Mike Wolanin | The Republic Members of the Columbus Police Department and Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department color guard march away from POW/MIA Plaza at the end of the annual Law Enforcement Memorial Service to honor fallen law enforcement officers in Columbus, Ind., Friday, May 19, 2023.
Mike Wolanin | The Republic Members of the Columbus Police Department and Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department color guard march away from POW/MIA Plaza at the end of the annual Law Enforcement Memorial Service to honor fallen law enforcement officers in Columbus, Ind., Friday, May 19, 2023.
The city of Columbus and the Landmark Columbus Foundation are continuing to look at potential updates for a memorial area in downtown Columbus.
Redevelopment Director Heather Pope said the city is working with Richard McCoy and Laura Garrett of Landmark Columbus to issue a request for qualifications for a landscape architect for the endeavor, which concerns two plazas located on the north and south sides of State Road 46, just a little distance northeast of the Robert N. Stewart Bridge before it becomes Second Street.
City Director of Administration and Community Development Mary Ferdon said in a previous interview that the north side is the POW/MIA Plaza or the “law enforcement plaza,” and the south side is the Robert D. Gartons Veterans Plaza. Viewed from above, the two halves form a circle.
According to Pope, the plaza area was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh, the same landscape architect who designed Mill Race Park.
“Richard McCoy has had some conversations with Van Valkenburgh and some other landscape architects,” Pope said at the Columbus Redevelopment Commission’s June 26 meeting. “And so what we’re doing is putting together a RFQ, a request for qualifications. And Richard and Laura will help and get those out in front of some qualified landscape architects, see if this is something that they would be interested in. It’s, in their world, a small project, but still a valuable project to us.”
Some community residents have expressed interest in updating the plazas and specifically making the POW/MIA Plaza more accessible so that viewers don’t have to cross as many lanes of traffic to reach the site, she said.
Ferdon said in a previous interview that the city was approached by a POW/MIA recognition group about potential changes to the north plaza in 2019 and 2020. As the city considered this, they realized that there were a number of stakeholders who should be engaged with the project.
“The sheriff and the police department do a ceremony every year, and ‘Crack the Whip’ (sculpture) is on it,” she said. “So we started just looking at the north side and realized that … the south side of Second Street, the Robert Garton Plaza, is really part of that original plaza design, years ago.”
In considering stakeholder engagement, city officials spoke with Britt Brewer from Indiana University’s J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, which has a class on Community and Coalition Building. In the fall of 2021, Brewer had students interview stakeholders about their opinions of the site and ideas for its future use. This included the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department, the Columbus Police Department, Robert and Barb Garton, and the POW/MIA group.
The purpose of this process, said Ferdon, was to understand how the two plazas are used and how they may be used in the future.
“Once we got that information back from IU, we realized that it would really be great to have someone local who could take that information and synthesize it and help us figure out kind of next steps,” said Ferdon.
This led the city to speak with McCoy and Garrett about having the Landmark Columbus Foundation’s Columbus Design Institute take over the project and create a design development team.
Pope said in a previous interview that the commission could potentially use some of its Tax Increment Financing dollars to fund infrastructure improvements at the site.
