Article:By K. Schipper

Client: City of Birmingham, Mich.
Project Manager: Wade Trim & Associates, Detroit
Landscape Architect: Michael J. Dul and Associates, Birmingham, Mich.
Stone Supplier/Installer: Rockworks LLC, Lake Orion, Mich.
Landscape Contractor: Tom’s Landscaping, Troy, Mich.

BIRMINGHAM, Mich. - Sometimes a project is more than a project. Although slow getting started, the approximately $1 million renovation of Booth Park really brought the community together, and even those paid to do the work say it was a remarkable process.

About the only thing that didn't cooperate was the weather, as completion of what was supposed to be approximately a three-month project stretched to four under heavier-than-average rains.

While a formal dedication will wait until mid-2007, Bob Fox, the city of Birmingham's assistant director of public services, says the approximately three-acre site is now ready to serve the role identified for it in a 2016 masterplan as a gateway to the north.

It's a big improvement for a property that once contained a roundhouse for an interurban rail system and later served as a staging area for a major storm sewer system upgrade. Fox explains that after the trolley system shut down in the 1920s, the Booth family, who donated it to the city for park space in the 1940s, bought the property. However, the space was underutilized for years.

"There was a baseball field on it, but not much else," says Fox. "Then, in the 1990s, when the city undertook a huge combined sewer overflow project, Booth Park was a staging area for that project. Afterwards, we put some play equipment in there, but the baseball field was eliminated."

Despite the site's identification in the 2016 master plan as a gateway, the property sat - in Fox's words - "fallow" until a combination of events earlier this decade. One was the city's 2001 passage of a $25 million bond issue for recreational improvements and the other was a lobbying effort by a local doctor named Timothy Page who approached the city parks and recreation board with the idea of having a community-built play structure at Booth Park.

Following the master plan, Fox says his office proceeded to hire the Detroit-based Wade Trim & Associates to do site plan drawings for Booth Park. At the same time, a community group interested in the future of the park enlisted the help of the locally based Michael J. Dul and Associates to incorporate Dr. Page's idea into a park plan.
"We made a presentation to the city commission," Fox explains. "Simultaneously, the community group made its pitch to the city commission for a more-sophisticated plan. The city commission approved that plan, and the decision was made to retain Wade Trim as our consulting engineer and landscape architects on the project, and have Michael J. Dul be a subcontractor under our general engineering firm. That's the way it morphed into what we have."

Jim Page, a senior associate with Dul, says that firm was originally brought in by the local group to give the playground some context.

"We really didn't want the playground to look like a timber-town on a field," says Page. "We worked at giving the community-built playground a site and a place to sit so it looked like it fit in, rather than standing out."
While the playground was the first issue to be considered, Page says community support was present for other amenities, as well, including a sledding hill – quite a challenge on essentially a flat plot of ground. The volunteer group also wanted the project to utilize natural materials.

"That's where stone first came in," says Page. "We wanted it to fit in using natural materials, and we needed stone for walls to retain the slopes. We also were able to play with stone through such things as wave walls and a labyrinth garden. Those were the things that went into the early design."

To assist with that part of the project, Dul brought in the Lake Orion, Mich.-based Rockworks LLC. Rockworks' designer and installer, Ray Rogers, says the two firms have collaborated for more than 20 years.

"They bring us in for consultations on what kind of stone to use and how we think it will look," he says. "In this case, I did some sketches and assisted them with it."

After having Michael J. Dul and Associates added to the design team, Rockworks was selected as the stone supplier, while Tom's Landscaping of Troy, Mich., was selected as the landscape contractor .
Dick Angell, who managed the project for Tom's Landscaping, says his company typically does a lot of corporate headquarters locations.

"We usually try to pick up a few projects of this size with this kind of involvement each year," he says. "This is one we were lucky enough to get the nod on."

Groundbreaking for the job came in late June, and one of the first tasks for Tom's was shaping the site.
"We moved roughly 10,000-11,000 yards of soil," Angell estimates. "When we started it was a flat site, and now the topographical changes are anywhere up to 20 feet. It required a lot of contouring, which makes the site interesting."

For Rogers, the labyrinth garden required plenty of thought, since the feature incorporates large flat pieces of granite weighing up to 15 tons each and standing on edge.

"We came up with the brackets and the footings," says Rogers. "We came up with them, and we found the right stone. We're in a climate that has a lot of freeze-thaw in our winters, so we had to find granite of a massive formation with not a lot of fracturing."

He admits that finding just the right stone for this portion of the project involved some research. After looking at several Canadian quarries, he contacted a quarry he'd never visited before.

"At first, it didn't sound aesthetically pleasing, but when I got there it was beautiful and exactly what I wanted," he says. "Plus the quarry owner was very receptive to trying to produce these pieces, which was very important."
Still, he says for him the biggest part of the job was going back and forth to the quarry to see what was being produced and then getting the stones trucked to the Rockworks yard for a mockup and further fabrication.

"I spent more time on this than I would have on a typical project," Rogers says. While getting the right stones for the labyrinth garden was important, equally critical was getting them mounted correctly. Rogers notes that the accepted way, especially where freeze-thaw isn't much of a problem, is simply to bury half the stone in the ground. In this case, there was no desire to truck stones that large to the site.

Instead, Rogers -- working with the engineers at Wade Trim -- came up with a method for mounting the rocks that involved drilling through them and installing galvanized steel rods. A bracket system was then designed to pull down into the footings, with a second pour of concrete going in over the brackets.

"This design to develop the foundation and connection details best accommodated the anticipated construction methods and schedule, as well as minimized costs," says David Anthony, who supervised the project for Wade Trim. "It certainly permitted an easier installation for the contractor, and we continued to work closely during construction to modify the design to accommodate the actual dimensions o the stone pieces and the field conditions."

"We cut the bottoms off the rocks, so they're only 14" below grade," Rogers explains. "We had 42" footings - twice as wide as the rock - then we bracketed them down with that second pour of concrete. I'm confident they're not going to move."

Installing the rocks for the project didn't take all that long, either. Rogers says digging the footings took a day, doing the first pour of concrete took another day, and the 64 tons of rocks were set with two large pieces of equipment in one day.

Dul's Page says there was a single casualty in the process. One of the large pieces broke, but it was set anyway, and to the designer's mind helps finish the look of the labyrinth.

"The men had to make quick decisions on which stone went where, with which face out, but we had the pieces numbered and we knew basically where they were going," says Page. "We broke a boulder setting it, but instead of taking it back we just let it sit broken. It looks very natural and I like that it broke. It turned out interesting and sort of spontaneous."

Both Page and Rogers say that some parts of the stone, where edges were left a little "new" because of excavation or from setting the rods, were then flamed to make them look like they've been weathering on the site for centuries.

The labyrinth garden also includes smaller boulders for children to climb. Rogers says he selected boulders that were round and fairly smooth.

Much of the rest of the masonry side of Booth Park was a bit more traditional. Rockworks was also responsible for all the masonry walls in the park, which include retaining walls for the newly shaped topography, the wave wall, and stone walkways, including stairs and a ramp.

Although the walls were initially going to be granite, they were later value-engineered to a Lake Superior limestone due to cost.

"The masonry walls are stacked, machine split limestone that was well engineered," says Rogers. "I was involved in selecting their look, and they're intended to look dry-laid, even though they're on concrete footings. They wanted them stacked with a deep rake joint. The veneer is up to 14" in depth, and we used hardly any mortar."
The stairs are natural slab stone steps.

Because of the changes in elevation at the site, drainage was also an issue. Tom's Landscaping's Angell says that company installed a variety of structures to drain the site.

"We put in almost 5,000 lineal feet of drainage, mostly tile that was tied to the drainage structures," Angell says. "We have a bio-retention system that was incorporated into the project."

The park doesn't incorporate any special water features besides a spray feature in the play area, and lighting is a low-voltage system designed to reduce light pollution and discourage after-dark use.

However, the park does incorporate the community-built playground envisioned years ago by the first community activists. The city's Fox calls it, "Disneyland of the North," and the labyrinth garden is only one of its numerous features.

"There are various play structures," he explains. "There are musical instruments children can play and a big sandbox and a replicated trolley that closely resembles the trolleys that used to go up and down Woodward Avenue. Another is a replicated gristmill that was near here more than a century ago. There's also a replica of a hose-drying tower from the fire hall that was uptown at the turn of the last century. Those will be highlighted with original photos and plaques."

The playground was designed following an all-day planning session with children from two local schools and their parents conducted by the Ithaca, N.Y.-based Leathers & Associates in December 2005.

Leathers then developed plans for that portion of the project. The actual structures were erected by literally hundreds of volunteers the week of Labor Day.

Wade Trim's Anthony says that weeklong event really drove much of the construction schedule.
"We had a real tight time frame to get the project ready for the September community build of the playground facility," Anthony says. "We also had to coordinate the work of Leathers & Associates." He adds that because of the comparatively small size of the site, the presence of the various trades involved also had to be carefully coordinated.

Fox says seeing the play structures go up in less than a week, pulled together by professionals and skilled laborers and even grandmothers working side-by-side truly brought Birmingham together.

"It's been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career," he says. "That week, especially, but the whole project is just incredible."

Although rain delayed completion of a donor wall and some seeding until November, those involved agree with the city official that the Booth Park project is one-of-a-kind.

"It was a complicated project," agrees Anthony. "The success is that there was a commitment on the part of the contractor, the design team and the city to get it built. When you have that level of cooperation and commitment, it's hard to go off track."

Fox says the new park will be dedicated in June.