Here’s something that gets forgotten in all of the discussion about reconstructing Zink Dam and building a new pedestrian bridge: the $465 million park sitting next to those structures isn’t done.

The Gathering Place is not finished. Anyone who uses the River Parks trail on the west side of the park knows this. Look west from the trail through the chain link fence and it’s apparent that there is no plaza onto which the new pedestrian bridge could land and that the promised north bump out is yet to be completed.

But they will be, along with the new pedestrian bridge, in about 28 months, in time for the opening of the rebuilt Zink Dam, which the city began working on in mid-August.

The city has allocated $27.4 million for the new pedestrian bridge. The plaza and bump out are part of the privately funded park.

Demolition of the old pedestrian bridge is scheduled for late October or November.

“We still have to finish out the (river) bank of the Gathering Place, which is the plaza area where the bridge will actually land in the Gathering Place,” said Jeff Stava, director and trustee of Tulsa’s Gathering Place LLC. “It is a large stone, open plaza to accept people and assimilate them onto the trail.”

The QuikTrip Riverview Lawn, as the bump out will be known, will be an open space where people can picnic, throw a Frisbee, kick a soccer ball or just hang out. And the incline from the base of the lawn to the main park area above will provide a natural seating space for people to enjoy concerts and other performances on the lawn below.

It is not lost on Stava that Riverview Lawn will sit alongside a river that, as recently as last year, flooded. So the design of the lawn has been simplified, and the riprap protecting the perimeter of the lawn will be elevated between 1 and 2 feet.

“We are excited to finish the nearly five acres of the Gathering Place along the east bank of the Arkansas River,” Stava said. “It is the part of the park that will allow Tulsans the ability to get down near the water’s edge.”

Three years ago, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, on behalf of the Gathering Place, won a city-sponsored design competition to build the bridge. The winning design, called the Gateway Bridge, will replace the pedestrian bridge that has spanned the Arkansas River for more than a century.

MVVA and the other finalist in the competition, KKT Architects, were asked to present designs for a bridge that could be built for $24.5 million — and a $3 million contingency — and one that could be built for $35 million.

Stava said that for now the plan is to build the base model of the bridge with the $27.4 million the city has allocated for the project. But he insists that nothing about it will be ordinary.

“It is the very first steel plate multiarch bridge ever built in the United States,” he said. “That’s a pretty big deal.”

The surface of the bridge’s 18-foot-wide deck will be the same rock aggregate found on walkways inside the Gathering Place, and handrail lights will illuminate the deck at night.

The new bridge will not have a fishing dock.

“The bridge will be higher than the other bridge, so it is going to be very difficult for people to fish off of it,” Stava said.

The new pedestrian bridge will not be the exact one Tulsans were shown in renderings when Mayor G.T. Bynum announced that the Gateway Bridge had won the design competition. Those drawings were of the $35 million version of the structure, which included wood decking, shading, benches, vegetation and canopy to shield people from the sun.

Stava said building a canopy or other sun shield over the deck would simply be too expensive. His hope is that construction bids will come in low enough that money will be available to install the up-lighting shown in the renderings and some kind of benches.

If the $27.4 million in public funding for the project is not sufficient to pay for those amenities, the city and the Gathering Place will determine whether they want to try to raise private money for the up-lighting, benches and any other features they would like included in the project. No private funding has been secured yet.

Bynum has said previously that the city would not put more public dollars into the project.

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Throwback Tulsa, Sept. 8, 2018: Building Gathering Place