Redi-Rock in the Park: Clarion, PA, Community Transformation

I'm on the group in town nonprofit. We're just looking to connect different organizations and help revitalize the town after some of the, you know, it got hurt in two thousand eight and two thousand ten from some of the local manufacturing leaving town. There was a woman who had an endowment. She had some family money that she wanted to spend on creating a park in town, and she'd been working on it for years and years. She came to our group, was talking about this. We have some members, one of the owners actually, American Precast and some other folks on the board. Their gears started turning and realized that this was a great spot. It was an old PennDOT shed, and then it was a burrow maintenance shed yard. And then after that, it just was a vacant lot that only got used for parking for big events that were happening in town. With her help and a couple local donors, we purchased the property, and it turned from just a playground to a huge park with pickleball courts and basketball courts. We're gonna have an ice skating rink. So over the past five years, we've been building it section by section as, you know, the funds come in and local community donates and we get grants. What you see here now, it's five years in and we've got a couple more years, hopefully, and it'll be complete. Right now, everyone calls it the second Avenue Park. We had our largest donor. They hit the threshold of naming rights. We're gonna unveil that here in the next couple months. But right now, everyone calls it the second Avenue Park. Obviously, through COVID, a lot of people hit hard times getting laid off or losing their jobs and then obviously stuff getting more expensive. You know, people are, strapped. We've heard a lot of people express how grateful they are to have somewhere that they can take their kids to have fun. It's real nice to see the community kind of take ownership of this place. We have a mix of gravity and freestanding walls here. The contractor that has installed most of the fencing in the in the walls themselves prefer to core drill through freestanding blocks. They prefer that installation process. The majority of these blocks are probably forty ones and twenty eights and freestanding top blocks. And then, obviously, there's a ton of caps around because everything's gonna be topped with a cap. When we went to start building this park, we referred to it as multi generational park. And that was because kids ages one to older people, senior citizens are able to use it for a multitude of different things. That was a pretty big draw for a lot of the support that we received. But not only is it multi generational for everyone's here, it's gonna be multi generational because my kids use it now and, you know, I hope this is something that will attract a lot of people's kids when they grow up to not leave town or even after college, they come back and start families here and their kids are gonna be able to use it. We always tell people that, you know, if you build a Redi-Rock wall, it's gonna last until we're all long gone. We want the park to stay the same. It's gonna be really cool to see someday, you know, all of our grandkids, playing on this park as well.