Neighborhood Awarded Grant
UPDATE October 15, 2023
Park and Play on Arlington Ave is nearly complete! First we had to demo the old bench and get the utilities marked. We then submitted an encroachment permit to the City of Fort Wayne’s Right of Way department. With its approval and recording last week, we were able to install the benches today! The Virginia bluebells were planted earlier this season and after the six street trees are planted this fall, this beautification project will be complete! Thank you again to the City of Fort Wayne for this awesome opportunity, we hope we get to enjoy it for many more years to come. We cant wait to see what other vision we can make come to life for the neighborhood!
Original Article April 25, 2023
We just received word today that our most recent grant application Park & Play on Arlington Ave to the City of Fort Wayne was approved!
Photo Credit: Fort Wayne Neighborhoods Facebook Page
The park strip on the 4600-4700 block of Arlington Avenue is frequented by residents of all ages, but especially children and their parents looking for more space to park and play. On any given day of the week you can find children using the oval shaped park strip like a track for foot and bike races or as extra space for practicing their swing or flinging a frisbee. In addition to this, the residents of Arlington Avenue successfully threw a neighborhood wide block party in the Fall of 2021, 2022 and plan to do so again this year.
Currently, there is a homemade cedar bench in the park strip that was installed and donated by the Board of Directors over a decade ago. However, this backless bench is in rough shape and has developed a wobble. Replacing this bench and adding another at the opposite end of the park strip will be a wonderful and worthwhile enhancement.
We will likely be working with TreeTopProducts.com to order two 4ft Champion Benches. These benches would be similar in size to the existing bench and their color and style will be an appropriate addition to our historic neighborhood. These benches would be ordered with the in ground mounting option which would allow volunteers to easily install them. Additionally, these eco friendly recycled plastic benches are rated to last fifty (50) years. The cherry on top would be adding the native spring ephemeral Virginia Bluebells to enhance the current plantings at the north and south ends of the park strip. We will also continue our efforts to increase our tree canopy with six new plantings along this block that we identified during our street tree audit.
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
Thank you City of Fort Wayne for continuing to value neighborhoods and for making these improvements possible.
Now begins the hard work in making sure we execute our vision and bring it to life! Stay tuned and reach out if you’d like to help volunteer for this project.
