Charlotte shouldn’t demolish its waterfall park uptown | Opinion

The City of Charlotte is preparing to demolish Thomas Polk Park, the dramatic waterfall park in the heart of uptown. It would be replaced with turf initially, and then become a new park named after former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr.

As scholars in the Department of Landscape Architecture at N.C. State University, we believe making changes to the park is reasonable, but the current plan to demolish everything and then ask the public later what it wants is highly unusual and wasteful.

A park’s features are public resources. Why destroy them without considering how they may be repurposed?

This is all especially unfortunate, given that Polk Park is an important work of one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. You may not recognize the name Angela Danadjieva, but many of us in the landscape architecture field were inspired by her example as a designer and an immigrant who overcame huge obstacles to rise to the top of a male-dominated profession.

Her career began in communist Bulgaria. She came to the U.S. in 1965, after winning a landscape design competition. But she never got that job. As she tells it, she heard she didn’t get that commission because “she has a skirt.”

Most of Danadjieva’s greatest works were credited to her employer, Lawrence Halprin & Associates. With teams at LH&A, Danadjieva designed two of the 20th century’s most notable landscapes — the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon, and Freeway Park in Seattle.

New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that the Ira Keller Fountain “may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.” Danadjieva’s name went unmentioned in that story and many others. But a plaque on site identifies her as the “project designer” and photos show her sculpting clay models of the fountain.

Charlotte’s Polk Park has one of the only abstract waterfalls completed under Danadjieva’s own name, after co-founding Danadjieva & Koenig. The watery respite for Charlotte’s office workers was included in a 2020 online exhibit, showing how women have shaped the American landscape. Its 30-foot granite waterfall was described as “a masterwork” in The New York Times.

Unfortunately, the lack of maintenance the park has received and the homeless users it has attracted have raised concern. These problems are not specific to this park. The failure to plan for maintenance of public parks and address growing homelessness issues has impacted downtown parks across the country.

There are ways to revise Polk Park without destroying its iconic waterfall completely. As landscape architect Gina Ford proposed in her plans for the site, the fountain could be restored and maintained, while other aspects of the park’s design that made it feel dark and cluttered and difficult to program with events could be altered to encourage more use of the space.

If no other compromise is possible, perhaps the fountain could be moved to another site, where people could appreciate it. That’s what happened with Marabar, an acclaimed work of land art at the National Geographic headquarters.

Obliterating a masterwork by one of our greatest female landscape architects would mar Charlotte and Bank of America’s and Hugh McColl’s legacies as proponents for the arts. They should stop the demolition, and explore other options.

Daniel Jost is a PhD candidate at N.C. State University. M. Elen Deming, Meg Calkins, and Fernando Magallanes are NCSU landscape architecture professors.