The Atlanta park where a bomb killed a woman and injured 111 people during the 1996 Summer Olympics reopened Saturday as the largest urban U.S. park built in the past 20 years.
"It's a great, great urban park," said Joseph Brown, president and chief executive officer of EDAW Inc., the San Francisco-based landscape architecture company that designed the original and now hugely expanded Centennial Olympic Park."It is as important to Atlanta as Central Park was for New York."
The park's redesign includes the Olympic water fountain with towers of lights plus new water gardens linking five plazas laid out like quilts to weave together the story of the Centennial Olympic Games.
One plaza features a lighted glass marker "to illuminate the sacrifice" of a Georgia woman killed by the bomb during the Centennial Olympic Games, Brown said. The person who planted the bomb, hidden in a knapsack, has not been apprehended.
Brown compared the enlarged Centennial Olympic Park to those built in the days of 19th century landscape architect and writer Frederick Law Olmsted, who built New York City's Central Park.
He designed other late 19th century parks in North America and a series of parks connecting greenways throughout Atlanta.
"The parks of the late 1800s were seen as green lungs, because you had this mass of immigration crowding into cities, and the cities were changing so fast that the buildings didn't really suit the people," Brown said.
"Today, parks have to be a brain and a heart, something more vibrant. They can't just be a green lung because green lungs have become unsafe places for the homeless.
"Parks with music and water and lights are a different thing," he said. "It's a new century."
Whether the park with grass, trees and a hiking trail will draw people downtown on weekends remains to be seen. It also has some areas of concrete and stone, unpleasant in scorching Georgia summers. But the park will draw weekday crowds because it is on a section of long-neglected property surrounded by Coca-Cola's world headquarters, Georgia Tech, the Georgia World Congress Center, the Georgia Dome, Atlanta's hotel and financial district, Cable News Network and Georgia State University.
"We saw this void in the middle of Atlanta," Brown said. "You had CNN, Coca-Cola, Georgia Tech, the downtown buildings and this void. This void is now Centennial Park. It is vibrant, and it pulls all the strings together."
It is the largest inner city park built in the United States in the past 20 years.
Saturday's park festivities included marching bands, autograph signings by Olympic athletes and concerts, including one by singer Ray Charles and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.