Jenny Park pointed across the street to Miller Park, which was mostly concealed because it sits in a bowl surrounded by steep hills on all sides.
"If you look out, you can't see what going on in the park," said Park, the strategic capital planner of the city. "A lot of people find that intimidating. It's not a welcoming thing to walk into a pit."
Several residents have told the city the Miller Park ground should be level with the street, Park said. That way, the park would actually be visible from the street and people would know it's a public space.
Ideas like this were exchanged Thursday night at Waterhouse Pavilion as representatives from Spackman Mossop+Michaels led a brainstorming session open to the public. There will be two more 90-minute public sessions at 8 a.m. and noon today.
The city, backed by River City Co. and the Benwood Foundation, recently allocated $3 million so Miller Park and nearby Patten Parkway can be upgraded.
What's the purpose of these workshops?
"It's certainly for us to hear from the community what their thoughts and their ideas are," said Emily Bullock, a landscape architect with the company.
The roughly 40 people who attended the workshop were split into three smaller groups, and then talked about things they like to do in Chattanooga and things they wish they could do. They mapped out walking and biking paths they use, and a few people talked about how much Chattanooga has grown since the park was first built almost 40 years ago.
"The streets used to be dangerous," one man said. "People didn't want to come downtown when the park was first built."
"And polluted," another man sitting next to him added. "Chattanooga was known for it's pollution."
Spackman Mossop+Michaels, who has primarily built projects in the New Orleans area and Australia, will now look at the hundreds of notecards and handful of maps and use the raw information for research purposes, Bullock said.
"We want to show a park doesn't have to be 'this' or 'that,'" she said. "A good park can be many different things at different times of the day, or different times of the year."
The New Orleans-based company was brought in to revamp Miller Park, which hasn't had major renovations since it's construction in 1976.
The design of Miller Park is still in it's infancy, as the workshops are meant to gain preliminary information from Chattanooga residents about what they'd like to see happen to the park.
Whatever the design ends up being for the park, Park said construction will begin in the summer of 2016.
Contact staff writer Evan Hoopfer at ehoopfer@timesfree press.com or @EvanHoopfer on Twitter or 423-757-6731.