The redesign of Tom Lee Park began in earnest this week as consultants picked up where they left off last spring when a civic controversy stalled the $60 million project.

Principals in the two main consulting firms, Studio Gang and Scape, told The Daily Memphian Tuesday they’re focused on delivering a new park design by May that’s consistent with results of city-ordered mediation and Army Corps of Engineers policy.

But the details should be familiar to those who were paying attention during a year-long feud between the Memphis River Parks Partnership and Tom Lee Park’s big-ticket user, the Memphis in May International Festival.

City releases mediation agreement with Tom Lee Park overhaul specifics

“I don’t think there’s going to be any massive reveal of new imagery that feels very different from what you’ve already seen. It will just be modified relative to the constraints,” said Kate Orff, principal of the New York and New Orleans landscape architecture firm Scape.

“Taking into account these two larger factors – the results of mediation and the kind of Army Corps constraints – by May we hope to have a plan that is checking every box,” said Orff.

Scape founder Orff, Studio Gang principal William Emmick and design team members are in Memphis Tuesday and Wednesday, Feb. 18-19, to meet with the partnership, City Council members and administration, the Corps of Engineers and the team designing a new Memphis Brooks Museum of Art on Front Street.

It’s their first visit since the partnership and Memphis in May agreed in December to design criteria assuring the festival’s future in the park while improving it for year-round visitors. The agreement ended nine months of mediation ordered by Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland.

The agreement spelled out adequate stage and viewing areas for Beale Street Music Festival, provisions for the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest and facilities for staging the events, which draw tens of thousands each May.

“What we will be making modifications to are primarily just the sizes and the locations of these large, open, generous lawn areas, ensuring as we did with the previous theme, generous truck access and staging access, for these big events,” Orff said.

Mediation ditched a plan to convert four-lane, divided Riverside Drive into one lane in each direction, but left intact a design theme of using landscaping and land forms to break up the park into distinct “rooms.”

An expanded area honoring the legacy of park namesake Tom Lee would join a centrally located cluster of multipurpose athletic courts and a nature area with a tower on the river at the 30-acre park’s south end.

How can Beale St. Landing already need $3.5M of work?

Orff and Emmick said the high level of detail in the MRPP-MIM mediation agreement had simplified the design process.

“For us, it’s a great point because it means we are charged, we have our marching orders and we’re ready to deliver this revised concept,” Orff said.

“We have our teams mobilized and ready to work. (We are) kicking off and heading right now into an extremely intensive concept phase, and we’ll be back likely in May with this revised layout and ready to meet with the community.”

The designers’ output will be vetted by a city steering committee to make sure it complies with the mediation agreement.

The designers and George Abbott, the partnership’s director of external affairs, said the design would be shared with the public at the appropriate time, likely through a public engagement center at Beale Street Landing.

Orff and Emmick could not say how much Corps of Engineers’ requirements might affect a previous plan to turn the pancake-flat park into an undulating landscape by piling up earth in some places and excavating elsewhere.

Orff said as a result of Corps’ input, the design would not be able to include some of the drainage and river observation features that had been proposed at the river’s edge.

The Corps exercises control over aspects of the park redesign that might affect the safety or navigability of the Mississippi River. Tom Lee Park was expanded six-fold about 30 years ago when the city filled in an area behind and protected by a Corps dike built to protect the Memphis bank from being destabilized by river currents.

Orff said Scape is no stranger to Corps regulations and is currently working with the Corps on projects in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Norfolk, Virginia.

“The very first meeting we had (Tuesday) was with the Corps of Engineers,” Emmick said. “It was important for us to kick off this meeting with understanding what are all the parameters or guidelines and criteria we have to design to. We’re working with the Corps to understand those constraints and design within them.

“We think there’s a path forward that will get us there. It’s not going to be easy. We have to roll up our sleeves and figure out unique ways to work within those constraints so we do have a signature park, but it’s not impossible to do,” Emmick said.

One challenge is figuring out how to protect pedestrians walking between the park and the river bluff via crosswalks on Riverside Drive. The mediation agreement calls for a stoplight on Riverside at the park’s midpoint, but the crosswalks will have design features, such as raised surfaces, rumble strips or other ways of getting motorists’ attention.

“That is something we need to really ramp up in the next design phase is to really think about crossings and access,” Orff said. “Those are top of mind for council members, access from north and south and really trying to step up the crossing points.”

The mediation settlement set out a timeline indicating construction would begin after May’s festival and be completed before the 2022 festival.

It was unclear if that timetable is still realistic, given the amount of work required to deliver an approved design, then translate it into construction documents and a construction contract.

Minority contractors will get at least 35% of Tom Lee Park work, planners say

“We’re basically relaunching the project,” Emmick said. “We’ve brought in new team members. It’s refreshing ourselves, where we’ve been, and now where we need to go in revisiting the concept and seeing where the calibrations have to happen based on the mediation and the Corps’ requirements.

“We’ll come out of that concept with a clearer idea or design direction as to where we want to go, to then develop the final details for construction,” he said.

But the basics of the original concept still hold up, Emmick said.

“There’s a lot of transferable design knowledge from what we had designed over to what we’re going to embark on now, that is useful for us,” he said. “The constraints of the mediation process are allowing us to just calibrate and fine-tune the design within those parameters to make it useful all year round as well as Memphis in May.”