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On Saturday morning, Waterloo Park reopened after a decade of renovations. A scheduled celebration with proclamations from city officials, performances by artist groups and an evening concert was canceled earlier this week due to rising coronavirus cases in the area, but John Rigdon, the park’s director of planning and design, did not seem disappointed.
“Honestly, what I really looked forward to most was seeing how people use the park,” he said at a table on the stage in the park’s new, state-of-the-art amphitheater.
“We are planning a park. We design amenities and facilities throughout the park, but people will find their own ways of using a park, ”he said.
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Waterloo Park offers refuge from the Austin heat
By 11:00 a.m. the park wasn’t crowded, but a good number of curious Austinites had turned up to explore the new green space that spanned three blocks downtown. Cyclists drove on a network of concrete paths that meander through landscaped terraces. Couples paused to admire the lush gardens and huge fountain in the center of the park. Children climbed the tiered rocks that surround some of the park’s hidden lounge areas.
As the sun rose in the sky, Stefany Quirico, Zeal Desai and their dog Scarf took refuge from the excruciating heat in the shade under a concrete skyway that forms a main artery through the park. The women had packed a picnic lunch and appreciated the tables and chairs set out on a shaded terrace with nearby food trucks.
Desai said she was surprised to find such a pleasant natural area in the busy downtown corridor. “It’s so unexpected,” she said. “It’s like being in a sea of buildings and structures, and this green space in the middle of the city center definitely feels like an oasis.”
There was no line to use the picture frame near the park’s southwest entrance to capture memories, but several families took advantage of the modernist play area, which includes a carved granite slide.
Evelyn Nazro, who works for Waterloo Greenway, the conservation group that manages the park, said the slide isn’t very fast now, but it does get faster if it is naturally polished with use. For pragmatic and aesthetic reasons, the park designers decided to build the slide out of stone instead of metal or plastic.
“The great thing about granite is that it stays cool,” says Nazro.
Colin Pfender and Cody Vaughan paused to admire the play area, which includes a climbing structure made of natural wooden beams and another hidden in light green poles that resemble an oversized bamboo grove. Pfender, a product designer, said he loved that the game landscape was abstract rather than “pre-fabricated”. It does not “mold” ideas about how it should be used in children. Instead, “they can make it up any way they want” while they play, he said.
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Regarding the overall design of the park, Vaughan said he appreciated the way the concrete elements fade into the background.
More:Take a first look at the completely redesigned Waterloo Park in downtown Austin
“It’s almost like a canvas that nature takes over and is in the foreground,” he said. “So it’s not just like a lawn. It’s something that you can interact with dynamically. “
Pfender and Vaughan got curious about the park in the early days of the pandemic when they developed a morning walk that took them past the construction site.
The park renovation cost $ 88 million and was paid for with a mix of public and private funds.
Now that they had the chance to experience it, Pfender and Vaughan feel the park was worth it. “People complain about taxes. But that’s the result of that, and it’s pretty great, ”said Pfender.
The Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park is slated to kick off this year’s series of ticketed concerts with two shows by Gary Clark Jr. on August 20-21. Upcoming shows at the amphitheater include concerts by Glass Animals, Rebelution and Sylvan Esso. Most of the park remains open to the public during the paid shows in the amphitheater.
Waterloo Park is open daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. More information is available at waterloogreenway.org.
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