In a news release, the Trinity Conservancy announced today that it is losing its president and chief executive, Brent Brown, but that it has reached the $100 million plateau in its fundraising campaign.
That leaves it halfway toward its goal of $200 million to build the 210-acre park in the Trinity.
“We are grateful to Brent for his leadership and for helping us shape a vision for [the Trinity] park that is, in many ways, bigger than we ever thought possible,” said Deedie Rose, the conservancy’s board chair, in a statement. “With these plans now in place, and with the capital campaign halfway to our goal, the Conservancy is well-positioned to move into the next phase of work, bringing this vision to reality.”
Brown will assume an “advisory role” with the organization, which will begin a search for his replacement. That spot will be filled temporarily by the conservancy’s board secretary, Walter Elcock, a philanthropist and former executive at Bank of America.
“It’s the right time for me, and it’s the right time for the conservancy,” said Brown, who is quarantined in Rhode Island. “I feel like I’ve done my job to help bring the concept forward, establish an organization with the capacity to deliver the park, and I want to get out of the day-to-day stuff, and devote my energies to advance community development around the park.”
Brown will be a difficult figure for the conservancy to replace. When he joined the organization, in 2015, it was known as the Trinity Trust Foundation, and the park it was championing was a contentious public joke with a toll road running through it.
The toll road has since disappeared, and under Brown’s leadership, the conservancy has commissioned a park design by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), one of the nation’s leading landscape architects, with extensive experience on major urban waterfront reclamation projects.
In December of 2018, the city got its first look at MVVA’s work. Gone were the pie-in-the-sky dreams of past visions, replaced by a 64-foot-long sectional diagram of a park with shifting topographies, pedestrian bridges and public amenities perched on expanded levee abutments.
For the first time, the city was given a legitimate design proposal, one that could transform the city.
Brown’s vision has not been constrained to the space between the levees. Brown has led the conservancy’s aggressive community outreach program, with the understanding that the park must serve the entire city, and that its arrival will inevitably lead to change in adjacent neighborhoods, for both good (development, housing) and ill (the rising costs associated with gentrification).
It was with these concerns in mind that the conservancy recently purchased the old Dawson State Jail, on Commerce Street.
“It sits there at the levy, it can help move forward the idea of building a new neighborhood between downtown and the river,” Brown said. The plan is “to re-envision what that building can be, and to tell the stories of that building’s past, which are painful.”
It will now be somebody else’s responsibility to fill that vision, and that will be an enormous challenge, beyond even the technical and financial hurdles of constructing a major urban park in a flood plain.
More than his design vision, Brown’s greatest attribute was his ability to bridge the city’s divides, to begin to heal the rift between the power structure that had supported the toll road and the rest of the city that had opposed it, and between those who think urban design between the levees is still possible, and those who look at previous park visions and can imagine nothing but boondoggles.
Brown earned that trust as director and board chair (which he remains) of BC Workshop, the nonprofit urban design and architecture office responsible for projects including the Jubilee Park affordable housing development and the Cottages at Hickory Crossing, permanent supportive housing for the homeless.
In the past, the conservancy has been ridiculed for posting fantasy visions of jugglers in the levees. Now it is in need of an executive juggler of the first order, and that is no joke at all.
