What stays, what goes? Designers review ideas to create 'beautiful square'

Ideas for redesigning Park Central Square have been percolating for months now, and concepts on the table range from a glass-enclosed community center to a lively plaza to a grand fountain.

While specifics of the redesign won’t be known for months, there is one certainty about the square’s future: The underutilized public space will be reborn as a destination.

Architect Tim Rosenbury and the Butler, Rosenbury and Partners Inc. design team charting Park Central Square’s renewal have set the bar high. Their informal goal is to transform the square into the “most beautiful square in America.”

To that end, BRP team members – along with design consultant Phil Myrick of New York-based Project for Public Spaces – are rethinking many of the square’s features, including the inner square’s lower elevation, sidewalks around the perimeter and the fountain on its east side.

“One of our challenges is how do we make this (square) the place that when people are in Springfield, they’ve just got to get a picture of it,” Rosenbury said. “The square itself already possesses a good deal of iconography, but what are the icons within the icons?”

Great public squares have flexible designs, plenty of amenities and management strategies that change with the seasons, according to PPS. Myrick has said that coordinating community usage of the square is just as important as determining what should stay, what should go and what should be built.

“It all revolves around what’s going to make that square a destination,” he told Springfield Business Journal in September.

Creative thinking

J. Howard Fisk has an idea how to bring more people to Park Central Square.

Fisk, owner of J. Howard Fisk Limousines Inc., said a glass-enclosed pavilion built in the middle of the square could function as a community center run by the Springfield-Greene County Parks Department.

“I’m just trying to think creatively here,” said Fisk, whose company runs shuttle services for downtown nightlife activities.

Activities at the center could include after-school programs for youngsters, dances for senior citizens and art classes or book-club meetings for downtown’s growing contingent of loft dwellers, Fisk said. The parks department also could lease the center for wedding receptions and fundraisers, he added.

Fisk envisions the building’s roof extending outward to create a canopy that would shelter visitors and vendors from the elements. He said a community center makes more sense for the square than an ice rink, amphitheater or fountain, all of which have been suggested.

“If people are going to spend money on something, why not spend money on something the Parks Department already needs?” Fisk said. “Invest it in a structure that has multiple uses for the community.”

Plaza potential

Architect Bo Hagerman, whose office is on the square’s south side, also has been pondering the square’s future. His firm, Hagerman New Urbanism, actively pursued the square design contract the city awarded to BRP.

Hagerman, who briefly lived in Florence, Italy, thinks the square has serious plaza potential.

“This whole thing needs to feel like a big public plaza, like you might find in Florence,” he said. “We ought to be able to have our version of that.”

Hagerman said he’s more concerned about the square’s compatibility with nearby buildings than revamping its layout.

“The buildings around it don’t have very good functionality, and they don’t support a need for a large public space,” he said. “If they could get a boutique hotel in the Heer’s building, that’d be huge. A hotel brings people, and it brings the right people. It brings life to that part of the city.”

In August, Springfield City Council agreed to sell the dilapidated Heer’s building to St. Louis development firm McGowan|Walsh for $3 million. Under the agreement, the firm has until Sept. 1, 2008, to begin refurbishing the former department store as either a boutique hotel or condominiums.

Principal Kevin McGowan said condos are a lower-risk investment, but he would rather renovate Heer’s as a boutique hotel. The hotel project, however, isn’t financially feasible without a controversial tax break that would divert hotel-motel tax revenues from the Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau, he said.

Hagerman said CVB officials would be foolish to deny McGowan’s requested tax break.

“McGowan|Walsh is a very reputable development company,” he said. “To them, it’s as simple as, ‘Does it make sense for us?’ If it’s not going to make sense for them, it’s never going to make sense for anybody else.”

Hagerman added, “What we’re asking him to do is go in where there’s not a market and create something. You’d have to have some kind of incentive to make that work.”

Traffic flow

Much of the discussion about Park Central Square has focused on the presence of cars and how they should interact with pedestrians.

Rosenbury said the design team hasn’t yet delved into traffic-flow issues, but a crossroads, roundabout and diamond configuration are among the possibilities for routing vehicles through the square.

“I think our design team is unanimous that we wish to make the square itself a pedestrian-oriented area that welcomes traffic, but that automobile traffic is not the main resident there,” he said.

Allen Casey, an architect whose office is in Holland Building on Park Central East, has watched the square’s traffic patterns change several times over the past three decades. While Casey isn’t sold on any particular configuration, he noted that a traditional intersection would create large plaza areas in each of the square’s quadrants.

Like Rosenbury, Casey believes the redesigned square should better accommodate pedestrians.

“It’s always been difficult to cross that street to go to the square,” he said.

Casey is eager to see which square concepts the design team endorse and which ideas circulating through the community will make the cut.

“I’ve found most of them to be quite intriguing,” he said. “It is absolutely delightful hearing so much broad-based community input.”[[In-content Ad]]