With little fanfare and crossed fingers, Clearwater city commissioners last week approved concepts for expansion and redevelopment of two downtown parks: Coachman Park and Station Square Park. In both places, there were major challenges to confront.
Station Square, a brick-paved courtyard between buildings on Cleveland Street, was dedicated in 1991. It was expected to become a favorite place for downtown workers to congregate and for the city to conduct small-scale outdoor events such as poetry readings and art shows. But the area never really fulfilled its promise; downtown workers do little more than stop at the hot dog cart to grab lunch and go. And lately, the park has become a daytime hangout for transients.
At Coachman Park, the city's centerpiece park overlooking Clearwater Harbor, the dream has long been to remove the hundreds of parking spaces at the Harborview Center next door and expand the park through that area and on across Cleveland Street to the area below Calvary Baptist Church and City Hall. The challenge was how to replace the parking.
The concept plans successfully address the challenges in both areas.
The concept for Station Square Park adds more landscaping and a wrought iron-style fence. And where there is now a surface parking lot beside the park, the city hopes to persuade a developer to build condominiums, a parking garage and perhaps a restaurant and shops. The problem with little foot traffic except for transients is likely to be solved with the addition of more people living, parking, eating and shopping in that location, planners said.
The concept for Coachman Park is far more elaborate. It starts with construction of a parking garage at the bottom of the bluff immediately west of City Hall, the key to enabling the city to remove the ugly Harborview parking lot and cover it with grass, trees and outdoor walkways. At the western terminus of Cleveland Street, which will close when the new bridge to the beach opens, there is a public plaza and a large interactive fountain where children of all ages can play in the water.
The extension of Drew Street that now separates Coachman Park from the water will disappear, replaced by a seawall promenade and a waterfront restaurant. A new marina with docks for dozens of boats will stretch into the harbor from the seawall on both sides of the new bridge. A new performance stage, perhaps with attached "wings" that could have shops and restrooms, would be built on the north end of the park facing south across a "great lawn" for outdoor events.
City staff and hired designers worked for months to develop the two concepts. It would be premature to call them plans. Pretty pictures fill files in City Hall, the remnants of past proposals that never got funded, never won political support, or didn't pass muster with the public. Last week city officials still were tweaking the concepts, and the engineers and financing experts haven't yet done their work.
City commissioners asked good questions last week, such as whether people would be reluctant to walk from the new parking garage to the Harborview Center and waterfront restaurant, and whether Pierce Street would be overburdened by serving as the only access road for both the garage and Pierce 100 condominiums. Both issues deserve more study, but neither is an insurmountable problem. More questions need to be asked about the viability and location of the proposed marina.
Mayor Brian Aungst raised an important issue that gets too little attention as communities throughout Pinellas plan new projects. Aungst said the parking garage below City Hall should be constructed so it could someday contain a monorail or light rail stop, perhaps on its roof. Even though money for a rail line between the mainland and Clearwater Beach isn't available now, Aungst said he thought it would be shortsighted not to plan for such a future possibility.
Absolutely. As Pinellas County is redeveloped, population densities are likely to increase in some areas and population centers may change. In Clearwater, for example, condominium projects are built, under construction or planned that will result in more people living downtown and in Clearwater Beach. Do we really want all of those people getting in their cars every time they must travel between the mainland and the beach?
If Coachman Park becomes the destination city officials dream of, provision needs to be made for Clearwater Beach residents and tourists, not to mention those people already on the mainland, to be able someday to step into an air-conditioned rail car and get off at a station in the park.
