Treehouses taking shape in Mississippi River Park by the Wolf River Harbor will get signs before the park’s Nov. 9 opening saying they are suitable for children ages 5-12.

But the park's designers and builders say adults should check them out, too, as well as the giant bird nests taking shape in the park.

“It’s not a treehouse. It’s a structure,” said Octavius Nickson of Nickson General Contractors, which is building the Downtown park that will include free-standing treehouse structures with seating areas and enough head room for adults.

“I can stand upright in them,” Nickson said.

The re-adaption of the park is so “forward-thinking our regulations on signage and what’s a playground haven’t caught up with this kind of development,” said George Abbott, director of external affairs for the Memphis River Parks Partnership, which is overseeing the project.

The MRPP — formerly known as the Riverfront Development Corp. — is seeking permission from the city to have a sign that refers to it as a river garden, although the partnership, which operates and maintains riverside public spaces, is not seeking a formal name change for the park.

“I have three boys, so when I go to a park with them I’m right here,” Nickson said as he sat on a park bench just a few feet from Riverside Drive. “There’s no room for me on those playgrounds. Here, I don’t see one element where I’m limited as to if I can spend time with them.”

Nickson and his crew are working from a concept plan by Groundswell Design Group of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The undertaking is a $1.6 million project as part of a larger $10 million project taking in the riverfront area from the Cossit Library to Memphis Park. Half of the $10 million comes from the Knight Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and JPB Foundation through the national “Reimagining the Civic Commons” project. The city of Memphis and Hyde Family Foundations put up the $5 million local match.

“Our goals from the beginning were to adapt the existing site and work with the existing conditions as much as possible,” said Meg Johnson, senior design associate with Groundswell Design Group. “And then embellish and build upon them to create a much more naturalistic environment. Kind of sculpt these different types of very intimate moments.”

Those moments are part of a process that begins to change “once you disturb a site,” Johnson said.

The site by the harbor has some secrets that have changed the initial plans, Nickson said, including drains running into the river and grading that changes closer to the water’s edge.

“We’re not really sure what this used to be way back when. But there’s probably a building under this site or something,” he said. “We definitely had to do a pretty significant amount of undercut and bring in new soil, reworking the grade in such a way that it fit around some of the trees that we wanted to keep.”

A walkway is taking shape around three trees near the pavilion.

“We didn’t intend to have this scale of planting and have the pavilion as close to it as it was initially,” Johnson said, noting the trees are “a special, almost sculptural element and a remnant from its prior life.”

The plans no longer include adapting intermodal containers to be the park pavilion, initially envisioned as a nod to the Mississippi River’s ongoing role of transporting goods.

“For multiple reasons, it didn’t prove reasonable to continue that way,” Johnson said. “It was actually cheaper and allowed us to have a little more freedom architecturally.”

In another part of the park, David Robinson of the Trenton, New Jersey, firm Natural Edge Rustic was working with two others on one of the three enormous bird nests that will be another feature.

“I have to put on my bird mentality,” he joked. “This is not a standard, typical situation. The pieces are all fit together one by one.”

Some of the wood for the nests comes from New Jersey, Robinson said, but most from the immediate area in and around the park. There are some metal armatures involved to hold the nests together.