By now, most neighbors have noticed the new addition to Shipe Park's northern side: a sturdy wall of petrified wood crowned by a handsome iron arch spelling out the park's name.
To some, the arch may seem to have sprung up overnight, and indeed, the construction itself was quickly done. But the finished arch is just the part you see. What's missing is the invisible chain of events leading to it - six years of seemingly random actions that, if plotted on a chart, would mark our collective learning curve as a neighborhood.
If you had to pick a starting point, it would be 1996. That's when Fred and Kathy Kent, nationally-known urban planners with the Project for Public Spaces, led a free neighborhood workshop for Hyde Park residents at the Methodist Church on Speedway.
For many neighbors, this was the first time to consciously think about how a public space worked - to realize that there were concrete reasons why one place simply felt better than another, and to understand that these elements could be identified and applied in our own community.
One workshop team spent the afternoon at Shipe Park, taking a critical look at how it functioned and brainstorming ways to make it better. Among the goals established for the park that day were improved safety for children in the north section near 45th Street and enhancement of the park with some type of gateway or entrance.
But these ideas were almost immediately shelved with the sudden emergence of the Triangle project. Begun as the bitterest of development battles, the project ultimately evolved into a hard-won collaboration, with community charrettes and planning workshops drawing hundreds of area residents into the design process. With felt-tip markers in hand, neighbors were again pressed to think hard about the actual physics of a community, what worked and what didn't. By the time the State Board rubber-stamped the final blueprints, many of us felt we'd earned our GEDs in urban planning.
A major issue in the Triangle fight was traffic, with 45th Street a top concern. So when the City of Austin selected our neighborhood for a Traffic Calming Pilot Project, we were ready. Through workshops with city staff, we learned new ways to manage traffic, how to slow it and how to encourage alternatives like walking and biking. We learned that pedestrians must be made to feel safe, with usable sidewalks buffered from the street. We learned that even simple roadside treatments such as attractive landscaping could have a slowing effect on drivers. Though the traffic calming project boundaries did not include 45th Street, neighbors began to see how these principles could be applied there.
At the same time, other changes were coming to Shipe Park and 45th. The city's Waller Creek restoration program replaced the park's washed-out bridge, re-connecting the north and south sections of Shipe. The kids loved the new bridge, but parents' concerns about 45th Street escalated now that any toddler could race across to the unfenced northern section.
With safety in mind, neighborhood volunteers redoubled their lobbying efforts for a protected crossing, finally winning a partial victory with a lighted mid-block crosswalk and some serious ped-X signs. And when federal funds underwrote a new sidewalk on 45th Street, neighborhood advocates put their learning to work and successfully pushed for a design that buffered the Shipe Park stretch from the street.
Meanwhile a few blocks west, more changes were afoot. Walgreens announced plans for a new pharmacy at the corner of 45th & Guadalupe, a project that sadly required the demolition of the old Petrified Forest Motel.
Once again, neighborhood volunteers jumped in, working with Walgreens to improve the proposed pharmacy design. A key victory was saving the petrified wood that had formed the façade of the historic motel. Some of the petrified wood was incorporated into the pharmacy's structure. The remaining tons were donated to Hyde Park Neighborhood Association (HPNA) for use in a future public project-like, say, a stone wall at Shipe Park?
Now the raw elements were falling into place. We had motive (safety, esthetics) and opportunity (several dozen tons of free rock). Neighbor Stan Kozinsky and his saintly wife Rae offered to give the rock a temporary home in their back yard until the project took shape. Now all we needed was a good design and some serious fundraising.
Again Stan Kozinsky rose to the occasion, donating his design skills for the project (okay, it was the only way he could get all that rock out of his yard). On the money front, former HPNA Co-president Suzee Brooks stepped in to pick up the fundraising gauntlet.
Suzee's first step was to create a list of goals for project, many of which had their roots that first neighborhood planning workshop. These were:
With goals in hand, Suzee garnered substantial donations from HPNA and many individual neighbors, plus a generous matching grant from an anonymous donor. The city's Parks and Recreation Department got on board, too, giving the green light on safety and maintenance requirements and kicking in some materials and equipment to boot. With Stan at the construction helm and Suzee on fundraising, the arch project was finally on its way.
That's how, on a bright blue morning shortly after New Year's Day, commuters on 45th Street saw something different as they passed Shipe Park. Simple, elegant iron letters silhouetted against the sky, arching out of a sturdy rock wall running the length of the park's northern border.
A wall to keep our kids safe, a gateway to beautify and celebrate, a bit of history reclaimed, a neighborhood working together.
What you see is strong and lovely. What you can't is even more so.
- Susan Moffat (January, 2002)