POINT PLEASANT, W.Va. -- It's an off day, but Charles Humphreys switches on the sound system at Point Pleasant's riverfront. Shouts and the crack of gunfire can be heard in the background while a narrator tells a story about the Battle of Point Pleasant, a story depicted in vivid color along the floodwall facing the Ohio River, very close to where the battle was fought.
Then Humphreys turns and watches the face of a young boy who had been eating lunch at the river with his family.
The boy is captivated, and that's exactly what Humphreys, director of the Mason County Development Authority, and others in the Point Pleasant community had in mind when planning events along their riverfront.
They're $7 million into a $10 million riverfront development project that includes a concrete amphitheater, a pavilion, floodwall art featuring key times in Point Pleasant's history and a sound system to bring it all to life for school children, families and tourists.
That makes Point Pleasant a local example of the cities across the country that are, or already have, taken their riverfronts and made them more than just a beautiful scene for a walk, picnic or a concert.
It's a topic that Huntington community members are invited to discuss during a public forum at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25, at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena conference room. Community leaders who have a role or interest in riverfront development will be there to answer questions about short-term and long-term possibilities for improving Harris Riverfront Park.
Point Pleasant is making its riverfront into series of vivid, action-filled history lessons. Memphis, Tenn., has turned its Mississippi riverfront into attractive, walkable green space and is working toward a public plaza.
Dubuque, Iowa, has put $188 million into its riverfront so far, filling in the sides of its floodwall to make it a raised walking path and adding a museum, aquarium, amphitheater, plaza and more.
They all went through different processes to accomplish their goals, with a few factors in common: It took time, it required a plan, and it took focus by someone or a group of people dedicated and relentless to the projects to make something happen.
Here are a couple examples of how they did it:
Just upstream
In Point Pleasant, the focus is education, said Humphreys, who directs both the county development authority and the city's Main Street organization.
Along with taking on the development of a one-mile stretch of the riverfront, the city has refurbished an old boating supply store into the Point Pleasant River Museum and renovated another old building into a visitors center.
Also on Point Pleasant's list of attractions is a charming Main Street, and there's no excluding the story of the Mothman, the mystical creature that reportedly appeared to warn of the Silver Bridge collapse. There's a Mothman museum and statue, where tourists like to get their picture taken.
But the river is where it's at. If you spend much time with Humphreys in this city about 40 miles northeast of Huntington, you learn pretty quickly that the Ohio River is what made the area an attractive home to the Shawnee and other tribes. It's what carried George Washington past, the man credited with naming the city, which originally was Pleasant Point.
This is the education embedded in community members like Humphreys that he wants to ensure is passed along to children.
"It will be a complete historic park in a mile-long riverfront development," Humphreys said. "It needs to be educational. ...It brings school kids, and it brings money."
The Battle of Point Pleasant is already depicted on one section of the floodwall, and a 220-foot depiction of the Shawnee Indians' way of life is in the works. Also planned are depictions of Lord Dunmore's War, of "Mad" Ann Bailey, a woman who served as scout during the Revolutionary War, and of Daniel Boone's years in Mason County.
"You don't have to be into history," Humphreys said. "It's going to be such interesting stuff that the average person will love it. ...When people leave here, they'll know their history."
The city also is planning two trails and has been donated a historic house near the riverfront, which it will refurbish. Also on its list of sights to see are a Farm Museum and Fort Randolph.
"We hope to bring scouts to camp at Fort Randolph and then go see the history lessons along the river. We have lessons all over at the river museum, the Mothman museum," Humphreys said.
He envisions a project on a much larger scale that draws on the strengths of several cities along the Ohio River, on the Ohio and West Virginia sides, stretching from the Weirton area to the Huntington-Ironton-Ashland area. That's 277 miles of the upper to mid Ohio Valley, he said.
He sees cities on either side of the river taking turns at hosting excursion boats, but all pulling together to make sure that passengers get the most fulfilling and educational sight-seeing as they travel the river. He envisions it being called the Ohio River Heritage Trail.
"We'd collaborate the whole season," he says. And the entire trip could provide an educational story of the area's history.
"If I were Huntington, I would do the history of the C&O Railroad -- that's what started Huntington," he said.
The region's cities working together could help snag some federal dollars, he added.
"If you're going after a grant and you're part of 'The Ohio River Heritage Trail,' they'll say, 'We want to help with that.' "
Point Pleasant already is the No. 1 stop in the Ohio Valley for big excursion boats, such as the Delta Queen, the American Queen and the River Barge Explorer, Humphreys said. Between school groups and tour boats, it's had more than 10,000 visitors this year, Humphreys said.
"We have a lot of things happening here, and the beauty of it is that we all work together," he said. "There hasn't been one squabble."
What helps the fort and the river museum also helps the riverfront. And they're both quite busy. The fort was packed with scouts a couple weekends ago, and the river museum has kids through it all the time.
"Kids come here with school groups and can't wait to bring their parents back," said Jack Fowler, executive director of the museum, which opened in stages beginning in 2003 and soon will build an addition with an aquarium featuring 32 species of Ohio and Kanawha river fish.
"We're very active," Humphreys said. "We have the next five years planned out, and we work hard every day to keep it going."
Along the Mississippi
In Memphis, it started with some pushing from the mayor in 1991.
"He thought to continue the revitalization of downtown, we needed to extend that to the riverfront," said Dorchelle Spence, communications director for the Riverfront Development Corporation in Memphis. "It had become primarily industrial with a couple wonderful civic parks. He wanted to take advantage of the riverfront and include amenities along the area."
So he contacted the Waterfront Center, a national nonprofit that works on waterfront development, Spence said. With the help of the center, the city then hosted a series of focus groups about what residents wanted to do to reclaim six miles of connected riverfront.
"Everybody thought we should do something positive along the riverfront, but nobody knew exactly what should happen," Spence said. So the mayor appointed a commission that visited four cities with waterfront projects: Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville and Indianapolis.
"What we heard over and over is that you need an entity separate from government that focuses solely on this (topic)," Spence said. "It needed to be nonprofit so that you could focus not only on one area, but raise funds and leverage public dollars with private investment to develop the kind of riverfront you want."
It was 1998 by the time this started, she said. "The first six or seven years, the mayor had tried to do it internally (with very little movement)," Spence said. "The fallacy he found in that is if there's no single entity in charge of it, it happens in spurts but there's no overall plan for it and there's no one pushing it forward."
The appointed commission became founding board members of the Riverfront Development Corporation, and they developed a master plan for the riverfront. The organization has a contract with the city to manage and develop public and green spaces along the river but does not own anything. "So anything and everything we do must be approved by the mayor and council so it's a very political, public process," Spence said.
They've rehabilitated parks and put in a trail system. It also manages and has made improvements to Mud Island River Park, which is in its 26th year and features trails and a museum. It's also reworked traffic patterns to improve access.
Now Memphis is embarking on its first large-scale project, Beale Street Landing, a $30 million public plaza. It takes a mix of retail, office and residential space for a sustainable development, especially in urban settings, Spence said.
About $10 million of the funding for that has come from state and federal sources while $20 million has come from local sources, and the group is moving through the permit process now.
At this point, there's no statistical evidence about its impact on the economy, but there is some anecdotal evidence, Spence said.
"Several developers who are building projects now came to our organization and asked, 'What are plans for the riverfront, and if we build here, how does that connect over here?' " she said. "We believe it's an economic driver from that standpoint."
7-day Archive
