Bridging the park
Friday was a beautiful place to be in Memorial Park. But the mayor was there for a different reason: the start of construction on a new bridge, funded by the Memorial Park Conservancy, that will be open later this year. It will link the north and south sides of Memorial Drive just east of the railroad tracks.
The new bridge will be a major safety improvement: the intersection of Memorial and the park loop is difficult for pedestrians and bicyclists to negotiate and the traffic moves fast. It should also reduce congestion, both pedestrian and vehicular. The parking lot on the south side of Memorial is little used, and the new bridge will allow runners to park there and cross over to the the hugely popular park loop trail. It might also encourage some of the people walking and running on that trail to cross over to the much less congested trails on the south side.
And to top it all off, the bridge will add to the beauty of the park. The design came out of a 2007 Rice Design Alliance charette, where ___ teams (anyone could enter) spent a weekend day conceiving and presenting designs for the bridge. The winning design was a “living bridge” by a team from Clark Condon Associates. Clark Condon was hired to do the final design, and it closely resembles the competition design: a curved path whose sides and edges are covered in vegetation.
The bridge should be open by the end of the year. Comments?