Christmas Update

First of all, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas!  What a Fall / Winter we've had so far...who would have thought that we'd have such cold weather so soon this year.  Compare this to a couple years ago when the temperature hardly went below 30 degrees!

Over at 1401 Olive Street, things have seemed a bit crazy in the past couple months.  For those not aware of the work going on adjacent to the lot, Jason Blankenship, owner of Indy Remodeling and Restoration, purchased the houses located at 1405 and 1345 Olive Street late last year.  Below are a few pics of the current progress:

1345 Olive (above) is behind schedule but moving along to be completed by the end of January.

1405 Olive (above) is nearly done with the exception of the garage (below to the left).  I believe that the entire second story was added as a part of this renovation.

An expansive deck was added to 1405 and privacy fence along the entire back yard.

The red tone fence is what was installed by the Pocket Park Volunteer Crew this past Summer of 2013.  The back yard of 1345 is a work in progress.

So back in October, Jason and I verbally agreed to allow his crews to utilize the 1401 lot as staging and access for those two houses during construction.  This seems to have ruffled a few feathers for local residents who thought perhaps that he was taking advantage of the arrangement!

As someone who has renovated a house or two, and with my experience as a design professional, I better understand the relationship between developers and local residents.  On the surface there is an adversarial shade cast on this relationship.  But if trust can be established, a true partnership can be reached which can result in a win-win situation.  I believe this is what we have at 1401 Olive.

In our conversation, Jason assured me that he would leave the lot in the same or better condition as he had found it.  While we are planning various improvements for the sake of the garden and play area (see this earlier post for the proposed site plan), Jason was planning on adding better quality privacy fencing to each of the above-mentioned properties and ensuring that the lot was re-seeded and cleaned up if necessary upon completion of their renovations.

I believe that allowing Jason's team to utilize the lot was the right move.  We've gained a supporter, lot beautification and enormous improvements to the immediate surroundings, which would likely have taken many months had this opportunity not come along when it did.  Our park is good for his future residents (i.e. his ability to sell those properties), and his renovations are good for our park.  And to boot, all of this occurred during a period of time over which no one really wanted to be outside anyway!

So, Merry Christmas to everyone on Olive and Linden Streets, for the renovations and improvements so longed for are slowly transforming our block of Fountain Square into a more neighborly and beautiful place.  Come Spring 2014, we'll plan a build / gardening event to begin the additional transformation of the 1401 Olive Street Pocket Park into something for which we can all care and use graciously!

PS.  Stay tuned also for features on some local gardens -- I still haven't quite gotten around to posting photos from my early Fall research around SE and East Indy...

Happy New Year,

Jason Burk
1401 Olive Pocket Park Community Coordinator

Other Indy Urban Gardens

Over the past couple weeks I've been trying to visit a few of the urban gardens around the near Downtown neighborhoods.  If you ask around the 'hood, you might be surprised about the resources we have nearby.  I found at least three urban gardens within a few miles of our neighborhood, all very good examples of what can happen with neighborly support and input.  I've identified them below; future posts will detail the features of the gardens to start compiling a list of ideas we can implement on Olive Street.

In our neighborhood, we have the Southeast Model Urban Garden (as reported in a previous post) across from Fountain Square Center at approximately 924 Shelby Street. This garden appears to have a good foothold in the community with sponsors for raised beds among being very visible along Shelby.

Another very impressive local garden is located in Bates Hendricks at the corner of Lincoln and Alabama. This garden appears to be connected with the James A.Garfield School #31 / Phoenix Academy. It is a very well kept garden with a lot of nice features we could certainly use to improve 1341.

On the Near East Side just north of Washington & Oxford Streets (one block east or Rural) there is a wonderful garden connected to Englewood Christain Church. The've called it both, Gardens for Growth as well as their Nature Playspace and Gardens. And it's a fantastic community garden. A lot of good ideas are going to stem from looking at this space for ideas.

Finally, a stop into the Pogue's Run Grocer preceded my trip to visit another garden located just north of 16th and Sheldon. I know very little about this garden, but judging from the look, it's a very fine example of a lot of hard work and planning. And if you haven't been to the Grocer, I highly recommend heading over for delicious deli sandwich. I can't wait to help the Pleasant Run Grocer get established in our neighborhood if it's going to be anything like this place!

I'm hopeful that with these four nearby examples we can brain storm the best and highest use of 1401 Olive Street and provide a space for play and utility which can enjoyed by residents now and long into the future.  Stay tuned for more on each of these spaces...

New Development on Volunteer Help

A couple weeks ago someone emailed me and offered to connect the Olive Street neighbors to a group of med students looking for a community service / beautification project.  The schedule would be tight, but I couldn't resist having 50 - 60 volunteers to put some effort into making HUGE progress of the 1401 pocket park project.  

As a part of the SEND MOU, we were asked to provide a plan for the future of the lot.  To date this had not happened, but with the tight schedule, we needed something to show the Med School Student Group. Although not all of the design features can be provided by the volunteer group, a comprehensive "master plan" was necessary to plot our course.

Over the past couple years, we've only very briefly discussed future plans.  We certainly wanted an area for kids to be off the street, perhaps a small "field" to play soccer or football, or to even shoot hoops.  We discussed providing a play area with sand box and swing set.  We also saw the value and benefit of a community garden, and simple beautification via landscaping and fencing.  Based on those core concepts, I threw together a plan which achieves those goals and while complimenting the existing vegetation on the lot:

The plan includes providing a mulched play area beneath the shade canopy of the trees toward the back of the lot while utilizing the sunny west side as the garden area.  The gardens would provide street side visual interest, while the shaded  east area would be reserved for kids to be well protected and away from the street.  A gated shadow-box style fence on the east side is both allows access and visual line of sight while providing a higher level of security to the play area from the alley.

Detailed features of the current garden design (see below) include 48" x 120" (4' x 10') raised bed garden plots, street front landscaping consisting of a decorative mulched area with low maintenance perennials such as proposed knock out roses, day lillys and hydrangea and seating features.  This area of the lot remains in the sun for most of the day.

Raised beds (above) could be sponsored (i.e. paid for) and tended to by local residents.  Seating could be salvaged and refurbished or designed and created by artistic neighbors, and perennial street plantings could be cultivated from yards within a couple block radius.  Room for nine large raised beds could result in a lot of fresh produce started in the spring of 2014.  Simple raised beds (below) could accommodate a large growing area.

The east side of the lot (below) would include a grassy play field in the center and a children's play area under the shade of the existing trees.  A large mulched area could accommodate a swing or play set and a sand box as well as seating features.  There is more than enough room to also accommodate compost and soil bins with lids to keep the contents dry.

Keeping our eyes peeled for salvaged play sets and sand boxes could make providing this feature a breeze (above).  Compost and soil bins (below left) are conceptually designed based on those features at the Youth Education Garden in the 900 block of Shelby Street (below right).

After visiting with Alan Hyslop, co-chair of the IU Med Student Volunteer Committee with Nathan Delafield, it was clear that we needed to prioritize things their group could achieve during their day of volunteer service.  We decided that their group would tend to weeding the lot, laying mulch in the front and back areas per the plan, planting some street front decorative shrubs and / or flowers, staining the existing fencing.  This work alone will really make the frontage shine and serve as a sounds stepping off point for the future of this community-based pocket park and garden.

Tentative IU Med Student Plan

Date: August 8th, 7 am to 1 pm.
Site: SENSE charter school and 1401 Olive St Pocket Park.
Numbers: ~80 volunteers from the School of Medicine; 2 head coordinators and 5 other volunteer coordinators; 10-15 other volunteers (if necessary).
Materials: 50 bags of mulch, 50 bags of top soil, bed lining, gardening tools, rakes, shovels, trash bags, gloves, trowels, trimmers, and hopefully some wood (if you needed this).
Plan: We will work on the SENSE charter school site first, making sure that the work is done there first. After we finish there (around 10-11 am or so), we will head to the pocket park and begin work there (spreading mulch, weeding, and planting flowers/plants or whatever you would like).


As we move forward, anyone with an interest in participating in the funding, construction, maintenance or use of the park should contact me to be included in digital updates as we post and issue them.

Lead testing...coming soon to a lot on Olive Street near you

As a part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Olive Street Block Club (OSBC) and SEND, the soil on the property must be tested for lead prior to use as a garden.  Let's back up a bit actually, and explain the MOU:

The 1401 lot belongs to SEND.   They own it.  Before they would allow the neighborhood group (OSBC) use the property, an MOU was drafted.  The MOU required a land use plan detailing projected improvements and alterations to the property as well as denoted responsibilities for the maintenance and upkeep of the lot after the acquisition and agreement is signed, such as mowing of the grass, monitoring the use of the property and obtaining a soil test to indicate the presence of hazardous materials.  Remember, there was a home on the property prior to it becoming a vacant lot, and that home likely had lead based paint all over it at some point.

Recognizing that lead testing is an important step prior to creating a community garden (and required by the MOU in our case), we needed to find an inexpensive (i.e. FREE!) way to get the soil tested, for we have little money at the moment to spend.  Knowing that Debra Boyer, 2012 Vice President of the Fountain Square Neighborhood Association (facebook page), has recently been active with another local garden, the Southeast Model Urban Garden across from the Fountain Square Center at 901 Shelby Street, I figured she'd be a good source.  See below for a couple pics of their garden:

Love the fence.  Basic pickets, but they're set at varying heights to create a very nice wave.

Small but effective garden plots.  I hope ours can be more sizable.

I think these are some kind of squashy / pumpkin kind of thing.

Debra pointed us toward IUPUI as a resource and is still looking on my behalf to see if the program she used is available.  I went a step further and contacted another friend who had their home's soil tested for lead a few years back.  They went through "the City."  The dreaded CITY.  What does that mean?  Well I started with the most logical choice:  Health and Hospital.  By searching for Health and Hospital Indianapolis I was pointed to their web site.  Further investigation to determine what local source would be best sent me toward the Marion County Public Health Department.  A search of their programs and services yielded this result:  The Marion County Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.  We signed up by calling (317) 221-2155.  After confirming that they test soil for lead, we await someone to schedule an appointment to visit the site.

If any residents of Marion County are concerned that their soil may have harmful lead, don't hesitate to call the program mentioned above.  It's a great resource to have; I hope it works out for us and we can move forward from this point without needing to field an additional testing agency, it was almost too good to be true to find someone willing to do the test so quickly.

Stay tuned for a post upcoming with some examples of a few of the other urban gardens around downtown (the ones I know of at least).

Makings of a Pocket Park

Well, here we are on this beautiful Sunday afternoon in July.  It's been over a year since the Olive Street neighborhood partners formed an official group and began looking into ways to spend a small amount of grant money awarded to Scott Severns and this band of motley, south side residents.

For the record, they are (in no particular order and if I've left anyone off, let me know and I will add you to the list!):  Jason Burk, Scott Severns, Jimmy Pringle, Jack Graves, Sue Amyx , Matt & Jessica Yoder and SEND.

In the past year and a half the pocket park has been slowly inching along (in somewhat chronological order):

• The house that used to occupy 1401 Olive was condemned and torn down (sorry, no pics!  You'll have to trust us that it was a dump!)
• Scott, Matt and I built the street front decorative cedar picket fencing and the rear "shadow box" style protective fencing:

• The lot was smoothed over by some friends with a Bobcat (Gardens of Growth in Indy) and seeded by yours truly and Jack.
• We tried to install a four-sprinkler watering system connected to Sue's house, but there wasn't enough pressure to make it work.  Plus, the Summer of 2012 was too dang hot to bother trying to water anyway, so we gave up.
• Grass started growing when the temperatures cooled back down later in the year (late 2012).
• Sue, Jimmy and Jack provided much needed maintenance to weed growth and grass mowing as the season progressed.
• Matt stored the various tools and materials needed in his garage.
• Finally, a year after we started the fence project, Scott and Jason built the gate components and installed them:

• Someone left us a small pile of mulch in the middle of the inadvertent "drive lane."  Not that we wanted a drive lane, but without a gate the lot was someone's parking area for a short amount of time.  I'm sure the mulch will come in handy, I just wish whoever delivered it would have put it off to the side or actually IN the spot that was most likely to be mulched!

• So now we have a mostly grassy lot, with a protected alley side, and a long narrow open sunny area, ripe for raised planting beds.  Next step:  Find some funding and / or materials and start making the dream come alive.  More to come on the future plans for the lot...

That's it for the first installment of the 1401 Pocket Park Blog.  It's taken a year for us to get here and grant funding from local neighborhood sources to bring together this small but effective group of residents.  We hope to bring together a desire to beautify this small piece of SoPro (South of Prospect) and to create something which all participants can be proud to use and call a little piece of their own neighborhood!

Sincerely,

Jason Burk

Past Resident and Current Supporter of Fountain Square