New Riverfront Park, Arriving 2016

Covering more than 1,500 miles from early Saturday morning to Monday evening, Mayor Gluba led a delegation of ten Davenporters on a tour of five cities.  The six state tour pushed as far south as Chattanooga, where temperatures hovered just above freezing, with a day-long rain.  The purpose of the tour was to see four riverfront parks and learn lessons from their design, construction and operation, as the City plans for the removal of the riverboat casino.  The planned removal of the casino in 2016 will open up nine new acres of park space at the foot of Main Street.  To meet the timetable for construction of a new park on the nine acres in 2016, bid-ready construction plans need to be developed in 2015.

Three of the four cities – Nashville, Louisville and Chattanooga – feature park designs by Hargreaves Associates, a world-class landscape architecture firm with some of the most distinctive and lauded commissions in the past few decades, including multiple Olympic sites.  Davenport’s “RiverVision Plan” was first drafted by Hargreaves Associates in 2004, and was updated this year on its tenth anniversary.  Like Davenport, the four main stops on the tour all feature former industrial riverfronts being turned into regional showplaces.  At every stop along the way, local leaders told similar stories of incredible success turning former brownfields into destinations hosting millions of visitors annually, with over a billion dollars of private investment near their new parks.