Green Design for Hemming Plaza

[hanjin1]

Just read this on jacksonville.com

Take away the hot-dog vendors at Hemming Plaza, take away the lunching workers and the street people hanging out, and you have a sea of bricks.

Add a hard rain, and you have sheets of water washing those people's debris into drains pointed at the St. Johns River.

"Our runoff into the storm water system from Hemming Plaza is almost 100 percent," said Robert Schuster, an engineer who sits on Jacksonville's Environmental Protection Board.

That made the landmark park outside City Hall an easy site for a contest for development professionals to design something greener.

If the City Council agrees, the board will invite local development teams to lay out visions for a Hemming Plaza that uses principles of low-impact design, a construction style the city sees as a new hope for lowering both water pollution and water use.

The idea is to showcase the style to encourage developers and designers to try their own projects. The winner would get $7,500 from a city fund made up of fines paid by polluters. With lesser prizes, publicity and other costs, the board wants to spend up to $40,000 on the competition.

The contest is only to make designs, not to rebuild the park.

But one of the contest requirements is for competitors to show project costs, both up front and for maintenance and routine use, then compare those against standard construction.

"In the few landscape architects I've talked to, there's not a great deal of awareness of low-impact design. ... We'd learn a lot," said Schuster. He said everything the park is used for now - concerts, art displays, farmers markets - would have to be figured into any new design.

The contest idea overlaps with legislation council committees will take up next week to hire a consultant to help the city put low-impact ideas into local building standards.

Downtown would be a great place to try the new designs, because it has almost no ponds or systems to keep trash, dirt and other pollution in water from running straight to the river, said Vince Seibold, chief of the city's Environmental Quality Division.

"If you put in [low-impact design] in and around downtown, you're getting some tangible benefit," he said.

A handful of local construction projects, including one small subdivision near the beach, have used elements of low-impact design like rain gardens, cisterns and new pavement that lets rainwater seep in and be held in the ground while pollutants settle out.

Seibold said the best Hemming Plaza design might be something the city could try building piecemeal sometime in the future, to show how the ideas can be put to use. It might also be used at new projects, like the Shipyards property on the downtown riverfront, he said.

Low-impact designs could also help cut levels of algae-feeding nitrogen and phosphorus in the river by using plants that require less fertilizer, Schuster said.

"Fertilizer really has no option but to go into the river eventually," Schuster said. "The long-term benefits to the river are remarkable. The potential is there."

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-10-15/story/city-board-wants-new-green-designs-hemming-plaza

[billy]

Just saw this on the FTU website.
How about getting the people who hang out there to wear photovoltaic sandwich boards?

actually, the competition is a good idea.....anything that gets people thinking about downtown

[simms3]

Yea I'd say it's a good competition.  Maybe the city is getting a little low cost consulting work done if they ever do want to redo Hemming.  $40,000 for a design bid with costs figured in?  I'll take it over a $400,000 "study".

[Non-RedNeck Westsider]

Basically the city is openly bidding for the work to be done in a 40k budget.  The 'winner' will be the design/build firm who will be able to hit the numbers that the city is aiming for.

My problem, I think simms was alluding to, is even if a company hit on the perfect design & under-budget the city will then bring in a consultant to review thier numbers, scope, impact, etc... find all of the holes, real or perceived, and then have the work done by someone (I may be reaching here) suggested by the consultant who will say that what was proposed can not be done for less than x. 

So our $47,500 renovation will end up costing the city close to $475,000.

[Jaxson]

The city made an epic mistake when they originally bricked over Hemming Park.  It always seemed to me like a failed attempt to replicate a suburban mall experience in the urban core.  It came across like using wood paneling to decorate the salon in a Queen Anne home (or something like that).  The saddest part is the the city's work on Hemming Park helped to kill what last businesses were in that area.  Shame.

[Wacca Pilatka]

The city made an epic mistake when they originally bricked over Hemming Park.  It always seemed to me like a failed attempt to replicate a suburban mall experience in the urban core.  It came across like using wood paneling to decorate the salon in a Queen Anne home (or something like that).  The saddest part is the the city's work on Hemming Park helped to kill what last businesses were in that area.  Shame.

That's exactly what it was.

[tpot]

They could spend 5 million on that park and at the end of the day it will still smell like piss & vomit and be overrun by the homeless......

[buckethead]

Home sweet home?

[downtownjaxgurl]

They could spend 5 million on that park and at the end of the day it will still smell like piss & vomit and be overrun by the homeless......

AMEN!!!!