BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) - The city’s waterfront park has been described as a field with a shed on it, but plans are being made to make it an attractive destination for residents and tourists alike.
Those plans, assembled by a firm that specializes in improving outdoor spaces, include opening a restaurant at Mary Ross Waterfront Park on the East River and adding other amenities and infrastructure such as playgrounds, boat slips and kayak launching points, a fishing pier, a multipurpose building and a pavillion and stage.
“Right now, there’s nothing there drawing people to the park,” Oliver Seabolt of Alta Planning and Design told the City Commission in a Wednesday work session.
Seabolt said his firm used information collected from local residents in determining what to include in the plans.
Chief among them was a restaurant “that would come in and act as an anchor for the park and generate activity on a day-to-day basis,” Seabolt said. “The idea is it could be a public-private partnership.”
Workers in the downtown area could patronize the restaurant during the week, then bring their children to the park on the weekend, he said.
Existing structures at the park would be removed under the plan, to be replaced with ones that are more functional and appealing to the eye.
“It’s a great opportunity to have some kind of iconic building that can be seen along Bay Street,” Seabolt said.
The park currently is under-used, Seabolt said, hosting a few annual events such as the Kiwanis Club’s Stewbilee and the disabled community’s Spring Fling. It also draws a few visitors to the farmers market several times a week.
Ozie Lee Lewis was sitting on a bench Thursday morning waiting for his first customer at his tables in the farmers market.
“They need to do something,” Lewis said. “They been talking about it for years.”
With his tables all arranged, Lewis helped another seller unload his truck in his familiar spot as the third vendor of the day, Dennis Pruzinsky, pulled in at the end of his drive from Jesup.
Pruzinsky said business is down 35 to 40 percent over the past five years possibly because of the economy but perhaps because local people don’t cook at home as much.
“When they started letting them take food stamps to McDonald’s…” he said.
People still come to see him because they know a lot of what he’s selling is grown 40 miles away in Wayne County not shipped in boxes from a farm in central Florida, Purzkinsky said.
Still, some once dependable sales are down. People don’t buy greens in the winter or field peas in the summer like they once did, he said.
But Pruzinsky said much of his business comes from tourists and that business is better when there’s an event on a Saturday, one of the few days the city lets the farmers market open. That would mean that some sort of draw to the park could help sales, he said.
Lewis said he doesn’t like the limited sales days, that he would prefer to be open daily.
On days when the farmers market is empty, so is the rest of the park with the exception of a few homeless people using the main building as a day shelter. Lewis said even many of the homeless have moved on with the opening of a heated and air-conditioned day shelter a few blocks down Gloucester Street.
Seabolt said that would change over time. With the suggested improvements, it will receive heavy usage, he said, with fishermen using the pier and strollers walking along a waterfront promenade.
“People will actually come to the Brunswick waterfront to go out on this iconic pier instead of fishing on the St. Simons Island causeway bridges,” he said.
The next step in the process is for Seabolt to receive input from the commissioners. Should it be ultimately be adopted, it will play out over a decade, with improvements made as funds become available.
“To do it all at once, that would be a lot of money,” City Planner Arne Glaeser said.
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Information from: The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, https://www.jacksonville.com
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