6 FRONTDOORS MEDIA | JULY 2018 I jokingly tell people you can claim you are an Arizona native if you were here before construction of Interstate 10 was done through Phoenix. As hard as it may be for newbies to believe, back in the day you had to actually take surface streets to traverse Phoenix from east to west. The I-10 was completed in the late 1980s, and it wasn’t without controversy. The route of the freeway, as you know, cuts through the heart of the city. Residents of central Phoenix had significant concerns about noise created by the new superhighway. So the planners came up with a fairly unique solution — build a tunnel in a place without a hill. Thus, the Deck Park Tunnel was born as well as Margaret T. Hance Park, which was designed to take the artificial real estate created by the tunnel and create a lush new oasis in the middle of the city. Anchored by the Burton Barr Central Library and home to several key cultural attractions, the park was to be a gathering place for Phoenicians and a point of pride for the community. Except that it never quite took. Some festivals and events have worked quite well at Hance Park, but it’s never quite grabbed the public’s imagination, and it’s not really on the list of places that you want to go to hang out outdoors. Light rail has made the park more accessible, but it has always lacked a sort of je ne sais quoi . It attracted a significant homeless population and a bad reputation, and Steele Indian School Park ended up taking the mantle of “Phoenix’s Central Park.” But now, the City of Phoenix is looking to change that, and help the park reach its potential as a public asset and a destination PHOENIX IS ABOUT TO TRANSFORM ITS OWN VERSION OF CENTRAL PARK Tom Evans | Contributing Editor NEXT DOORS {ahead of the curve}

JULY 2018 | FRONTDOORS MEDIA 7 for locals and tourists. The effort is a $100 million upgrade — with most of the funding coming from private donations — and a collaboration between the Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department, Phoenix Community Alliance and the Hance Park Conservancy. “We want to activate the areas around the core around the Burton Barr Library and make it more of a destination park for people from central Phoenix and other parts of the Valley,” said Gregg Bach, public information officer for the Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department. “And with the addition of that programming it would take some of the negative activity people see there now and push that out of the park.” The gist of it is creating a park experience that provides more enjoyable uses of outdoor space, including increased shade, creation of new walking paths and promenades and more appealing areas for people to congregate. Plans include a new 1.2-mile urban pedestrian and bicycle loop, a 200 percent increase in the number of trees and a 30 percent reduction in the amount of hardscape in the park. And, a major goal of the effort is to make the 32-acre park a safe and attractive place to be at night, including increased lighting and what’s being called “an immersive, water- based experience” at the center of the park. “Right now it’s not a park that has a lot of activity in the evening,” Bach said. “This is the type of change that would really activate it and program it throughout the day, where right now we just have that happening during events.” It’s great that the park is getting an upgrade from an aesthetic standpoint,