The other day my wife and I ambled around the new 5-acre Water Works Park and were touched by pride and excitement.
It was pride that our city’s priorities increasingly include the Hillsborough River that runs through downtown. We all know the history of neglect. For too long the river was treated as the gritty, industrial waterway that it was, one that featured all the aesthetic ambience of warehouse row. It was also a prime locale for parking garages.
Our bad.
Now we’re envisioning next year’s completion of the 2.4-mile, Tampa Riverwalk linear park, one that will connect Tampa Heights with the Tampa History Center. One that will soon include a Lights on Tampa art installation near Kiley Gardens. One that, including Water Works, now has three riverfront parks.
Our good fortune.
It was excitement that the $7.3 million (thanks largely to the Community Investment Tax) Water Works Park is a key component in the re-energizing of the Tampa Heights area and an extension of downtown revitalization. It’s an investment in us and our quality of life.
There’s a band shell, a dog park, picnic areas and a playground. There’s also a splash pad where little kids await the periodic tipping of a huge yellow water bucket. It’s even fun for unsoaked, adult observers.
There’s also environmental enlightenment, which would have been an oxymoron in the trolley barn, police garage and fuel depot days. Self-pollinating and disease-resistant olive trees; drought-resistant, pink-flowering, muhley grass; and urban-friendly bald cyprus trees abound. Newly planted mangroves are apparent. The ecological centerpiece is the restored, bubbling Ulele spring, the original source of Tampa’s drinking water–and a possible manatee magnet.
The key complement is Richard Gonzmart’s Ulele Native-Inspired Food and Spirits restaurant, a cooly repurposed pumphouse. It comes with a 15-barrel brewhouse and a gregarious brewmaster, Tim Shockton. He treated us to complimentary lagers that we won’t mind paying for next time. And there will be a next time.
There’s also excitement–notably at City Hall–for the ripple effect of such synergistic projects. And it’s not only Water Works Park and the $5 million Ulele restaurant. The nearby Armature Works Building is owned by SoHo Capital developers, which has plans to rehab it into an event- hall anchor for its mixed-use project, “The Heights.”
“The investment that we’ve made in this park will trigger tens of millions of dollars of private investment that will take place, that will add to the tax base, that will create jobs, that will create a destination,” gushed Mayor Bob Buckhorn.
But there is a glaring Riverwalk anomaly. And, no, it has nothing to do with the inimitable brush work left behind by collegiate rowing teams.
At some point your enthralled gaze–whether from the Tampa Museum of Art or from Water Works Park–takes you west across the river. To be sure, there are mesmerizing, iconic minarets and an emerging plan to reincarnate Julian B. Lane Riverfront Park.
But there’s also this: McKay Hall at the University of Tampa and Blake High School.
The former is a long, brick, two-story, vintage 1950s building that has all the architectural charm of the Bates Motel. Nondescript would be a decided upgrade. When it was built in 1959, Tampa was, as noted earlier, a different place, and the Hillsborough River wasn’t treated like the crown jewel of downtown.
No, it’s not a storage facility. It’s actually residential housing–that’s been periodically refurbished–and can accommodate 190 students. It’s a key cog in UT’s mission to be a “resident campus,” according to UT spokesman Eric Cardenas. “It serves its purpose. It’s the architecture of the time.” Unfortunately.
But there is a major consolation. No, there are no plans to landscape with Spartan topiary. But McKay Hall does have some killer views of the Riverwalk waterfront.
The other aesthetically-challenged vista is Howard W. Blake High School, which was not built in the ’50s–but 1997. It’s brick and functionally contemporary. And it faces North Boulevard, which means the back fronts the river across from Water Works Park.
Unless you’re nostalgic for the era of insensitivity to the Hillsborough, having a major structure turning its back on the river now seems an affront. It is not only sans architectural elements, it’s also lacking windows.
How ironic that a magnet school for visual and performing arts should be so starkly indifferent to the river that personifies our 21st century aspirations. How inexplicably ironic that it looks like a maximum-security facility from the Riverwalk side.
Perhaps that father-and-son team that painted the mural on the West Tampa water tower could be brought back for some more public art sprucing. After they’ve finished with the Con-Agra silos, maybe they could address the back side of Blake.