Parks lately unveiled by New York and Chicago — the much-ballyhooed High Line and Millennium Park, respectively — are tasty desserts added to the already-laden menus of residents and tourists. But in a city like Houston, a new downtown park comes burdened with a much more challenging mandate. Charged with spurring development and creating a city core that is a place to live not just work, the 12-acre Discovery Green assume s a role previously assigned to the ’80s-era performing arts center and the ’90s-era downtown sports venue.
Thanks to its across-the-board appeal, wide diversity of uses like bocce courts and model boat racing, and heavy programming schedule, this urban green space may be the final piece in the ever-perplexing puzzle of how to repopulate the downtown of one of America’s largest cities.
Discovery Green lays a LEED-certified meadow over the site of two former surface parking lots (parking has been buried), and is strategically located in front of the George R. Brown Convention Center and between Minute Maid Park baseball stadium and Toyota Center football dome, at the eastern edge of downtown. It celebrated its second anniversary this Spring.
Houston is, obviously, a place where no little plans are made. Built for the rather astounding sum of $122 million through a public-private venture, the Green features transported 100-year-old live oaks, two restaurants, a playground, stage, dog run, and model boat pond/ice rink. Residents can even enjoy a mobile library service and reading room, where they can supposedly have a book delivered to them.
photos by JoAnn Greco
Lunch at The Grove, the more elegant of the park’s two restaurants, offers floor-to-ceiling picture windows, wood ceilings, and great views of both the park and the city skyline. Its creative farm-to-table menu skews toward the vaguely Tex-Mex (entrees include pulled rotisserie chicken tacos with grilled corn, and spicy shrimp salad with avocado and mango).
This amenities-laden park serves as a prime example of how investment can transform a neighborhood. Before it was even completed, a developer bought an adjacent lot with the idea of opening One Park Place — a moniker from the mouths of marketers, if ever there was one!. The first new apartment tower to go up in Houston in decades, it started renting this year and is about 65 percent occupied. Its promised ground floor retail, however, has yet to materialize. On the western perimeter of the park, an Embassy Suites Hotel and a 31-story office tower will arrive early next year.
“I was sitting eating lunch here one day,” muses Susanne Theis, the park’s programming director, “and it dawned on me that aside from the spires of the Annunciation Church ([1869] and the Convention Center itself [1987], nothing within site of the park is older than 20 years.”
Theis says the park’s been a beehive of activity, presenting some 400 events in a year from movie nights to children’s writing workshops to tango lesson. More than a million visitors, 30 percent of them from the distant suburbs and out-of-town, have taken advantage of its amenities and performances.
The kicker, says Theis: “Weekends have proved to be the most popular days. We weren’t expecting that at all.”
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