Downtown's Latest Park an Afterthought?

[Metro Jacksonville]

Downtown's Latest Park an Afterthought?



Now that the Duval County Courthouse is finally open for business, Metro Jacksonville visits downtown's latest green space and discovers its presence appears to be an afterthought to city leaders promoting downtown revitalization.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2012-jun-downtowns-latest-green-space-an-afterthought

[Noone]

No sidewalks. How was that allowed to happen?

[peestandingup]

Seriously, did we all REALLY expect it not to be?

A better question would be, what hasn't been an afterthought when it comes to downtown development??

[Keith-N-Jax]

Jacksonville,  no one should be surprised.

[simms3]

So with people on the sidewalks the courthouse with the green space actually looks even sillier.  If they weren't planning on doing anything with the front yard, they shouldn't have built a huge front yard and we'd have a building built to the streets.  Ironically considering the size of the building and the lawn compared to the people on the sidewalks, the pictures look absolutely ridiculous.

[simms3]

Frankly, its weird to have massive public space in front of a courthouse because in most cities often the jail and bail bonds are nearby.  In Nashville's case that is a combined city hall and courthouse and that lawn is configured more to be the end of a street running down to the river rather than the lawn of a courthouse, which happens to be adjacent.  It's also adjacent to other government buildings to its west as opposed to our massive courthouse which sits alone on several blocks and faces a garage (their courthouse faces historic buildings, including an Indigo Hotel in a building similar to our old Barnett Bank building).  Also their lawn is on the river with a viewpoint tower, so like I said, it's more a culmination/riverwalk feature than a courthouse lawn.

[thelakelander]

Public spaces in front of courthouses are actually quite common.  I have some more pics from courthouses around the country that I'll post later.  In our particular case, the weird thing is the courthouse itself and its impact on the surrounding area.

[simms3]

Monroe St looks sleepy, yes, so does Pearl.  That picture showing a teeny tiny narrow sidewalk by the side of the new courthouse in the distance just ending abruptly so a new [turn lane?] could be added on Pearl is just ridiculous.  In fact, with the lack of traffic on so many downtown streets, does the city even need those streets to be for cars?  How about looking at focusing downtown traffic, which is light, on a few streets as it is already, and converting other streets to real complete streets with wide sidewalks, shade streets, benches, trash cans, kiosks, bike lanes, etc?

[JFman00]

My bet is that they're going to push ahead with reconstructing Monroe. Let's make Jacksonville #1... in pedestrian deaths!

[thelakelander]

Great point, Simms. Btw, as a part of their BRT project, JTA will be reconstructing Broad and Jefferson between Water and State Streets in 2013. Unfortunately, neither will include bike lanes.

[tufsu1]

keep in mind that in order to get City Council to reverse its decision on extending Monroe Street, the proposal was basically to 'only lay down some sod' and see what happens.

Now that the courthouse is open, I don't think it will be long for people to realize how bad of an idea the road extension would be....and then we can get some real park enhancements.

[Tacachale]

The article misses the important part of the backstory tfsu1 mentions. This was a compromise to keep the Monroe Street rebuilding fiasco from happening. The plan was just to throw some grass down; this is no one's idea of a final product.

You only just touch on the truly frustrating thing about the plaza - that we actually had people pushing for the Monroe Street connector.

[fsujax]

^^yeah like the new CC Preisdent. Good luck getting him to be in favor of creating park space there.

[Dapperdan]

At least we have more useful palm trees to look at to remind us we are in Florida.

[fsujax]

now, looking at the picture. that space is large enough to support the planting of live oaks! Plenty of room for them to grow and mature majestically.