Hermann Park: a landscape jewel

Oct 07, 2008 (Houston Chronicle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- TIF | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Mayor Bob Lanier intimidated Laurie Olin. In 1993, the Friends of Hermann Park had hired Olin, one of the country's top landscape architects, to draw a master plan that would revive the grand old park. If Olin's design were to be executed, he'd need the mayor's backing.

After a dinner party one night, Olin approached the mayor gingerly. Lanier, a gruff, shambling alpha male, appeared the physical opposite of courtly, lanky Olin, and it seemed possible that he'd think just as differently, too.

Lanier, a developer, had risen to political promise by opposing light rail. He seemed inclined to favor buildings and cars: exactly the things Olin didn't want to add to the park.

Olin began tentatively, hoping to discover some sliver of common ground. "I said something like, 'Mister Mayor, I'm embarking on a plan to rejuvenate Hermann Park, and I'd like to know what you think. What are your desires? What's your advice?' "

Confronted with flowery language, the mayor responded with a grunt. "Make it greener," he said. "Make it bluer."

Those six no-nonsense words told Olin that the mayor was on his side, that what he wanted from Hermann Park was more grass, more lakes.

Jubilant, Olin adopted the clipped speech of his new ally.

"Got it," he said.

"Landscape architecture is one of the most political things you can do," Olin tells his University of Pennsylvania students. Year after year, the statement shocks them. They plan to design gardens, campuses and parks. What's political about that?

And who could oppose the sorts of landscape designs that Olin is known for? The first stage of his master plan for Houston's Hermann Park -- a larger, prettier lake, a neater reflecting pond, more trees and bathrooms and smarter parking -- has been met with rapture. Bryant Park, once a headquarters for Manhattan muggers and drug dealers, is now one of New York's jewels, thanks to Olin. Assigned to make the Washington Monument less vulnerable to terrorists, he also made the approach to the obelisk better-looking and more momentous.

But design makes up only a part of landscape architecture, Olin tells his students. It's not just the trees, plants and land forms that are complex, changing, and require long-term cultivation. It's also the fundraising, the constituents and the bureaucracies. A good landscape architect has to be both a designer and a political animal.

White-haired and charming, Olin excels at both sides of his business. In courting Brooklynites suspicious of the Atlantic Yards development, it's usually Olin who takes the lead, not his frequent collaborator, Frank Gehry. Gehry is perhaps the most famous architect in the world, but at public forums on the project, he mainly sits quiet. Olin does the talking.

Olin was in town last week in part to celebrate a Hermann Park milestone: The Tiffany & Co. Foundation was awarding the park a $1 million grant to build a bridge over the park's lake. Part of the Lake Plaza development now rising near the Houston Zoo's entrance, the bridge will be romantic and lovely. It also will play a functional role in Olin's larger plan to connect one part of the park to another.

The Tiffany people, of course, love jewelry metaphors: "The clasp on the necklace," they called the bridge. It's a line almost worthy of Olin.

When talking about Hermann park, he prefers to compare it not to jewelry but to its famous New York forebear.

"If Houston had a park called 'Central Park,' Hermann Park would be it," he likes to say -- a line that conveys both the park's long history and its importance to the city.

George Hermann, an admirer of Central Park, donated most of his namesake park's land in 1913, near the end of America's heroic park-building era. The celebrated St. Louis architect George Kessler, Hermann Park's first master planner, laid out its grand entrance, now Mecom Fountain, as well as its live-oak allees, but his plans for a reflecting pool and meandering lake weren't completed. His successor, the firm Hare & Hare, maintained the original plan's integrity even while adding a golf course and a zoo.

But the park began losing its way in the 1950s, as the U.S. entered what's been called an era of public splendor and private squalor. Over the decades, as its neglect grew less benign, the city stopped planting new trees to replace its aging ones. The lake grew scummy, and the golf course, bedraggled. The reflecting pool, Olin says, was "a mud hole."

The Friends of Hermann Park modeled itself on a private group that revived Central Park and hired Olin's firm in 1993. Studying the land, he found that the park had lost its old sense of purpose. Well-meaning people now saw its open land as ripe for development.

Venues with fences and admission fees claimed big chunks of the park: Among them, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Japanese Garden, the Houston Zoo. They were beloved and well worth preserving -- but they weren't park space.

Just as bad, cars had taken over the park. Parking spaces commanded prime central acreage. Traffic sometimes backed up on bottleneck roads through the park. And worse, North and South MacGregor, fast-moving major roads to the Texas Medical Center, sliced through the park, cutting off the large wild strip of park land along Brays Bayou.

"The park," says Olin, "had become the funny leftover space between the venues, the roads and the parking lots." The venues attracted crowds, but few people used the shabby park itself.

"It was unpleasant," Olin says. "Who'd want to go there?"

Olin sat sideways in the back of a careening golf cart, happily snapping photos as Doreen Stoller, director of the Hermann Park Conservancy, drove us on a tour of the work-in-progress. Stoller treats Olin like a favorite uncle. Sometimes, she says, she forgets what a big deal he is.

We rode through the impressive completed stages of the park's renovation. We started with the Heart of the Park, the reflecting-pool-and-lake project that kicked off the park's rebirth. Even on a weekday, people sunned themselves and walked their dogs. Toddlers admired the ducks.

Head-in parking no longer besieges the statue of Sam Houston. Many parking lots have been moved to the park's edges, and the new, improved little train serves as both kiddie ride and park transportation.

"Toilets, toilets, toilets," Olin exulted behind Miller Outdoor Theatre, where an addition replaced the porta-potties that once serviced the area.

At the golf course, we examined an unfinished pedestrian trail. "Who knew there were golf-course safety consultants?" laughed Stoller, eyeing the attractive chain-link structures that protect the path's pedestrians from flying golf balls.

Originally, Olin considered the path's purpose to allow visitors to walk from the front part of the park back to the wilder bayou lands. But as highrise buildings increasingly rise alongside the park, the trail has acquired a second purpose: allowing neighborhood residents access to the front parts of the park.

At the beginning of his work, Olin resisted the suggestion that the golf course was expendable. He liked the golf course. It was historic: one of the first integrated golf courses in Texas. And it attracted a crowd that's both racially and economically diverse -- everyone from CEOs to retired mail carriers.

But he also saw the golf course as a way to fulfill one of his larger missions in the park: "to bank open space," to protect parkland from development and preserve it for future generations. "Golf may fall out of fashion in the next hundred years," he said. "But we'll still have that space."

Stoller drove the golf cart toward the Lake Plaza. At the hard-hat construction site, Olin snapped photos. He looked with approval at the way the land had been graded so that a natural-looking rise leads up to the edge of the lake. "Houston has a bad case of the flats," he said. And he approved the larval stage of the amphitheaterlike steps that will hug the water's edge: a place for picnicking and hanging out.

In models and drawings, the three Lake Plaza buildings under construction look modest but attractive, with big porchlike open spaces to provide the shade so important in Houston. Olin, though, seems sheepish about them. They are, after all, buildings: new development on the open space he deems so precious.

"These are little park pavilions, not the main events," he says. "They're supportive of life and activity in the park."

One will provide storage for equipment such as lawnmowers. Another will serve as a train station and gift shop. The third will be an upscale burger stand run by the partners who operate Reef, one of Houston's best new restaurants.

Olin looked at the construction site, full of cranes and guys in hard hats, and happily imagined its future as a place of leisure.

"One of the things I learned at Bryant Park," he said, "is the pleasure of watching other people. Of the five great apes, we are among the most gregarious. We like trooping.

"If we can sit around, eat, drink and see other people in a beautiful place, we feel really happy. We like the stimulus of watching leaves moving in the wind. We can look at things up close, then look at things far away. We hear the crunch of footsteps on gravel and feel the breeze. All our senses are stimulated.

"That's restorative to us as animals," he said. He tilted his face toward the October sun. "We need that."

lisa.gray@chron.com

To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com. Copyright (c) 2008, Houston Chronicle Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

More News:   Market Updates | Stock Alerts | All Trading News | Stock Index