Jacobs donates $8M to Dallas park expansion project

Dive Brief:

Construction and engineering giant Jacobs is making its mark on civic improvements to its hometown of Dallas, four years after relocating its headquarters there from Pasadena, California.
The firm has donated $8 million to the 1.65-acre expansion of Klyde Warren Park, a 5-acre urban recreation space that opened in 2012. Construction is scheduled to begin in late 2021, with completion in 2024.
Jacobs will name the project’s 36,000-square-foot multi-use west lawn The Jacobs Lawn, and the area will provide additional green space and host a variety of seasonal events such as markets, festivals, a winter ice rink and other forms of recreation for the community.

Dive Insight:

Jacobs participated in the original planning and design of Phase 1 of the park, which is built over a major highway, one of the first “deck parks” in the world. It will also work on the expansion.

The street-level deck over Woodall Rodgers Freeway is made of more than 300 concrete beams arranged in groups with spacing in between the groups. Concrete slabs span the spaces connecting to the bottoms of the beams and forming trenches. The trenches act like planter boxes, allowing the trees to grow to the desired size. A combination of Geofoam and specially-designed soil helps keep the deck from being too heavy, according to the park’s website.

Last month, a Sacramento, California, contractor put its name on a public arena that it had helped to build. Roebbelen Contracting purchased the naming rights sponsorship for the Placer Valley Event Center, part of the $47 million transformation of @the Grounds 55-acre fairgrounds in Roseville, California. Financial terms of the sponsorship were not released.

Roebbelen was the general contractor for the renovation of the 160,000-square-foot center that opened to the public in February. The newly named Roebbelen Center — one of the largest meeting places in the Sacramento region — can accommodate major amateur sports competitions, large meetings, trade shows, concerts and other events.

The Roebbelen Center and The Jacobs Lawn join a handful of other venues named for construction or building product firms. These include:

The Dow Event Center indoor arena in Saginaw, Michigan.
Caterpillar's Dozer Park minor league baseball stadium in Peoria, Illinois.
Fluor Field at the West End minor league baseball stadium in Greenville, South Carolina.
PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, home to the Penguins NHL team.
Rio Tinto MLS soccer stadium near Salt Lake City, Utah, named for the global mining operations company.