New Albany's Bicknell Park is reborn

From the New Albany News Tribune
By ERIC SCOTT CAMPBELL
Eric.Campbell@newsandtribune.com

NEW ALBANY — Nine-year-old Michael ran plays with his third- and fourth-grade New Albany football team; three-year-old KaDynze trotted around the grass on the other side of the field. Few mothers were getting more use out of Bicknell Park Tuesday evening than Ketra Taylor.

“I like it. Lots of space for kids to run around and play,” Taylor said of the park, renovated by local authorities this year for about $160,000. “I think it could be fenced in [to be safer], but that’s anywhere with little kids.”

Taylor used to play basketball here years ago. There’s still a court, but much has changed in the square between Silver, Jay, Division and Rear Market streets in the city’s east end.

A softball field in the southwest corner and old tennis courts on the east side were removed to make room for, among other things, an 8-foot-wide, quarter-mile-long paved path. The tennis courts are now a parking lot, and light poles, benches and playground equipment have been installed. Dozens of newly planted young deciduous trees are about human height.

Though the path was finished in May, light poles were installed only recently. The park’s benefactors from city government and the city-county parks department gathered for a brief ribbon cutting Tuesday evening, before a meeting at which officials were expected to push forward in pursuing a successor to Bill Koehler after the parks director’s abrupt departure.

Read more on the Park and its rebirth at http://www.news-tribune.net/local/local_story_241122216.html