Amid a healthy dose of controversy, Mayor Vince Gray and other city officials celebrated the groundbreaking of Chuck Brown Memorial Park this afternoon—-not coincidentally, the late Brown’s birthday. The park, located within Langdon Park, will not have a 900-seat amphitheater, as earlier planned. Nor will it have a 200-seat amphitheater, as later amended. In fact, it won’t have any amphitheater at all, not even the dinky one that exists there now.

So what will it have? After plans for the amphitheater were scrapped, it appeared that there would be no musical or performance element at all in the memorial to the Godfather of Go-Go. But since then, the designers of the park have tossed a bone to outraged Brown devotees. In addition to a memorial wall and a central plaza, the park will feature “outdoor toy drums.”

“It is going to still be a memorial, so you want to keep some musical element to it,” says Department of Parks and Recreation Chief of Staff John Stokes.

Below is the architectural concept selected by the city, as prepared by Marshall Moya Design. What do you think?

[documentcloud url=”https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/777955-chuck-brown-concept-1.html”]

Rendering from Marshall Moya Design