PRISON YARDS

Team Members:

Charles Dillard, Julie Barghout, Pam Chance, Paul Horne, Marianne Kwok, Eileen McDonough, Reid Saunders, Jennifer Truman

Team Prison Yards is a double play on words that draws inspiration from New York City’s Hudson Yards project, by proposing a platform over the site’s existing rail infrastructure, as well as proposing a reverential and memorializing open space at the site of the historic prison wall that serves as the center point along a spine, or “river” of green, urban, open spaces connecting Dix Park to points Downtown and the train and future bus station. This spine then serves as the armature, along with an extended historic, Christmas city street grid, for an urban intensification that accommodates a new Governor Morehead school, residential, office, retail, potentially tech based urban farming and light manufacturing uses, as well as open spaces and numerous transit stations. Team Prison Yards imagines how a city with no need for prisons and that is designed for all residents might look and feel. This is a proposal for a city where social connectivity is reinforced both vertically and horizontally across the site to create opportunity rather than segregation, criminalization, and incarceration.