Tom Lee Park Mixes It Up in Memphis: Located on the Mississippi River waterfront, the park is part of a plan to help different classes, communities, and histories commingle, Metropolis, Oct. 18, 2023.
A few blocks from the famous strip of Delta blues clubs on Beale Street, a stretch of shoreline redesigned as an alluring civic space for downtown Memphis opened this September. Embedded with multitudes of attractive features to draw residents from all parts of the city and its suburbs, as well as pollinator gardens to support wildlife, it’s the first built project to be directly helmed and developed by Carol Coletta, a formidable decades-long advocate for reinvestment, placemaking, and the civic commons.
“I want to make cities successful, particularly those that get counted out,” says Coletta, a Memphis native who has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to art and design projects aimed at reviving American cities. “I’m big on people and places that have been roughed up. I think I can relate to it because I was counted out.”
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If all that was needed were to add basketball courts and picnic tables, you would not need Studio Gang. But the architects and Coletta argue emphatically that to create great civic places attracting people from all the city’s demographics, these functions need to be elevated, made alluring, using the backdrop of the Mississippi River and its bridges to Arkansas as highlights. “You’ve got to provide hope and a vision of what can be in an alluring way,” Coletta says. “You’ve got to provide allure.”
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“The design is still very important because that’s what draws people to a place,” Gang says. “You need that spark too. A lot of times urban plans sit on the shelf, and if there isn’t something that makes people feel like ‘I really want to have that in my neighborhood,’ or something new and exciting, then it doesn’t seem like it takes.”
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The goal, ultimately, is to make the park into one of those “third places” outside of the home and office where, in a society stratified more than ever by income levels and political ideology, social mixing happens across differences. “That is the goal: to break down the divides that are inherent in places like Chicago and other cities, where there are areas where you don’t feel welcome,” Gang says. “In a city like Memphis that is not used to using the waterfront as a place to go, there’s a huge hurdle to get over.”
