Calling it "our Central Park" and "the people’s park," Hono­lulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell is urging Oahu residents to weigh in on a master plan that aims to guide the future of Ala Moana Park.

"Everyone on this island, no matter when you arrived here, has gone into that park to celebrate something," Caldwell said at a Hono­lulu Hale news conference Friday. "It is our people’s park, our gathering place."

The mayor said if it were all up to him, he’d want a reasonably priced restaurant where people can sit outside, listen to Hawaiian music, have a beer and enjoy the sunset.

But "it’s all on the table," he said, noting that the city has hired New York-based Bie­der­man Redevelopment Ventures and Associates as consultants to lead the effort. Daniel Bie­der­man is credited with revitalizing midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, next to the New York Public Library, through public-private partnerships. Observers point to the rebirth of Bryant Park, a onetime drug haven, as an example of how New York has reinvented itself.

A public workshop and public hearing will be held at Ala Moana Park’s McCoy Pavilion at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

The initiative also allows people to provide input online, said Chris Dacus, Department of Parks and Recreation executive assistant. At www.ouralamoana park.com, people will be able to learn about the 119-acre park, which opened in 1934, and take part in surveys as well as offer suggestions on park-related priorities, Dacus said.

Caldwell said that by encouraging the public to take more ownership of the city’s parks, people will feel more pride in them. "Every day, our parks are vandalized — every day," he said. "We build a new bathroom, they set it on fire. We put in a new urinal, they rip it out. We put in a new sprinkler head, it gets kicked over. Garbage cans are stolen, toilet paper is taken away."

Biederman’s contract is for $1.2 million, and the work is expected to take three years. The design is supposed to incorporate sea level rise that is expected to have major impacts on the park as the decades go by.

Judith Stilgenbauer, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture, has already enlisted third-year students in her landscape architecture and urban design class to come up with sky’s-the-limit-type improvements at Ala Moana as well as address the sea level changes at the shoreline.

Student Rebecca Ogi’s "Reinventing the Shorelines of Hawaii" project recognizes the inevitability of the diminishment of Oahu shorelines and tries to maintain and preserve as much sandy beach as possible.

Ogi’s plan features an elevated pathway that would connect the park with downtown and Ala Moana Center and its rail transit stop as well as other areas in the region. "Within the blue path lines, I have a wetland area that will provide filtration of the Ala Wai Canal, as well as further inundation due to flooding," she said. The wetlands would include loi, taro fields and other plants and animals. "It would become a habitat for new life that (once) used to prevail in this area."