Bicentennial Park welcomes visitors at the junction of Macon’s past and future, representing the pain, healing, and hope within the city’s long story
Story by Julia Morrison | Photos by Mike Young
At a chaotic junction in East Macon, there sits an oasis of calm.
Steps away, cars whizz by on their way to somewhere else, perhaps with no sense of place anchoring them. Just over the river from the burgeoning downtown scene, Coliseum Drive moves people. They are ferried across the bridge to the other side of town, onto the perennially in progress interstate, to the soon-to-be-replaced arena for sports and entertainment, and for healing at Piedmont Hospital.
But if one steps away from the bustle of vehicles and construction, there’s a little inlet full of public art, freshly planted trees, a walking trail, benches to rest, and expansive greenspace. Surrounding the park is a community art center, quaintly updated historic cottage homes, and a pedestrian entrance to the Ocmulgee Mounds.
This is Bicentennial Park, a convergence of forces in Macon’s story. As finishing touches are put in place, it weaves itself into the fabric of the city’s history and looks to be a prominent location for its future.
Macon’s original Main Street
Entering the park on Clinton Street, another road branches off in a different direction. This is Main Street, a name that reflects the original founding of Macon.
Many do not realize that the city we know today—built upon lands that had been continuously inhabited for thousands of years by the Muscogee (Creek) people and taken from them during forcible removal—was originally on the east side, developed around Fort Hawkins. Downtown Macon came later, and so this truly was the first Main Street.
The park location was chosen for this reason, because it represents the intersections of Macon’s deeply important Indigenous origins along with the founding of the city in 1823. East Macon’s historic district is also considered a historically Black neighborhood today, with a mix of mid-19th and early 20th-century homes. It also reflects Macon’s industrial mill history, with Bibb Mill #1 once located nearby. Several of the mill homes and the Mill Hill Community Arts Center have since been restored by the Urban Development Authority.
Art and community input create dynamic public space
The Macon200 Bicentennial Committee, co-chaired by Wes Griffith and Alex Habersham with members selected by Mayor Lester Miller, picked the site as its signature project for the 2023 bicentennial celebrations, raising approximately $1 million for the park.
For Macon’s centennial celebration in 1923, the project was creating Macon City Auditorium, which opened in 1925. One of the architects leading the charge for the auditorium was P.E. Dennis. A century later, his great-granddaughter, Wimberly Treadwell, a well-known landscape architect, was selected to design Bicentennial Park in a fitting tribute.
The park design drew from community input from the original Mill Hill project, where East Macon neighbors requested a walking path and an open field for athletics. The Macon200 committee put their stamp on it by using some of the money raised to work with world-class artists for major pieces in the park. Using an open call managed by Macon Arts Alliance, the committee ultimately selected several sculptures that are in the process of installation. The sculptures are meant to enhance Macon’s history.
First to arrive was Ilan Averbuch’s towering boat-like structure in early April, titled “Even Walls Can Move.” Averbuch, whose studio is based in New York, works frequently with recycled materials. The boat, which is partially made up of salvaged local Cherokee Brick, gives an appearance of a brick wall. Metal stick figures appear to carry the vessel, symbolizing community moving history forward.
Averbuch was inspired by his research on the city: “We were very attracted to the history of Macon, the sort of separation between white and Black and Native American. At the same time, I knew some of the musicians that came from Macon, and I did a Google search and was blown away. There is an interaction there, and so I’m thinking, how do we take all this history and move it forward?”
In Averbuch’s view, societal walls like race and class separate us. But his vision hopes to transcend those barriers. “A wall is something that can move, people can move it,” he said during the sculpture installation. “It’s very architectural, but it’s also figurative. You will really feel that there is a movement, a human movement. It’s about community. There are communities on either side of the wall, and they are taking it on a ride. I hope that they will read symbolically into all these images, and with the background of the history of what happened here.”
He added that the boat also alludes to the forces brought people here, from those who arrived as immigrants, to Africans who were enslaved in the Middle Passage, to Indigenous communities travelling the Ocmulgee by canoe.
Next came Kenneth Johnson’s large marble piece over the summer, titled “ECKE – Mother Ground.” Johnson, a Muscogee citizen, says ecke refers to the word mother in the Muscogee language. Created out of Georgia marble, the piece evokes that Macon is built upon the ancestral Muscogee homelands. A female figure is carved into the stone, which Johnson purposefully faced West, towards Oklahoma, where the Muscogee Nation is located after forcible removal from their lands during the Trail of Tears.
Also etched into the stone are the ceremonial fires that the Muscogee carried from here to their settlements in Oklahoma. Below the flames are a circle with four points. “What it represents is the people, that are really the flame spiritually,” said Johnson. “You’re made up of earth, water, fire, winds, the breath in your lungs. You rub your hands together. That heat just shows that you are still alive. That’s what that is, and what it really means is the people are back.”
A fascinating element is the intentionality behind a red color in the design. “There is a special clay that the warriors used to paint themselves before stickball games or before battle. We took that same clay, indigenous to this area, and this is a commercial paint that’s matched to the clay,” Johnson explained. Johnson worked with local sculptor Tanner Coleman, who sent him a sample of the clay. Eventually, Johnson envisions applying that clay on the spot with other Muscogee people on an annual basis, renewing the ritual of his ancestors and tying the work to the Ocmulgee River.
Eventually, there will be a bronze statue of a stickball player standing in front of the mother figure. The field in front of the sculpture is sized to be suitable for the sport, which is similar to lacrosse and has a long history of being played by North American Indigenous tribes. “So there’s duality,” Johnson said about the bronze figure. “The stickball players traditionally are male, but it’s the women who open up the ground, so there is this very male symbol within this mother earth.”
Tracie Revis of Ocmulgee Mounds National Park and Preserve Initiative, who served on the Macon200 committee explained what Johnson’s sculpture meant to her as a Muscogee woman. “I think the representation, for me, reflects so much on the growth that Macon has had over the last couple years,” she said.
“Maon is embracing our history, letting us have a place back in our original homelands. It really does represent a time of reconciliation for our people to come back. Having this here serves to welcome us back home, into our original homeland. But the sculpture also is for Macon, acknowledging what happened in our story.”
A third major piece yet to be installed is by Spanish artist Casto Solano, which will feature cut steel panels with vivid images from historic photographs of Macon on them. Called “The Living Story of Macon,” the panels will feature themes of architecture, transportation, music history, Black excellence, Muscogee culture, and the industrial mill workers.
A fourth sculpture sits at a staircase between the park and Mill Hill Community Arts Center. Made by Macon-based artists Alexis Gregg and Tanner Coleman, this piece is called, “Peace Pole,” and returns home to Macon after a stint on the Beltline in Atlanta. The pole matches other brick elements of the park, and reflects the style of the couple, who specialize in carving and using local brick. Finally, several wind sculptures commissioned by the Urban Development Authority have been installed.
Additionally, Macon Arts Alliance has built a pavilion at the edge of the community arts center this year, inviting community members to bring their events into the outdoors and in view of the park. The pavilion is dedicated in honor of local leader Steven Fulbright, who passed in 2022.
Envisioned by designer Treadwell as “a beautiful passive park to enjoy and reflect,” Bicentennial Park is located not just in a significant place to Macon’s past, but its future. Across from the stickball field, the historic DeWitt-McCrary House is being reenvisioned as a potential Muscogee cultural center. The old Bibb Mill site has plans to become a multimillion-dollar development championed by the mayor, the East Bank project. The Macon Coliseum is being replaced by a new state-of-the-art arena. And Maconites wait on Washington with baited breath in hopes that the Ocmulgee Mounds will soon be designated as Georgia’s first National Park.
The park is poised to be at the center – with vibrant public art on a scale Macon has rarely seen as the anchor of it all.
When asked why the city should invest in art, Averbuch did not hesitate. “It’s like, why plant a tree? These pieces are part of our lives,” he said.
“People hang pictures in the house, in the park, they come for a monument. It has a memory of all kinds of things, and it’s a place for discussion. Sometimes it angers people, sometimes it makes them believe in things, sometimes it moves us forward. I think it’s really important for a place to have public work. You don’t have to have a lot. They mark the land, and they create a focal point in the place. It can be a great source of conversation.”
The land beneath Bicentennial Park has been talking for over 200 years, but it seems like with the new improvements, the conversation is just getting started.
Please note: Julia Morrison served as the marketing chair for the Macon200 Bicentennial Committee and has been working on the plans surrounding the park.
