Fort Monroe is sacred ground to Scott Martin.
Its 565 acres are a blend of rich ecology and centuries of history that, for Martin, the Fort Monroe Authority’s chief executive officer, make it a peer with the country’s most iconic sites.
Fort Monroe is starting a “once-in-a-century” plan to guide the national monument’s development which Martin says will honor and elevate its past while envisioning ways to experience its stories.
Martin calls the process “doggone exciting,” and he’s not the only one who thinks so; four of the world’s leading landscape architecture firms are in consideration to lead a year-long project involving significant public input.
Representatives of the companies – Field Operations, Hargreaves Jones, OLIN Studio and West 8 – will be at Fort Monroe to make TED Talk-style presentations on Oct. 23.
Fort Monroe supports dozens of bird species and hundreds of plants within its seven miles of shoreline. It was a vital hunting ground and trade crossroads for Indigenous peoples living on the Chesapeake; it was a refuge for enslaved people fleeing during the Civil War and the landing point for the first African captives brought to English North America in 1619. It’s been a military fortification since Colonial times and a base for thousands of soldiers over more than a century as an Army installation until 2011.
Now, it’s home to hundreds and a growing roster of businesses, and minutes away from the bustling Phoebus business district in Hampton.
Martin said it’s why he mentions it in the same sentence as some of the most moving and well-planned public sites in the country: Central Park and Governors Island in New York City, the Presidio in San Francisco, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C.
“Frederick Law Olmsted, when he designed Central Park, was the only one who saw the Central Park we see today, how the city was going to grow around this place,” Martin said. “His plan is what spoke to that and shaped it. We have to be the same way.”
It’s been nearly a year since Martin stepped in. He said it was clear from the start the fort’s master plan needed to be updated.
While several components remain useful, it included now-defunct ideas such as an educational institution in the fort's center. The African Landing Memorial Plaza wasn’t factored in at all. Housing and construction costs have skyrocketed, and the COVID-19 pandemic changed how some people work.
“It was built for an environment that doesn’t exist today,” Martin said.
Creating a timeless design, Martin said, will require a “North Star” to inform decisions that ensure new housing, office space and recreation spots accentuate Fort Monroe’s features.
“You have to have a harmonizing approach,” he said. “You’re going to make a thousand decisions that may be very good in that moment, but unless you understand the impact of each one of those cumulative decisions over time and how they relate to the rest of the sites, before you know it, you’ve lost the forest for the trees."
The project has drawn attention from around the globe and the semi-finalists have planned some of the world's most popular public landscapes and memorials.
They include Field Operations, designer of elevated parks at the Presidio and the High Line in New York City; West 8, which retooled a military installation into Governors Island in the New York Harbor; Hargreaves Jones, which helped envision London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park; and OLIN Studio, known for its work at Apple headquarters and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial.
Representatives will share design philosophies and impressions of Fort Monroe with a group of 200 at the old Torpedo Wharf.
The crowd includes leaders in Virginia’s landscape design community such as Virginia Tech’s design school dean Matt Powers, the University of Virginia’s landscape architecture dean Leena Cho and Hampton University’s architecture department director Daya Taylor. They’re also part of the jury considering the firms’ proposals and making a recommendation to the Fort Monroe Authority Board of Trustees..
“It’ll be months before pen hits paper and drawings happen,” he said. “First, you have to listen, learn and understand.”
The selected firm will work with Fort Monroe staff to host public input meetings to help form the plan.
“This is our shot to regionally pivot at this spot and ask how this site serves us in the future,” Martin said.
Fort Monroe officials see another benefit to the planning: new investment.
Virginia provided about $50 million for water and sewer line upgrades. Nearly $20 million in private housing development is underway. The first phase of the African Landing Memorial, Fort Monroe’s first national memorial, is expected to be ready by winter.
But utility issues have slowed some redevelopment projects. A multi-million-dollar marina redevelopment fell through in 2024 because of rising costs. The Fort Monroe Foundation, the authority’s nonprofit partner, has also had limited success at enticing donors.
That could change with the new plan, said Aaz Mrozinski, the foundation’s new executive director.
“There’s going to be a sort of shift in our conversation about how we support the fort philanthropically,” she said. “We’ve got to be comfortable thinking about large numbers and fundraising at scale, and getting people involved at scale.”
Mrozinski spent years working as a fundraiser for startups and venture capital organizations around Hampton Roads.
“It’s about getting as many people onto the landscape as possible to get their take on why they’re excited,” Mrozinski said. “Without the stories, I think it would be much more difficult to make a really strong case for why people should get involved.”
The plan will mean change in a commonwealth that, Martin notes, isn’t always eager to accept it. He’s confident, through careful listening and respect for Fort Monroe’s legacy, that people will be open to new ideas that will transform the place into a national destination that competes with the best.
“I took this job and came home to Virginia because I think Virginia should not only be in this room, I think Virginia should lead this room,” Martin said. “We used to do it; we can do it again.”
