz building (note the building is in 4 sections) and put their bathrooms in that. That way, they could bring the building back from the curb of MLK to improve pedestrian capacity, but retain enough existing space to avoid building a new building and avoid tearing down the entirety of the old building.

In the end, perhaps as a result of our comments, they ended up increasing the size of the 'formal oval' and adding more interesting landscaping to that corner of the park. Also, they ended up shrinking the size of the new bathrooms and blending it better into the plan to reduce the appearance of the building of a large new facilities building while tearing down an existing building.

post-670-1220298084_thumb.jpg

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The plans and renderings of Bearden Park look incredible. Does anyone have any more firm information on the current timeline for getting it built (projected start/end dates)? How long does it typically take to build such a park?

I know the baseball stadium legal issues are connected with this but haven't heard any updates on whether they can continue with Bearden independently of the baseball stadium. Thanks.

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They can't continue with the park until the baseball issues are resolved. The heart of the some of the lawsuits actually served are suggesting that the park money was committed to the original site. The initial ruling is that that is not the case, but appeals are pending.

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  • 1 month later...

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