WORDS Brent Rosen
The botanical garden project in Oak Park is the municipal equivalent of putting $20,000 worth of rims on a $10,000 car. Botanical Gardens are something to invest in when your city already has everything; they are an amenity, not a necessity. Money spent on the botanical garden is money unspent on other projects — city funds are not limitless, and a botanical garden is not cheap. You can’t just send out a jump-suited city works crew with a couple of hoses and expect to maintain anything worth visiting. You need horticulturists, scientists, dedicated full-time gardeners, and that expertise does not come cheap. I grew up in St. Louis, where we have a world-class botanical garden, and that facility’s compensation budget alone is $25,000,000.
Now you may be saying, “but we aren’t trying to build the Missouri Botanical Garden (79 acres), but something on a smaller scale (9 acres) so the people of Montgomery can enjoy the benefits of a botanical garden.” So what are those benefits? The facebook page for “Montgomery Botanical Gardens at Oak Park” lists the following as its stated goals for the facility: “A destination for those traveling through Montgomery and for our citizenry, a natural science-based educational experience, a role model for environmentally-sound, sustainable horticultural practices, an important and profitable venue for events and functions, a plant-collections-based living museum, [and] a museum of Alabama outdoor art.”
Those benefits sound awfully familiar. In fact, I think we already have somewhere that presents all those benefits — EAT South’s farms downtown and at Hampstead. If anyone had asked, EAT South would have gladly partnered on this project, dedicating unused acreage for a rose garden or some display of indigenous flora. Instead, we now have two projects with similar missions and similar goals fighting over limited fundraising dollars. Awesome.
Yes, I am biased on this subject (see adjacent disclaimer), but that doesn’t change the fact we are building an expensive, duplicative public works project that, from the start, is not intended to be world class. So, what’s the point of doing this? I direct your attention to 2013’s most infuriating sentence, courtesy of our partner al.com’s November 7, 2013, article on the groundbreaking of the botanical garden:
“Currently, Montgomery is the only city out of the four largest in the state without a botanical gardens.”
There you have it — we need a botanical garden because everyone else has one. Does it make sense? Who cares. Do we have a Drummond or McWane or Harbert paying for it? Who knows. Does Montgomery have any historical connection to botanical gardens? What difference does that make. These are unimportant questions, because “botanical gardens.”
While I think a botanical garden makes no sense, I agree that Oak Park should be further developed. Right now the park is best known for African-American picnics during the day and white men cruising for anonymous gay sex at night. With its prime real estate, highway access, and the interesting surrounding neighborhoods off of Mulberry St. and Highland Ave, the right project could be a major catalyst for the entire neighborhood. But the right project has to ask the right questions, and the most important question is how can Montgomery set itself apart? How can our city present something to the world you can’t get anywhere else?
One idea immediately comes to mind. Why not build the best civil rights museum in America somewhere in Oak Park? No other city has our historical legacy: from slavery to Martin Luther King, characters like Rosa Parks and George Wallace, even the recent efforts of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Other places have some of this history — Birmingham, Memphis, small towns across Mississippi — but none have it all. The Civil Rights story is Montgomery’s story, and while we have some commemorative markers, the Rosa Parks Library, and the Civil Rights Memorial near the Southern Poverty Law Center, we could fold all of that together, expand everything into a permanent collection, solicit traveling exhibitions, and create one world class museum and education center.
Beyond our historical legacy, here are another few reasons this project makes sense. First, the museum would essentially touch Alabama State’s Campus. While that university is (literally) criminally mismanaged, it still has the faculty, graduate students, and mission needed to make a major civil rights museum in Montgomery an academic center for both historical scholarship and current research into civil rights issues. Next, Oak Park is in a historical, predominantly African American neighborhood, surrounded by African American businesses, and within walking distance of a number of majority African American schools. A civil rights museum could be the centerpiece of a thriving African American neighborhood in a way no botanical garden could ever be. Also, Montgomery is only a few hours from many other Southern cities (read Atlanta), and a major civil rights museum could be a major tourist draw. The money brought in from outside Montgomery will be spent not just on Mulberry Street and Highland Ave, but also in our downtown entertainment district.
Finally, we are coming up on the 60th Anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott inspired by Rosa Parks. Why not hire a development officer and use the time between now and 2015 to raise money across the United States? Go to Atlanta, Memphis, Charlotte, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington. Meet with leaders across the United States and let the rest of the United States pay for our museum. There is no better national fundraising hook than a civil rights museum in the home of Rosa Parks, especially if that museum will break ground on the 60th anniversary of her refusal to move to the back of the bus. Have fundraising concerts, dinners in every major Southern City, newspaper advertisements and interviews with national media. Get the word out, and the development will do itself. An effort like this will put Montgomery in the national conversation, and once you reach that status, success on every level becomes easier. Either that, or build a botanical garden — maybe the rose garden can hide the pool the city drained in 1959.
It takes no vision to try and civically keep up with the Joneses, and without this, Montgomery will continue to lurch from one half-hearted attempt at being more like somewhere else to another, never making Montgomery into “Montgomery.” A world-class, nationally renowned civil rights museum could happen here. We have all the building blocks, and this is a project we can execute better than any other city in America. We have the perfect site in Oak Park and a historic Rosa Parks anniversary to work with. This project just works. My hope for 2014 is that our city stops its infuriating attempts to be more like everywhere else, when all Montgomery needs to be successful is unashamed of itself.