Tim Ryan, tryan@wolfrivermedia.com
Leader Photo by Tim Ryan Work crews this week began demolishing Spirit of Shawano Park to make way for a new, more open park setting expected to be completed by mid-November.
Leader Photo by Tim Ryan Work crews this week began demolishing Spirit of Shawano Park to make way for a new, more open park setting expected to be completed by mid-November.
Renovation of the Spirit of Shawano Park is on track to be completed by mid-November, though it will be next spring before donors’ names will be restored to the site.
Construction crews started Monday with demolition of the existing park structure to make way for the eventual open space park that will replace it.
“There’s some wrecking going on out there,” Park and Recreation Director Matt Hendricks told the Common Council on Wednesday. “Before things get pretty, they get ugly, I guess.”
The park is located on the northeast and southeast corners of the intersection of Green Bay and Main streets, and features statues paying tribute to farming and logging, along with the names of donors who contributed to the project.
The statues and the names will remain part of the park, though the location of the statues will change and the names will be re-engraved on new monuments.
Hendricks said the statues will still be a focal point of the park, on high ground, a few feet above the rest of the site so that they stand out.
The roughly 1,350 donor names will be re-engraved onto two granite monuments, each 6-by-3½ feet. The names will be white-on-black granite and laser-engraved.
“We will still honor the folks that kind of were the foundation of that project when it was first started,” Hendricks said.
The monuments won’t be erected until the spring, however, because of the time it takes to secure the materials and do the engraving, he said.
New landscaping will also be in place by mid-November though it will take some time for it to blossom into full flower.
“Obviously, it will take a solid year or two for it to grow in and really become part of the landscape,” Hendricks said.
The new Spirit of Shawano Park will be slightly scaled down from what was originally envisioned due to a bid for the project that exceeded expectations.
A price tag of around $90,000 was anticipated for the project. Instead, the one bid that came in was just over $184,000.
An archway and welcoming sign that would have spanned Green Bay Street at that location were subsequently jettisoned, along with some water features.
The Common Council in August approved a new bid for the scaled-down project from Martel Construction Inc. in the amount of $123,457, along with a quote from Schneider Monument Co. in the amount of $13,190 for the donor monuments, for a total cost of $136,647.
Park and recreation staff last month began doing some of the prep work to make way for Martel, removing landscaping and benches to cut down the cost of the project.