At the Board of Architectural Review’s February 20 meeting, final plans were approved for renovations to McGuffey Park.

“That’s an interesting project,” says BAR vice-chair Syd Knight. “It’s going to be a park unlike anything Charlottesville has seen.”

Indeed, as reported by the Hook in November 2005, the park will be a kind of “living sculpture,” replete with design “footprints” of a Victorian mansion and kiddie equipment named “the Kuma,” “the Argo,” and “the Spica.”

Designed by free speech wall architects Pete O’Shea and Robert Winstead[error--sorry], the park project has a determined group of North Downtown residents, called Friends of McGuffey Park, who are continuing to raise money for their vision, which could cost as much as $750,000.

Of course, not everyone was happy about changing the old park last time we asked around. Longtime North Downtown resident Frances Walton, 62, thought there were “better uses for the money,” like undergrounding utilities, and believed the push for the park was “generational,” spear-headed as it is by North Downtown’s new crop of residents, many of them young moms.

North Downtown resident Steve Murphy worried about the additional traffic the park might generate and, like Walton, wondered if the money could be better spent. “Why not build a new fancy park for poor people?” he quipped.

PHOTO RIGHT: A photo illustration of the new park by architects O’Shea/Winstead[error--sorry], with children on Spicas

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