A Bridge of Parks
When it comes to our many dreams of developing our riverfront (more on that to come) we have to first imagine the two anchor points or ends of what could be our 'downtown riverfront'. We easily have one fabulous anchor point now with the Sundial Bridge and Turtle Bay, but if you were to go for a walk along a beautiful, populous, well developed version of our riverfront / Park Marina Drive, where would you go? And where would you turn around? How would this change if you were on a bike? How would you get across the river if you lived in East Redding? Are there any existing landmarks that could play a pivotal, if not historical, role? What about parks and destinations already proposed or in the works?
Think about what you see from Cypress bridge. To the North we see Park Marina in all of its potential, but to the South, aren't there already two underutilized parks - Parkview Riverfront Park and the future Henderson Openspace and Kayak Launch?
What if we could re-imagine the old Freebridge as a new pedestrian link to anchor the South end of our trail? I think most of us would agree that Cypress Bridge is unbearably in-human in both scale and comfort. Driving across it is intimidating. Walking or riding across it does not generate nearly the same intimate, community bonding type experience as the Sundial Bridge. However, with the Henderson Open Space coming at some point in the near future, the Cypress Bridge will be its only access point from downtown if you are on foot or bike.
When we talk about pedestrian scale, we are talking about places to slow down, enjoy your journey, maybe sit and have lunch looking out over the river or meet someone for one of the variety of recreational activities nearby. We are talking about something like the images below, incorporating a variety of human scale spaces, greenscape and in our case, probably some shade.
What makes this opportunity unique is the existing historical piers of the old Free Bridge. The 'Adaptive Reuse' of those old piers brings a unique historical twist to a potential community asset. An abbreviated history of Free Bridge will include its original construction in 1884, being washed out by a flood in 1906, reconstructed in 1908, damaged by flooding again in 1940, replaced by the Cypress Street Bridge in 1948 and dismantled in 1956. So for 135 years those piers have been standing there watching the city grow, and for 60+ years people have been forgetting why they are there.
Let's put the piers back to use as an anchor to our riverfront planning. New projects rooted to local historical artifacts bring depth and educational opportunities to our community gathering places.
Please note that the opinions in this article represent those of the author and not the Envision Redding group as a whole.
