On a blisteringly hot Saturday last March, thousands of people gathered in Tampa’s revitalized urban green, Curtis Hixon Park, to enjoy the first-ever Gasparilla Music Festival. Actually, two parks hosted the event — Curtis Hixon played host to the fest’s main stage just in front of the Hillsborough River, while two other stages were set in adjoining Kiley Garden, a park designed by world-renowned architect Dan Kiley back in 1988.
To see Tampa host a daytime music festival with such a high level of quality acts was exciting for music enthusiasts, as well as for those who just want downtown to prosper.
But it was extraordinarily warm that day, even for a March afternoon in Tampa. Former City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena said that at around 2:30 p.m., while blues-rocker Kaleigh Baker was performing, "people were climbing the wall" — her reference to the foot and a half or so of shade that was available at that particular moment.
Saul-Sena leads the vanguard of concerned citizens who say the festival could be enhanced next year with the phasing in of trees, making the park more aesthetically attractive and providing crucial cover from the unforgiving sun.
Kiley enthusiasts also would like to see the fountains from the original design restored, but that’s not their first priority. They’re also not asking for a handout. What these concerned citizens want is for the city to grant Kiley Garden local historic landmark status, enabling them to raise money for tree replacement via grants available to such preserved landmarks.
Adding more trees in Kiley is something that all of the players involved in this saga agree upon. But that’s where the consensus ends, as city officials are on record as being opposed to historic preservation.
To the garden's supporters, the resistance smacks of the same attitude that has plagued the park since Kiley created it simultaneously with architect Harry Wolfe’s construction of what is affectionately/derisively known as “the Beer Can Building” (aka Riverfront Tower) at the corner of Kennedy Boulevard and Ashley Drive some 24 years ago.
One argument made by Dennis Fernandez, the city’s historic preservation and urban design manager, is that Kiley simply hasn’t yet lasted the required length of time (traditionally 50 years).
But a report published nearly five years ago says that the park’s initial blueprint design by Dan Kiley was so original that it deserves such a ranking. Pressley Associates, a landscape architectural firm located in Cambridge, Mass., wrote that though the plaza was then barely two decades old, there was a provision in the National Register (Criteria Consideration G, specifically) that grants an exception for properties that have “achieved significance in the past 50 years due to their exceptional importance at the national, state or local level … NCNB Plaza (its official name) is of exceptional importance as a work of modern landscape architectural and is thus likely eligible for listing on the National Register.”
But the Pressley Associates report also says that to be eligible for National Historic Landmark status, such a facility must retain a high level of integrity, which is something critics say the current Kiley Garden absolutely lacks from its original design in 1988.
Dan Kiley worked on a number of notable projects before his death at the age of 91 in 2004, such as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the Ford Foundation’s headquarters and Lincoln Center in Manhattan and I.M. Pei’s East Building for the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
One of the new owners of Rivergate Tower, Dennis Udwin, said he was unaware of the push by advocates for Kiley Garden to attain landmark status for the park. He says he doesn’t have a problem with them applying.
“I think they should do more trees, but you have to be more sensitive from an architectural and landscaping architect’s point of view, so it doesn’t cause issues for us and the city and the parking garage,” he says.
Another reason Tampa doesn’t want to give the park historical status is that city officials say it goes hand in hand with NCNB Plaza, the official name of Rivergate Tower, which doesn’t want historic status. Kiley advocates say that’s fine — that Rivergate Tower isn’t going anywhere in the future, and doesn’t need the designation. But they’re not sure if that will be the case with Kiley.
To hear its supporters tell it, Kiley Garden has always been the Rodney Dangerfield of public parks in Tampa. In a recent edition of La Gaceta, Patrick Manteiga wrote, “There never was a heyday for the gardens,” before lambasting it as “gone, and we are okay if it is forgotten.”
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn echoes Manteiga, saying, “It was a dysfunctional park. It never worked. It wasn’t the economic engine that it could be. It didn’t attract the type of use that it should.”
Architect Taryn Sabia, co-founder of the Tampa Urban Charette, says the reason it fell into disrepute is simple.
“To put it mildly, the city didn’t take care of it,” she says, referencing the problems that were created from the earliest days of the park, when the city planted full-sized crape myrtle trees instead of the dwarf variety called for by the design, and made matters worse by adding too many (800) and never pruning them. The garden’s reflecting pools had to be removed because they leaked into the parking garage below. Though rooftop gardens were new back in the late 1980s, modern materials can now prevent that leakage.
Chris Vela with Friends of Kiley Garden agrees, saying the park’s importance has been “denigrated by poor oversight and even poorer explanations of what design means in urban planning.”
Councilwoman Mary Mulhern complains that previous administrations have never appreciated it, or other valuable landmarks that were ultimately lost. “As long as I’ve lived here, there has not been a commitment to preserving history,” she told CL while vacationing in Michigan earlier this month.
Mulhern, who worked at the Art Institute of Chicago for over a decade before moving to Tampa, championed the park in the pages of CL (then the Weekly Planet) in 2005, when she served as art critic for this paper.
“The whole point of giving it historic status is to protect it,” she said, referring to a dark moment for Kiley supporters back in 2006, when Mayor Pam Iorio had her parks and rec department cut down the overgrown crape myrtles as a prelude to a restoration project on the park.
Advocates refer to that as a “massacre.”
Taryn Sabia said that a group of young professionals, mostly from the local design community, worked on a weekly basis to upkeep the garden, and there were hopes for a tree swap to take out the mature crape myrtles.
Iorio responds that all of the trees had to be moved to fix the problem with the leaks into the underground garage. “We started taking the trees down prior to construction because the entire site had become such a hazard,” she says.
Concerns about Kiley’s future go back a decade, when in these very pages former CL Editor Susan Edwards wrote about the plans of then-Mayor Dick Greco, who became enamored with a design for a new Tampa art museum that required killing off Kiley. When architect Rafael Vinoly's design was rejected, the park was saved.
Mayor Iorio’s tearing down of more than 100 of the oversized crape myrtles in the park preceded a complete renovation of the facility, which occurred between 2008 and 2010, at the same time that two new museums were built north on Ashley Drive, with Curtis Hixon Park receiving a sparkling new renovation as well. Iorio says her order for the crape myrtles to be cut down transformed Kiley from a “neglected and hazardous eyesore to part of an overall urban transformation that has greatly enhanced the downtown core.”
Other items recently renovated include the outdoor amphitheater, paving units, runnels, structure, electrical and irrigation.
But when Historic Preservation and Urban Design Manager Fernandez went before the Council last month to advocate that local preservation status was not warranted, he listed the removal of the trees, reflecting pools, geometric pavers and benches as proof that the integrity of the park was “challenged.”
While giving praise to Dan Kiley, he also bitch-slapped his memory, saying his design of alternating squares of grass and concrete in a checkerboard pattern used “throughout the ages.”
Fernandez also said, “Opportunities are not associated with local historic listings.” And he mentioned that the tower and park share an “inseparable relationship design,” saying you can’t historically recognize the park and not the tower.
Those “opportunities” worry Kiley advocates, concerned that the city has plans for the park that they’re not telling anybody about.
There’s also the fact that Kiley’s upscale neighbor, Curtis Hixon Park, has became a focal point for events downtown, something that wasn’t the case until it was rebuilt, with the brand new Tampa Museum of Art and Glazer Children’s Museum adding to the reboot in early 2010.
Brian Funk is a board member with the Gasparilla Music Festival. He says the group respects the effort to restore Kiley Garden, but said at this point it would “frustrate a lot of the current and future programming needs of the city” to bring back the water fountains and a lot of trees. He says his group would work with the city to provide shade, but “certainly not to the extent that it’s a replication of what was there 24 years ago,” which he says the board is vehemently opposed to.
Although advocates have asked for trees to be added as a compromise, Funk adds that if it's “just a few trees, is it really Kiley Garden anymore?
Another Gasparilla Music Festival organizer, Phil Benito, echoes Funk, saying that he’s open to planting some trees around the perimeter of the garden, but adding anything more than that “kills the open space.”
Some Kiley advocates think it’s peculiar that the music festival organizers seemingly have so much clout regarding the ultimate decision about the park. They’ve used the park exactly once, and for all the concerns about how restoring Kiley will diminish Curtis Hixon, Parks and Rec. Director Greg Bayor tells CL that there have been a grand total of 11 events in Kiley over the past year, with six of them weddings held in the park’s amphitheater.
Recently, the Downtown CRA Advisory Committee has discussed using a structure, not trees, to provide shade in Curtis Hixon. Brenda Dohring Hicks, a Tampa appraiser and broker who owns a number of vintage buildings downtown, says that Karla Price with the Parks and Recreation Department is scheduled to come back with different options, such as giant triangular sheets that could be hoisted up by large collapsible poles.
City Councilwoman Lisa Montelione says she champions historic preservation. She says she’d like to find a balance between “how we can bring the garden to a semblance of Dan Kiley’s vision, but still have it be a place we can utilize for a city.”
Landscape architect Ron Still with Reynolds Smith & Hill was the man in charge of the restoration of Kiley that was completed in 2010. He says part of that restoration makes it safe to plant trees again without the fear of leaks.
But the question of what the city has planned for Kiley is what has advocates concerned. “They gave no reason why they want to preserve it,” Mary Mulhern complains. “I mean, give me a reason. Do they want to sell it, do they want to build on it? I have no idea what’s going on there. It makes no sense.”
Taryn Sabia says Curtis Hixon was designed to be a programmable space that is wide open, but in terms of a music festival, she doesn’t think Kiley is the best place
But Mayor Buckhorn says he wants to start using the park as much as Curtis Hixon.
“We do need to have some shade up there, but it needs to be reasonable and user-friendly.” That sounds like the makings of a compromise, perhaps.
“We’re going to make Kiley usable and attractive,” the Mayor says. “But we’re not going to restore it to what it was.”
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2012.