The Meléndrez team has been notified that SCAG intends to award us a Compass Blueprint project with the City of Glendale. We will explore the opportunities and constraints, costs and benefits, and design alternatives of a “cap park” over the 134 Freeway, through Downtown Glendale.

Our team includes: Michael Metcalfe and Robert Dannenbrink, two long-time luminaries in the southern California world of architecture / planning / urban design; KPFF, who will bring their national and international engineering expertise to bear in conceptualizing the structure of this cap; and Allyn Rifkin of RTPG who has vast expertise with regard to traffic engineering and related transit and transportation planning matters.

We will focus on best practices and highly-innovative design and planning. The ultimate goal will be to provide Glendale with concepts and visions for a park space that the City can be proud of, one that lives up to the City’s identity as a forward thinking, well-rounded place, a regional commercial and cultural center, both a “destination” and a “home”. Space 134 has the potential to re-link north and south Glendale and repair the urban fabric that was ripped apart by the 134 freeway. More specifically it has the potential to fulfill the city’s visions for the Downtown Area as put forth in the recent Downtown Specific Plan.

The lack of public park space in LA County is vast; it’s estimated that almost 2 out of 3 children in the county do not like within walking distance of a park, playground, or open space (see image representing existing parks near Space 134 in Glendale). Also, many park spaces throughout the County are located away from the urban core and from underserved communities. Glendale is attacking this issue head-on with the Space 134 study, looking at the potential for new open space immediately adjacent to its downtown core and to many residential communities to the north.

Space 134 takes its place among other notable cap park studies such as Park 101 in Downtown LA, Hollywood Central Park in Hollywood, similar projects in Santa Monica, along with ground-breaking built projects around the country, such as Seattle’s Freeway Park and Olympic Sculpture Park, or Millennium Park in Chicago. Cincinnati, St Louis and Dallas also have new studies and plans on the books looking at cap parks to rejoin fragmented neighborhoods and improve the livability of their communities.

Space 134 has the potential to both catalyze new development and investment in the city and to become the next great place in Glendale. We look forward to getting work underway on the project in early June.