Wichita unveils redesigned park honoring civil rights icon at entrance to med school
.JPG "An artists conception of the redesigned Chester I. Lewis Reflection Park, which will also serve as the entryway to a new osteopathic medical school being built downtown")
City officials have begun showing off the planned design of a downtown park being rebuilt as the entryway to Wichita’s new osteopathic medical school, while continuing to honor the legacy of civil rights luminary Chester I. Lewis.
The proposed redesign of Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park features a small stage, the floor of which will be a tinted concrete rendering of the “redline” map of Wichita.
It shows the pattern of segregation in the city caused by overtly racist policies from the 1930s to the 1960s, which limited the places African Americans and immigrants could buy housing.
“Something I didn’t know when I came into this was Wichita was the third-biggest redlined city in the United States,” said Anthony Joiner, an art consultant on the project. “It was over 80% redlined.”
Lewis, a civil rights attorney, was among the first African Americans to challenge redlining by having a white friend buy a house in a white-restricted neighborhood and sign it over to him. He defiantly stayed there despite the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in his yard and other attempted intimidations.
The stage opens out onto a lawn of artificial turf that’s sloped inward to subtly invite passersby on Douglas into the park.
Over the stage, the new design includes a stainless steel skeleton of a house, which will be accented by a series of six steel panels, each of which is progressively angled to give the impression of a roof gradually opening to the sky.
The vertical base of each of the panels will highlight Lewis’ activism on different fronts of the civil rights movement, including desegregation of housing, schools, restaurants, aircraft plants and railroads. The historical displays will carry QR codes to help visitors go online and dig deeper into Lewis’ life and accomplishments.
One major element that won’t be in the new park is the city’s historical sculpture of the Dockum Drug Store lunch counter sit-in of July and August of 1958, which led to the desegregation of Wichita restaurants.
Although the sit-in was a youth-led effort, Lewis mentored the protesters and was their lawyer. The sit-in will be highlighted on one of the panels.
In presenting the plan to the Park Board, Park and Recreation Director Troy Houtman said the city has other plans for the prominent display of the sculpture, but he did not say where it will be moved.
Brandon Johnson, the only African-American member of the City Council, said the new design is a fitting tribute to Lewis and he’s pleased to see it go beyond just the sit-in.
“We’re actually telling the story of Chester Lewis, more than just one piece of his lifetime and accomplishments,” Johnson said. “And we’re doing it through art, through words, through technology and I think people will appreciate all of those things.”
The project budget totals $1.7 million, including $300,000 that’s been paid to buy and demolish a building to expand the park, $900,000 for construction and $500,000 for the art elements, said Larry Hoetmer, city public works and landscape architect
“This last number you see is pretty significant, half a million dollars in public art,” Hoetmer said. “This is unprecedented for a public project and that it’s in the center of our city it is really an opportunity to be raised at a whole new level.”
The park was also designed around utility value for the Kansas Health Science Center - Kansas College of Osteopathic Medicine. The park acts as the main entryway for the school, which is under construction in the former Finney State Office building.
With that in mind, the park incorporates several features to accommodate the needs of future medical students.
It departs from the city’s recent trend toward downtown public furniture designed to be uncomfortable for anything but sitting straight up, which discourages homeless people from sleeping in the parks or on streetside benches.
The new design takes into account that students may want to lounge and study in the park and offers a variety of opportunities for that.
The design provides for “not just a bench to sit on, but maybe it’s a space where you can lay down,” said Jeff Best, of LK Architecture, which is working for the city to design the park. “Maybe lay on your stomach and do some studying or you know, kind of spread out a little.”
The city plans to sell two small parcels of land from the park to the school to accommodate the entryway, which is a bit larger than originally planned.
As we were going through the design, we were putting two or three parts of a puzzle together and right now, the puzzle pieces don’t fit,” Houtman said.
The city will also sell some easements to the medical school for underground building footings that will extend into the park below ground level, but won’t interfere with park operations, said John Philbrick, the city’s real estate administrator.
Philbrick said the land and easement sales are expected to generate about $28,000 total.
“The money will be returned to the project, so ultimately it will go back into . . . the park,” Philbrick said.
