How Designers Transformed a Memphis Park into a Public Oasis

“A can’t miss design team.” That’s how Carol Coletta, Memphis River Parks Partnership president and CEO, describes the ensemble responsible for reinvigorating the city’s 31-acre Tom Lee Park, named after the Black levee worker who, in 1925, while steering his skiff up the Mississippi, rescued 32 people from a capsized riverboat, himself not knowing how to swim, but wasn’t dedicated to Lee until 1954, two years after his death. Over the decades, the flat ¾-mile stretch had become arid and lifeless. That is until women-led firms Studio Gang and Scape, and Black artists Theaster Gates and James Little came upon the scene. Among Jeanne Gang and team’s contribution as master planner and architect is the Sunset Canopy, an expansive community-activity pavilion of locally sourced glulam supported by steel “quad pods,” which nod to the riverfront’s industrial past, all anchored by a vibrant floorwork by Little. Other forms of life—30,000 yards of sod, thousands of native trees and plants, myriad pollinators, undulating hills—are the work of Scape’s Kate Orff and her crew of landscape architects. A few verdant steps away from all the buzz is Gates’s meditative installation of 33 monumental stone stools—one for Lee and everyone he saved.