Barrett Kays & Associates - Southern Living News Article

When New Yorkers needed help with the Great Lawn of Central Park—trampled and ravaged by concert crowds and a Mass celebrated by the Pope—did they turn to a fellow New Yorker?

No, they came South to Tar Heel country, seeking Barrett Kays of Raleigh. He faced the hardscrabble patchwork of gravel and crushed grass—even vast sinkholes as deep as 5 feet—and clearly visualized solutions for its future. The soft-spoken soil scientist, with a Ph.D from North Carolina State, heads Barrett Kays and Associates, P.A., a small but widely respected environmental and engineering consulting firm. And he possesses a knack for creating the toughest natural soil and turf this side of a Carolina Panthers practice field.

"There are not too many soil scientists who deal primarily with urban issues," Barrett says, explaining how an Oklahoma native with North Carolina ties won the New York project. "There are still less than a dozen in the country and, at that time, maybe three."

Barrett started digging holes in the Great Lawn when the Central Park Conservancy— a private-public partnership set up in 1980—hired him to do the work. The goal: make the Great Lawn strong enough to withstand the yearly abuse taken by the 55-acre central gathering spot in America's largest city.

New Yorkers use the Great Lawn for such activities as baseball, softball, soccer, operas, orchestra performances, dog parades, hot-air balloon launches, movie showings, and cathedral services.

In 1842, the famous acreage became the Croton Reservoir. By the 1930s, city planners drained and filled the reservoir with rubble from city construction sites and capped it with dirt and topsoil. In 1936, the Lawn joined the urban park enjoyed by multitudes.

When Barrett first began working on the project in 1984, he discovered the reservoir-turned-park had reverted to its old watery ways, filling underground with more than 100 million gallons of water, or enough to cover 24 acres in 30-plus-foot-deep water.

"When it rained, the rainwater didn't drain very well, and the lawn became a giant mud bath sometimes during concert events," explains Barrett. His detection of the subsurface problems set the restoration plans back a decade while the Central Park Conservancy worked to raise funds to fix the situation.

In 1994, Barrett traveled back to the Big Apple as part of a $71 million restoration effort, with more than $18 million earmarked for the Great Lawn alone. The Raleigh consultant's improvements involved lowering the water table without destabilizing the soil cap or harming hundreds of trees with shallow root systems. Then he had several feet of custom Barrett Kays-engineered soil installed along with a new state-of-the-art drainage system.

Next, the Barrett Kays and Associates team redesigned and restored Belvedere Lake, formerly known as Turtle Pond, which had literally choked on contaminated ground water and erosion. Schoolchildren now study and enjoy the beautifully revitalized wetland and pond. Ultimately, 55 acres of the restored and improved park benefited from the team's touch.

"It was really a fun project to work on," he says, smiling. "There are just so many people who use the Great Lawn."

Barrett inherited his green thumb from his father, Raymond, a professor of horticulture at Oklahoma State University. Known as "Mr. Oklahoma Gardening," the elder Kays hosted a weekly television gardening show when he wasn't leading tours of European gardens for Southern Living readers during the 1960s and 1970s.

Both Barrett and his older brother, Stanley, followed in their father's footsteps as OSU horticulture majors and competed against each other for the best grade in their father's exacting, systematic horticulture class. Stan now teaches horticulture at The University of Georgia.

Barrett, however, trod a different dirt path. After graduating from OSU in 1971, he earned a master's degree in landscape architecture from N.C. State in 1973. A teaching job kept him there until 1975, when he earned a doctorate in soil science. By 1979, the transplanted North Carolinian owned his own consulting firm. Today, Barrett Kays & Associates has 15 employees and billings of over $25 million. The group includes a variety of professionals, such as landscape architects, engineers, and environmental scientists who specialize in dealing with projects involving complicated ecological and environmental contamination issues.

Although they consult all over the country, the team's talents often better North Carolina soil. At Duke University, Jim Spangler, a principal in the firm and a Duke graduate, helped prevent an Orange County landfill in Duke Forest.

"Much of the Duke Forest is located in Orange County," Barrett says. "[The local government] wanted to take one of the most famous research forests in North America and turn it into a landfill. Our job was to protect the Duke Forest and guarantee its long-term protection." They did so by consulting with the university about its involvement with such federal entities as NASA. Those connections allowed Duke to enter its property into federal easements. "The local Orange County government couldn't condemn private property that was federally protected," Barrett says.

Currently, his company has assisted O'Brien Atkins with developing the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, making it accessible from the Blue Ridge Parkway (through a new 1.5-mile entrance road gently paralleling and crossing a trout stream), yet ensuring the surrounding environment remains unspoiled.

We are doing both environmental and engineering work in building the arboretum," he says. "The new entrance roadway and parking system we designed involves $6 million in improvements."

And then there's Centennial Campus at N.C. State in Raleigh. Hurricane Fran destroyed the dam that keeps the campus's Lake Raleigh filled. University officials hired Barrett Kays and Associates, who consulted with Land Design, to engineer a full environmental restoration solution for the campus centerpiece and surrounding wetlands by the year 2000. When it's completed, the 65-acre lake will provide an environmental laboratory for the university and a wetland and lake as the central aesthetic focal point for the 982-acre Centennial Campus.

"It's just tremendously rewarding to take something lots of people hold dear and restore it and improve it," Barrett says about his company's projects. "I can't tell you how much I enjoy my work—if you can call it that."

-Robert Lamme

©1998 Southern Living, Inc.
Reprinted with permission.

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