Richmond plans to reconnect three communities to create a new mega-park

The City of Richmond’s Department of Parks & Recreation just received a brand new plan to combine three green spaces on the city’s East End into one new mega-park. Plans for the project are taking place amid record high demand for more space to walk, bike, and be outside as people seek to get outdoors for exercise, their mental well being, as well as commuting to essential jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the design drafted by the Storefront for Community Design’s mObstudio, three new foot bridges would link Libby Hill Park, Chimborazo Park, and Gillies Creek Park — reconnecting communities separated by racialized “urban renewal” projects — with new bike- and walk-friendly infrastructure.

Gillies Creek Park is a hidden gem

Nestled between the neighborhoods of Church Hill and Fulton on Richmond’s East End lies the frequently overlooked Gillies Creek Park. Its 40 acres contain multitudes: soccer fields, volleyball courts, horseshoe pits, a frisbee golf course, a baseball diamond, cornhole courts, and even Central Virginia’s only certified BMX race track.

“Even the people who use the park aren’t aware of how extensive it is and how much is available to them here,” said Carl Otto, Director of the Gillies Creek Park Foundation. “This is a big, beautiful green space where people can come, stretch their legs, and have a good time. A park like this doesn’t need to be a secret.”

This part of town wasn’t always such a hidden gem. Just sixty years ago, a dense urban community known as Fulton Bottom existed here. In the 1970s, the City of Richmond targeted Fulton Bottom for destruction by deeming this Black and immigrant working-class community a severe flood zone. After residents were evicted and their homes razed, the promised replacement housing was delayed for decades and the once vibrant neighborhood never returned.

“When Carl first started working with Gillies Creek Park it was just a landfill,” said Giles Garrison of RVA Parks & Recreation. “He’s been slowly developing the area into one big master park over the years. Even though this illustration is conceptual, it can help people to see our vision for Gillies Creek Park to be a beautiful connective feature in Richmond to reconnect Church Hill, Fulton, and the East End.”

Safe connections make for certain access

MObstudio is riding the momentum from the proposed Gillies Creek Park Greenway, which would link the Virginia Capital Trail to several East End neighborhoods and even Henrico County. The collective’s newly released vision for the area seeks to boost mobility on Richmond’s East End with three new bike and pedestrian bridges that would help build out an interconnected park system.

The four Virginia Commonwealth University students behind the project—Abby Knuff, Monika Bierschenk, Kelsy Boyle, and Chloe Cho—hoped to build excitement around Gillies Creek Park by putting forward a bold vision. “Before I started working on this project I had never even heard of these parks, but they’re all transit accessible and give people great access to nature,” said Cho. “With this project we wanted to let the public know that this space exists in Richmond and it’s worth investing in.”

The vision’s focus on mobility stems from the ladies’ own lived experience as university students trying to navigate the city without a car. “Biking is my primary mode of travel in Richmond,” said Boyle. “Whenever I face a dangerous intersection or a tricky obstacle, I don’t feel safe and just won’t go by bike, so we wanted to look at how we could use our designs to make safe connections for people to bike or walk to and through the parks.”

‘Infra-sutures’ will stitch communities back together

Currently, steep hills, ravines, and dismantled former bridges separate the three parks, making it nearly impossible for people to traverse the area safely without a car. According to Knuff, “Even though all the parks are right next to each other, they feel so disconnected. Too often you have to take a long way around to get from one park to another and there’s no way to bike between them safely. That’s why we wanted to emphasize the ability to bike and walk safely.”

By constructing three bridges between Chimborazo and the Libby Hill micro-neighborhood of Sugar Bottom; Chimborazo and Stone Brewing at Rockett’s Landing; and Chimborazo and Gillies Creek Park, the groups’ vision echoes the concept of “infra-sutures”—the idea of using infrastructure to stitch neighborhoods back together after disruptive urban planning interventions have physically, culturally, and socioeconomically divided them.

“The connection we envision over Gillies Creek is where the old Fulton Street used to be,” said Bierschenk. “That’s a connection we see as vital to overcoming some of the histories of the area and really uniting these different communities once again.”

Extending what remains of Fulton Street across Stony Run Road and up to Chimborazo would reunite the two neighborhoods along the original stone paths that linked them 70 years ago. The historical importance of such a project isn’t lost on Garrison: “We have the chance to use bike/ped infrastructure as a means of correcting our city’s mistakes of the past. That’s why this vision for Gillies Creek Park is so meaningful.”

Finding the funding

There’s one main question looming over the plan for this new mega-amenity: how to pay for it? “We only have $500,000 a year to spend on all the parks in the city,” said Garrison. “Building just one of these bridges would completely exhaust the annual capital improvements budget for our entire department!”

As one of the parks department’s liaisons to private foundations, Garrison hopes to build partnerships with private funders to make these proposed improvements a reality. The newly created Central Virginia Transportation Authority could prove another useful funding stream should City of Richmond leaders choose to invest part of their local share of the new revenue into such critical connections. Support from people in the adjacent neighborhoods and across the region could also help build momentum behind the project.

“Our hope is the more inspired the residents in the surrounding communities become, the more we can push our local government to follow through on these plans and reconnect this side of the city,” said Bierschenk.

Whether funding can quickly be found or not, Otto plans to continue the transformation of Gillies Creek Park into a world-class amenity. His lifelong dedication to quality space for recreation stems from the traumatic loss of his favorite place to play as a child; when the city demolished over 30 square blocks of homes to plow the Downtown Expressway through some of Richmond’s most beloved neighborhoods, Otto’s childhood horseshoe pit was one of the places lost.

With his work on Gillies Creek Park, he hopes to undo a small part of that history. “People come from all over to enjoy the amenities here. I expect visitors to the park to have access to the same things I enjoyed as a kid,” he said. “If you look at a map of the city and take out a crayon, you can easily connect all these green spaces into one big park. It’s easy to do, and it’s time we did it.”

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