For years, Century Gardens park has been a pleasant lunching spot for some, a thoroughfare to the LRT for others, and a sketchy concrete stairwell for discreet public urination for a few.

The west downtown park’s new redevelopment plans are intended to preserve many of its most popular and historic features — including the architecturally significant concrete fountains ­­— and try to quash what parks planner Michelle Reid politely calls the “perception of undesirable activity.”

It’s more than perception. As Reid showed this reporter the park and fountain views from the upper level, a woman peed in the open-air staircase we were about to descend.

This was the challenge park designers faced: the hulking concrete structures at the corner of 8th Street and 8th Avenue S.W. are cherished by architecture buffs, parkour athletes and Calgarians who like fountains (which is most people).

But those climbing areas and dark corners also offer the unsafe and dirty stuff few want in one of downtown’s few public parks.

“It’s viewed as the best part of it and it’s viewed as the worst part of it,” Reid said.

Century Gardens’ fountains and waterfalls will all stay, according to the new park blueprints. The ramps and concrete staircases to the upper level will be demolished. They will be replaced by a pair of public buildings that offer a cafe on one side and a public washroom on the other ­­— and access to the top level will be from inside those buildings, and shuttered after hours.

The park opened for Calgary’s centennial in 1975, with grassy foothills on the east side and the mountain-themed concrete gateway at the west.

Its age is showing. The round logs that form walls and seats are rotten, their paint faded. Plastic panels along the bridges, once translucent, have yellowed over. Rebar pokes through sections of crumbled concrete.

But the concrete fountains represent one of Calgary’s prime examples of brutalist architecture ­— also seen in the old planetarium and science centre nearby, and the former Calgary Board of Education headquarters on 1st Street S.E. The structures are also popular for parkour, a sort of urban gymnastics that involves running, climbing and jumping obstacles.

It would be too expensive today to attempt recreating the park’s fountains, said Reid, who also led the redevelopment of Central Memorial Park. The city doesn’t yet have a timeline or price tag for the Century Gardens overhaul, which will be timed to coordinate with a tower planned on the site’s northwest corner, where a long-shuttered building sits next to the LRT platform.

While the park’s central pond will remain, crews will raise the level to minimize the dip that hampers sightlines from the street.

The bridge at the corner entrance may be replaced or removed entirely, depending on public feedback that’s being solicited at calgary.ca until Oct. 15.

Reid is rooting to keep a bridge.

“The views are just much more interesting, and I think once the redevelopment happens this place will just seem so much more inviting that this bridge going over the entrance will act more as a gateway than as a barrier to the park,” she said.

“I hope that the biggest thing that (visitors) notice is not much has changed. That when you come to the park you can still really see these elements of the park that are historically significant. It’s such a unique place in our parks system.”

jmarkusoff@calgaryherald.com