By Joe Earle
joeearle@reporternewspapers.net
Come summer, Carolyn Kenny likes to sit in front of her Brookhaven home and watch the people who pass by and stop at the little triangle of land across the street. She sees strollers, joggers, neighbors walking their dogs.
“It gives you a real sense of community,” Kenny said as she looked over the triangle one recent morning. “We’ll sit out here on a summer evening and there’s probably five or 10 people coming by. It’s nice.”
Now Kenny and her neighbor Sally Perez are trying to do something nice for their little neighborhood green space. They’re raising money to have the triangle at Club and Davidson drives fixed up and landscaped.
So far, they have raised about $7,000, including a $5,000 Park Pride grant that’s been tentatively approved for the project, Kenny said. Kenny thinks they’ll need about $15,000 altogether. They plan to seek contributions from their neighbors.
“What we want to do is renovate it and make it a really nice space for the neighborhood,” she said.
The triangle takes up about 6,000 square feet of space, Kenny said. It’s one of a number of little parks that pop up around Brookhaven. Kenny says there may be as many as 10. She says they’re called “micro-parks.”
Despite its size, the Club-Davidson triangle gets used, she said. Kids play there because the ground is relatively flat, she said. Walkers pause to sit on the benches. Runners use the park as a watering station.
The Club-Davidson triangle is owned by the city of Atlanta and maintained by the Historic Brookhaven Neighborhood Association, Kenny said. The triangle contains a half-dozen trees, some shrubs, a utility pole and a pair of benches installed to memorialize Elizabeth Bloodworth Howell, who died in 1997.
Kenny said she and Perez want to replace the shrubs with other plantings that don’t block site lines from the streets, and add trees and benches. An early plan they had drawn up for the park is being revised, she said.
Residents of other Brookhaven streets have landscaped their triangles nicely, Kenny said. Now she hopes her neighbors are willing to join in to do the same for the triangle at Club and Davidson drives.
“Surprisingly, a lot of people – neighbors – walk through the park,” she said. “It’s actually one of the more useful micro-parks in the neighborhood.”