Macon Magazine

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021 | maconmagazine.com 39 The plan is to connect the section to Riverside Drive going downstream past Rotary Park and tie into the trail at the Otis Redding Bridge. It will then go south to the Mike Ford Trail and into the Ocmulgee Mounds. Another significant piece of the master plan is the Riverside Cemetery Connector, for which the Department of Natural Resources recently awarded the project a $100,000 grant. Sheridan said with that money, they will extend the boardwalk at the Riverside Cemetery trail across Vineville Branch, where it will tie it into the trail system going to Amerson River Park and cross the river to the trail on the east side. That is expected to be completed by Oct. 30. AN ONGOING PROJECT Mike Ford, former NewTown Macon president and now Ocmulgee Heritage Trail committee member, smiled the entire time he spoke about the plan. Like Sheridan, he has worked on this plan since the late 1990s. "With every little section completed, we can almost see the end," Ford said. "But it's not over just yet." In 2020, Macon joined the national initiative Reimagining the Civic Commons (RCC), funded by the JPB Foundation, Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and the William Penn Foundation, in order to advance THE HISTORY OF ROSA PARKS SQUARE The greenspace we know today as Rosa Parks Square, nestled between City Hall and the City Auditorium, has only recently become a space that could be considered a place for reflection and respite amongst the urban landscape of downtown. Most of the space in the park spent the last few centuries as a road. Cotton Avenue, the old federal road from Fort Hawkins to New Orleans, cut across the grid of downtown through the park area and continued along what is today known as DT Walton Sr. Way and Forsyth Street. It was the site of cotton markets, a gas station and an extremely complicated intersection. It wasn't until the 1970s, when Cotton Avenue was rerouted and Poplar Street was redesigned to include larger pedestrian plazas, that the notion of this square becoming a park was broached. In 1978, the Macon-Bibb County Urban Development Authority (UDA) released a plan to turn the former intersection and parking lot into "Macon Civic Plaza" to highlight the significant architectural aspects of the buildings that surround the park. Original concepts were designed by local architects, but the land was not procured for several more decades. The first foray into making this area a park took place around the turn of the millennium when Poplar Street went through another redesign and more green space was created due to changes in the right-of-way. The first square of the park was dedicated to local civil rights legend Ozzie Belle McKay. Additional markers honoring several other icons and heroes ranging from Medal of Honor recipient Rodney Davis and Cole Hogan, who perished in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, to civil rights legends DT Walton Sr. and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were placed in the right-of-way prior to the renaming of the area Rosa Parks Square following Parks' death in 2005. It was not until 2012 that the originally dreamt of civic plaza would include all of its planned property, when a land trade between the City of Macon and the owners of the Shrine Temple property converted a remaining surface parking lot into greenspace. When the Macon Action Plan began development in 2014, Rosa Parks Square was identified as a critical greenspace that could use enhancement to increase its programming, helping to serve as a place of civic engagement and business support in the urban core, as well as a critical hub of the greenway network throughout downtown. After the completion of the plan in 2015, the UDA lead a public process to redesign the park. Unveiled in late 2016, the plans for the park harken back to the original vision of the space as a place of robust civic engagement and protest that honors the heroes who brought Macon forward and provides opportunities for protest and unity to carry Macon toward a brighter, more economically inclusive future. The Friends of Rosa Parks Square board is working diligently to bring this vision to life and will soon release a final design for the park and immediately begin renovations of a vision 43 years in the making. — Alex Morrison

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