Mark Hopkins, owner
of Hopkins Ace Hardware, has pitched his vision for a reinvented Coffee
Creek Park to the Chesterton Park Board, the Town Council, and the
Chesterton-Porter Rotary Club, and each body has expressed enthusiasm for
the project.
It’s an ambitious
re-imagining of what Coffee Creek Park could be: a destination for
Dunelanders and out-of-towers alike, an entertainment and event venue, an
economic-development engine for the Downtown, including an amphitheater,
terraced seating, an expanded sledding hill, and a waterfall.
The question is
this, however, as Park Board Member Mark Dickinson put it succinctly at
Tuesday evening’s meeting: What exactly would the first step be in polishing
this diamond in the rough?
Hopkins, who
returned to the Park Board on Tuesday to provide more details--as well as,
incidentally, to reassure skeptics who’ve posted to the Chesterton
Tribune’s Facebook page--told members that the very first
preliminary step is scheduled for today, when he and Town Engineer Mark
O’Dell will take a meeting with Redbud Landscape Services of St. John. The
purpose of the meeting: to disassemble all of the moving parts of Hopkins’
plan, in order to determine the best possible sequence for reassembling them
in phases. Also on the table: an initial discussion of materials, sourcing,
and costing.
Hopkins did take a
moment to respond to the odd misconception or two posted to the Tribune’s
Facebook page. For one thing, the amphitheater will be built into the
hill on the north side of the park, but it will not--repeat, not--replace
the sledding hill. On the contrary, Hopkins is proposing to expand the
sledding hill into three lanes.
For another thing,
Hopkins said that he has every intention of preserving Coffee Creek Park’s
naturalness, and he repeated his belief that the crown jewel of Coffee Creek
Park is in fact Coffee Creek. Just last week, he told the board, he spotted
a mink at the creek, as others over the years have seen river otters,
beaver, trout, and some fine birds. The boardwalk will remain in place, but
its overlooks will be repaired and improved, and Hopkins said that very few
if any trees will need to be removed: pruned, perhaps, but not cut. “This
won’t be some fancy park. It needs to retain its character. This is an old
downtown.”
And in the end it’s
the Chesterton Downtown which Hopkins is hoping to revitalize through the
reinvention of Coffee Creek Park. Make it visible not only to out-of-towners
but to Chesterton residents who don’t even know that it’s there. Make it a
venue for music, theater, weddings. Make it a place to meet and greet, to
picnic, to relax with an ice cream or coffee. Make it, in other words, a
viable part of the Downtown itself, an extension of the Downtown, and not a
hinterland veiled from view by the South Calumet Road business block. “I’d
like to see it useful for the entire community,” Hopkins said. “That’s what
parks are for.”
As Hopkins has
acknowledged, the limiting factor in his vision is funding, but there are
potentially tappable sources. MS4 Operator Jennifer Gadzala, for example,
has time and again proved herself to be “Supergirl when it comes to getting
grants,” Hopkins said. The Rotary has also indicated that they would like to
make Coffee Creek Park a “long-term project.” A crowdfunding campaign could
be organized like the one which raised additional moneys for the Thomas
Centennial Park boxcar restroom project, and conceivably tax increment
financing funds could be invested too. From the beginning, moreover, Hopkins
has insisted that much of the job could be done through sweat equity, that
is, volunteers coming together with their particular skill sets, equipment
and resources, and the willingness to put them to work for the community.
To Town Council
Member and Park Department liaison Jennifer Fisher, I-5th, Member Paul Shinn
put this question: “Can you get the Town Council to buy into this?”
“Everyone on the
council is very excited by Mark’s vision,” Fisher replied. “Still, it’s in
the very early stages and it’s got a lot of components. Each component needs
to be engineered, specced out, and funds secured. That’s always the next
step, moving from proposal to execution. But there was a very positive
response from the Town Council.”
Fisher did offer a
word of caution, though. “Budgeting is going to be an issue down the road,”
in particular as municipal property-tax draws are right now expected to fall
next year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re kind of walking
everything through in a new time,” she said, then quickly added, “But I
wouldn’t take that as discouragement.”
Fisher also threw
one more potential source of funding onto the table: corporate sponsorships,
which have worked well in other communities.
Gratitude
Hopkins once again
thanked the many customers who, through a roundup campaign at Hopkins Ace,
raised $3,000 for cleanup work at Coffee Creek Park. Some of that work was
done by Park Department Administrator Hilary Thomas-Peterson, who along with
some volunteers and Street Commissioner John Schnadenberg removed a ton of
brush and scrub from around the pond. “So you can actually see the pond
now,” he said, “and not worry too much about snagging your fishing hook.”
Park Superintendent
Shane Griffin similarly expressed his gratitude to the Hopkins Ace customers
for their community-mindedness and public spirit.
Griffin had more
thank-yous to make: to Dan Ameling and the Duneland Diamonds for their
purchase of the new aluminum bleachers now in place behind home plate at
Chesterton Park.