Not since the Allen Brothers promoted Houston as a semi-tropical paradise has the east end of Buffalo Bayou looked as promising as it does today.

Along a four-mile stretch of waterway tantalizingly close to downtown, the water is wide, more river than bayou. Egrets and herons perch on deadwood, and pelicans and hawks glide by along the high, weedy banks.

From Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s pontoon boat, passersby also see vast tracts of rugged, abandoned acreage where heavy industries established in the early 20th century once claimed the waterfront for barges. Those sites still cut off access to the bayou for the working class neighborhoods on both sides between downtown and the Port of Houston’s Turning Basin.

But big change is coming. Developers and civic leaders see the East Buffalo Bayou as a catalyst for the largest urban revitalization drive in Houston’s history, the key to transforming an environmentally challenged corner of the city that has been a speculator’s dreamland for decades.

Saturday, the nonprofit Partnership will unveil its long-awaited Buffalo Bayou East master plan during an afternoon of free performances and other activities at Turkey Bend, one of several former industrial sites the Partnership plans to re-purpose. During the past 15 years, the organization has invested or leveraged more than $144 million to compile a 70-acre patchwork of public spaces along the eastern waterfront.

Buffalo Bayou East Master Plan Celebration When: Noon-4 p.m. Saturday Where: 5803 Navigation Details: Free; buffalobayou.org Panel Talk: Buffalo Bayou Park and Beyond When: 6:30 p.m. Monday Where: Sunset Coffee Building, 1019 Commerce Street Details: Free; buffalobayou.org

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“We don’t plan to just pick up Buffalo Bayou Park and plop it over there,” said Partnership president Anne Olson. “This plan is about investing in communities that haven’t benefited from the same level of park funding that Houston’s more affluent communities have seen.”

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Music, sports and barbecue

Far more complex than the Partnership’s development of Buffalo Bayou Park west of downtown, the Buffalo Bayou East plan is woven between public land and infrastructure, privately-owned parcels and active industry, including a major steel recycling facility. It bulges out in some places, looks like just a sliver of trails in others, and stretches into neighborhoods a few flocks away from the bayou.

The proposals include 40 miles of new and improved waterfront trails and bikeways; 200 acres of parks and unique public spaces; seven new boat landings and seven new pedestrian bridges. With its steep banks and wider, deeper channel, the bayou’s east sector does not experience the flooding that occurs upstream. But because banks close to downtown shifted by about 100 feet during Hurricane Harvey, the plans also consider hydrology and stabilization issues.

Designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael van Valkenburgh Associates, the economic development and public policy firm HR&A Advisors and other consultants, the plan evolved during two years of public input that involved every civic organization in the area, as well as individual residents.

“You’ll see ideas that you wouldn’t normally see in a park master plan,” says HR&A partner Cary Hirschstein. Not just about green and public space, it includes the significant gesture of creating a mixed-income neighborhood on land the Partnership owns as a model for future bayou-fronting development.

The plan also embraces the bayou’s natural elements and wildlife, the cultural heritage of the area’s neighborhoods and the industrial architecture that remains. “What results will be civic spaces unlike no other in Houston, and probably in the country,” Hirschstein says.

Industrial relics have become engines for urban revitalization around the world, but the size and scope of Houston’s plan isn’t common, Hirschstein says. For comparison, he notes the success of Bethlehem, Pa.’s SteelStacks Arts + Cultural Campus, which repurposed facilities within an 1,800-acre brownfield redevelopment that once held a Bethlehem Steel Plant.

The plan envisions a community barbecue shed near a quartet of massive concrete silos; a concert and party venue on the docks of the graffiti-covered, gantry-lined barge dock and warehouse at Turkey Bend; an experimental water garden at an abandoned city sewage treatment facility; and an adventure park and extreme sports facility inspired by the gravel and sand mountains of a concrete plant.

The plan also calls for ball fields, nature play areas and beaches within new or expanded parks. Tony Marron Park in the Second Ward will more than double in size to become a 40-acre recreational anchor. Closer to downtown, green space will sprout from detention ponds made possible by the Texas Dept. of Transportation’s proposed North Houston Highway Improvement Project. And the project will restore Fifth Ward’s nearly-disappeared Japhet Creek tributary.

The proposed projects could take as long as 20 more years to fully realize, requiring millions of dollars of investments and public-private partnerships. They’re clustered in four areas, designated the Downtown Gateway, the Central Hub, the Industrial District and the Eastern Terminus — each with different characteristics and amenities, all connected by various kinds of hike and bike trails as well as, of course, the waterway.

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Emphasizing inclusivity

Redevelopment could be both a boon and a threat to the area’s economically modest neighborhoods — the predominantly African-American Fifth Ward and the predominantly Hispanic East End — which are already feeling the impact of gentrification.

Midway Companies, the CityCentre developer, owns the largest tract of land in the area, a former Kellogg-Brown & Root campus on the bayou’s north side covering 150 acres. Equal to about 60 city blocks, with a mile of uninterrupted bayou frontage, that parcel will soon be reborn as the mixed-use development East River.

Midway CEO Jonathan Brinsden says the company plans to break ground during the first quarter of next year on East River’s Phase I, to build new multi-family housing, offices, retail, restaurants and entertainment venues. He also hopes a new Maritime Museum also will be located there, and the company has commissioned a master plan for public art.

Midway negotiated trail easements with the Partnership along and into East River. “Seamlessness was important,” says Brinsden, who also is a member of the Partnership’s board. The location and market would still be attractive to Midway even without planned public amenities, he adds, “but the trail system makes it more exciting.”

Brinsden says each of his company’s projects are designed to serve their surrounding communities with a “degree of authenticity,” and he does not envision East River as another CityCenter. Nor does he want to call it gentrification. Midway is “opening up a barrier” between the Fifth Ward and the bayou, he says, adding that the company is also considering ways to integrate “an affordability aspect” at East River.

Tommy Garcia-Prats, one of three brothers who co-founded the nascent urban farm and event venue Finca Tres Robles in the East End, says he is excited about the unique spaces the Partnership is activating — especially the gardens that could sprout at the former water treatment plant, “which has been dead for decades,” he says. He and other East End residents were initially concerned about the character of the Partnership’s planned spaces. “Members of our community are not looking for spaces the same as what’s along Allen Parkway,” he says. “They’ve done their due dilligence and provided opportunities for us to have a say.”

Garcia-Prats also is happy to see green space being preserved close to downtown. “The East End has a reputation as an industrial area, but it’s exciting that Buffalo Bayou Partnership is working to counter that perception,” he says.

The Partnership will host a panel talk Monday evening and offer free walking, bike and pontoon boat tours through November to familiarize more people with the master plan.

The trail and bridge within the Downtown Gateway are already near completion, and plans are moving forward for a trail connecting Buffalo Bend Nature Park and Hidalgo Park at the plan’s Eastern Terminus area. Other small projects and programming will happen soon, Olson says, but she doesn’t want to launch a capital campaign right away to execute the big-ticket amenities.

“People in those neighborhoods have been planned to death,” she said.

molly.glentzer@chron.com

Twitter.com/mollyglentzer

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