In her seminal work, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” urban theorist Jane Jacobs argued that the isolation and deterioration of central cities had been brought about by poorly considered urban renewal programs of the 1950s and ‘60s.

The creation of a large system of limited access freeways had two lasting effects: the depopulation of the urban core of American cities, and the devastation of formerly stable urban neighborhoods.

By the late 1970s, one city recognized that alternatives existed to the suburban sprawl so pervasive at the time. Norfolk, Virginia, was ready to think outside the box with a small parcel of land that came to be known as Town Point Park.

A Look Back
Norfolk’s history, dating back to the Revolutionary War, has been tied to the sea. As a port city along the Elizabeth River, Norfolk was a bustling place of freighters and naval vessels, commerce and waterfront warehouses. Its economy intertwined with the export of American food, coal and fiber products. As the twentieth century unfolded and America grew into a world power, Norfolk became a hub of shipping, as well as the home of the world’s largest Naval installation.

The Hampton Roads area experienced tremendous expansion in the 1960s. Fueled by military spending, the metropolitan area population grew to 1.5 million.

But the historic heart of Norfolk, the waterfront, did not experience this vibrant growth.

The warehouses and commercial buildings that had served the shipping industry were abandoned one by one. In their place were liquor stores, check cashing storefronts, and shadowy clubs occupying the rundown buildings.

Out of this urban decay, the city of Norfolk created one of the first urban-redevelopment success stories, Town Point Park.

Success in the 1980s
Norfolk established one of the first urban Redevelopment and Housing authorities in the United States in the early 1940s. They decided that Town Point situated at a bend in the Elizabeth River, represented an excellent site for an urban open space, the type of advocated by Jacobs and others.

In the late 1970s, working with well-known developer Rouse Development, MMM Design Group, a multi-disciplinary design firm of architects, engineers and planners, headquartered in the city, reconfigured Waterfront Street into Waterside Drive, creating a promenade-like street with views of the river.

Eight acres of the waterfront was made into open space and became known as Town Point Park, and designed replete with plantings, walkways, and a brick promenade along the river.

Revolutionary in design? Hardly, except for the fact that access to the water was very limited prior to the park’s creation. The apparently simple act of walking along the Elizabeth River, viewing passing ships, and the Portsmouth skyline across the water could now be enjoyed by any resident.

By 1982, Town Point Park was flourishing as one of the regions most successful outdoor event and festival spaces.

HarborFest, an annual festival featuring an international flotilla of tall ships, has become recognized as one of the premier events of its kind, while dozens of other events are hosted there every year.

Success of this type was a new phenomenon in the 1980s. Americans were flocking in greater and greater numbers to climate-controlled shopping malls, whose expansion across the suburban landscape was just beginning to take off.

The concept that people would leave their homes, drive some distance into the urban core, and spend an entire day there was new. But it also pointed to the type of experience that Jane Jacobs said would make cities livable again.

Town Point Park stimulated other redevelopment around it. The influx of weekend crowds created a market for restaurants and retailers to serve those crowds. Nearby, Freemason Harbor Park was developed and connected to it via a promenade.

By the late 1990s, Nordstroms, a national retailer, had opened at the MacArthur Center, two blocks away. A $35 million cruise ship terminal was developed adjacent to the park in 2006. Simultaneously, residential rehab and construction began springing up in the vicinity.

Town Point Park soon found that it had 5,000 fulltime neighbors - people whose primary residences were within several blocks.

One small park had quite an effect on an entire downtown district.

Revival
Twenty-five years after its creation, Town Point Park was slowly becoming a victim of its own success. As the city grew, the park began to show its age.

The small, eight-acre site had never really been designed to accommodate up to 50,000 visitors every weekend. Growth in the surrounding neighborhood added the stress of daily use to the park. It had not really been designed as a neighborhood park.

Once again, Norfolk chose to make the public investment necessary. Only this time, the concept of redeveloping a public waterfront open space was not the experimental proposition it was in the early ‘80s.

The proposed $11 million upgrade for Town Point Park is seen as a modest investment in a vibrant, still-growing downtown. Its makeover will include four new performance venues, grass seating areas, paved entry plazas, water features, furnishings and plantings.

In 2007, MMM Design Group was again called upon to redesign the park it originally designed in 1982. In the process, the firm incorporated a number of sustainable design practices as part of the renovation.

Grass pavers will handle occasional parking and allow rain water to naturally percolate into the soil. The use of native plants throughout the park limits the need for full time irrigation systems, conserving water. Bio-retention swales and filtration systems collect stormwater, cleansing runoff before it is discharged into local waterways. Wherever feasible, electrical systems in the park will be powered by solar cells.

With little undeveloped land left in Norfolk, redevelopment represents the only sustainable option to continued sprawl. The willingness of the development community to make these investments is being demonstrated by the construction of numerous residential condominiums that have increased the downtown residential population by over 4,000.

MMM has continued this model of successful urban parks in other Virginia cities like Charlottesville (Downtown Pedestrian Mall), Portsmouth (Portsmouth Harbor Center), and Newport News (Oyster Point Town Center).

Town Point Park was not revolutionary, but its effect on downtown Norfolk was. Why did it work so well?

Most Norfolk residents would answer in a word - water.

Most of Norfolk’s historic waterfront had been privately owned. It served the needs of commerce tied to shipping and the military. Providing public access to water was a simple but new concept in American urban planning.

It took a relatively small municipality working with an innovative design firm to add funding, music, history, and entertainment to a small stretch along the Elizabeth River, to think out of the box of time and place, and create the gem known today as Town Point Park. SLDT