Preservationists aim to halt Peavey Plaza redesign
A Minneapolis City Council committee is in a hearing today discussing whether Peavey Plaza is worth preserving.
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People enjoy an afternoon at Peavey Plaza in downtown Minneapolis, Minn. Wednesday, May 16, 2012. After Minneapolis' Heritage Preservation Commission voted in support of saving the plaza, the Minneapolis City Council will vote this month on whether the plaza should be preserved or demolished and rebuilt. MPR Photo/Jeffrey Thompson
The city's planning department says the downtown park is unsafe, inaccessible and too expensive to maintain. They want to replace it with a newly designed plaza they say will better suit the city's needs.
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But MPR's Curtis Gilbert reports historic preservationists see the plaza as a significant work of modernist architecture and they're fighting to save it.
"Demolition is drastic," says Charles Birnbaum, a historical preservationist and the president of the of Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington, D.C.
"Because Peavey Plaza, I would say is a seminal work of landscape architecture of national import, it is worthy of careful change."
Birnbaum says Peavey represents the first "park plaza" in America. It combines paved and green space in a way that has been imitated since. He wants to see it preserved.
On Wednesday evening, Birnbaum unveiled a proposal to update Peavey Plaza. The plan adds additional wheelchair ramps, a restaurant and a bridge that connects 12th Street to Orchestra Hall. It was created by the original architect, Paul Friedberg, who is now 81 and lives in New York City.
"You don't have to destroy something to improve it," Birnbaum said.
Friedberg and Birnbaum were originally part of the team charged with coming up with a revitalization plan for Peavey Plaza, but they were eliminated from the process when Minneapolis decided it wanted to completely replace the plaza.
You can read the rest of Curtis Gilbert's story here.
The debate has also reached the attention of the New York Times, which reported on the story this morning. You can find that here.