Above the Ground

Collaborators

Ogechi Oseji, Julie Powers, Jainami Shah

There is a disconnect between communities in the Southwest region of Raleigh, its downtown core, and Dorothea Dix Park. Public spaces are isolated, inaccessible, and lack safe crossings over Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard – a major conduit moving east-to-west through the city.

Dix Park was historically a Mental Health Hospital and was intentionally designed as separate from the city. The hospital officially closed in August of 2012, and the land was sold to the city to be turned into a public park. The park has now been coined as the “Central Park of Raleigh”, yet the park’s location is quite decentralized from the city center. Despite the plans to turn Dorothea Dix into a destination park unrivaled among other major city parks across the Southeast, its true connection to the city is insufficient, and isolating.

Our proposal is to create a series of bridges over Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and the Dawson/McDowell St cloverleaf, which will create connections between isolated communities and connect downtown Raleigh to Dorothea Dix Park. 

The bridge system has strategically placed connections to patch holes in the greenway trails and pedestrian accesses throughout Southwest Raleigh. In addition, there is a destination space built up in one of the cloverleafs to provide a space for people to pause and observe the skyline view, and for communities to hold events as a “destination before the destination” of Dix Park.