Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Contest: "What Makes your Place Great"?


Placemaking Chicago is having a neat little contest for the best photo/250 word essay on what makes your place great. I love little contests like this and want to encourage other entrants. For more info, click here. Here was our submittal:

West Haven is a proud community on the Near West Side. Over the summer a group of students from Crane High School are working to restore our community garden. Led by their high school teacher, the garden will be dedicated to a local community hero of ours, Mable Manning. Mable helped save our community from being wiped out in the 1980s for a new NFL stadium.

What makes our place great are all of the community members working hard to improve West Haven everyday. We got together to create a quality-of-life plan called West Haven: Rising Like the Phoenix and are now in the process of implementing this plan. The community garden is adjacent to our library (the Mable Manning Public Library) and runs along our cultural corridor. Touhy-Herbert Park, the Boys and Girls Club and Major Adams Community Committee are all down the street.

The students responsible for all of the hard work are responsible for the garden design as well. Many of the design principals that Projects for Public Spaces advocates for are taken advantage of. Flower beds, vegetable beds and even benches will be part of a good garden made great with helping hands.

2 comments:

Patrick Barry said...

Mike, great idea entering this contest to highlight local youth, your garden and the library. That's a winning combination.

I would think there are plenty of other neighborhoods out there (hint hint) that should be entering their own photos and essays.

MandyBurrell said...

Mike, this is Mandy with Placemaking Chicago and MPC. Thanks so much for your entry and for encouraging your readers to submit their own pics and videos. Everyone else, if you need more inspiration, check out our Web site to see a couple of the submissions we've received so far. More are rolling in every day, and there's still time to get your entry in before July 27. So snap those pics and send 'em in.

http://www.placemakingchicago.com/places/submissions.asp