Riverfront park likely to return hills and mounds to Detroit's landscape

The world's not flat, but Detroit is. Its topography, that is.

Being a Midwest city in a region scoured by glaciers millennia ago, the landscape of Detroit resembles a tabletop on which buildings have been erected and roads laid out.

But a high-profile project may be about to change that. On Thursday, four design teams unveiled proposals for Detroit’s planned 22-acre west riverfront park. And all four plans suggested sculpting the terrain of the west riverfront to create more hills and valleys.

Now, we’re not talking Rocky Mountains here. But even introducing variations in the topography of, say, 20 feet from top to bottom would create something new in Detroit. The mounds could provide venues for sunset watchers and little kids sledding in the winter.

Mark Wallace, CEO of the nonprofit Detroit RiverFront Conservancy, which operates the RiverWalk and is planning the future park, likes the idea of shifting the dirt around in creative ways. He cited the experience with a big mound of dirt near Milliken State Park on the east riverfront, reportedly heaped up long ago with dredging spoils when nearby dry docks were created in the 19th century.

"It's funny as you look at the east riverfront, one of the most successful spots in what kids refer to as 'the hill,'" Wallace said. "Little kids love to run up hills and they love to roll down hills, so it's encouraging that all the design teams came up ideas to modify the topography."

Or as presenter James Corner of James Corner Field Operations, which designed the famous High Line park in New York, told the audience at Thursday's presentations, "The views are good today. It you can get up 10 or 20 feet, it'll really blow your mind."

Ironically, the landscape that the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac found here when he established a settlement on the strait in 1701 did show more variation in the terrain than exists now. The shoreline of the Detroit River was lined with bluffs present in old illustrations.

Even today, the historic Elmwood Cemetery on the east side shows elements of the rolling, broken terrain that Cadillac encountered. But progress, that two-edged sword, bulldozed flat much of the rest of the city.

The creation of mounds would represent just one of the many features of the future west riverfront park. The project, still unnamed, is likely to include a full range of options — basketball courts, soccer pitches, fishing piers, picnic spots, shelters from the elements and free Wi-Fi connections.

All those features were found in the four presentations Thursday by the four teams chosen as finalists. The RiverFront Conservancy had solicited ideas last year for the 22-acre site west of downtown, and narrowed the competitors to four teams headed by world-renown landscape designers.

Those teams, which included local Detroit designers, were headed by four firms: Gustafson Guthrie Nichol of Seattle; Hood Design Studio of Oakland, Calif.; James Corner Field Operations of New York City; and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates of Brooklyn.

During the daylong presentations at the 1001 Woodward skyscraper near Campus Martius, each team got about 90 minutes to present ideas to the public and a jury that included Maurice Cox, the city's director of planning, and Matt Cullen, chairman of the Riverfront Conservancy and a top aide to businessman Dan Gilbert.

The renderings and models will remain on display in the lobby of 1001 Woodward for public view and comments for two weeks.

How it all shakes out will be decided in the future. The nine-member jury working in consultation with the conservancy will make recommendations, and a winning team will be chosen in several weeks.

But the selection will represent just a starting point. For one thing, the suggested $50-million budget remains a guesstimate of what the park may cost. "Obviously we need to raise the funds to do any of this," Wallace told the audience Thursday.

And as Wallace explained, the selection of a winning team moves the process into a robust community engagement period during which the winning proposal will be refined and modified, emerging perhaps significantly different from what was shown on Thursday.

But the day-long series of presentations nonetheless provided an extraordinary glimpse into what could become a destination for generations of Detroiters.

And beyond the suggested mounds and picnic areas, the presentations emphasized what kind of city Detroit is trying to become. In the midst of rapid changes in some parts of the city — amounting to what many critics bemoan as "gentrification" — the four finalist teams accepted that the the park must serve all Detroiters, not just a few.

In the elegant phrase of David Adjaye, an architect working with the Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates's team, the goal on Detroit's west riverfront is to create "beauty without the tyranny of elitism."

Or as Van Valkenburgh himself told the audience, "Building a park is the ultimate act of democracy."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.