|
GARDEN PARTY PROCEEDS WILL SPRUCE UP BURROUGHS
| |
Laura Eversz
|
bBrroughs after.
Patrons of the annual Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society Garden Party in April helped raise more than $25,000 while visiting seven local gardens. There will be another garden to enjoy when a landscaping project is completed at John Burroughs Middle School, recipient of Garden Party proceeds.
“This year’s tour was our biggest ever,” said Laura Cohen, event co-chair along with Myrna Robin Gintel and June Bilgore. “John Burroughs is a crown jewel of our neighborhood and really brought out the support.”
Funds will be used for planting, irrigation upgrades and installation of benches to complement recent landscaping improvements.
Joanne Medeiros, who lives across the street from the 600 S. McCadden Pl. campus, was the catalyst for the project, says assistant principal Helena Yoon.
“I remember as a child marveling at the school when I’d drive past with my mom on the way to lunch at Bullock’s Wilshire tea room,” said Medeiros.
“Living directly across from it, I couldn’t accept that things weren’t pretty or clean enough. I had to make a conscious decision: do I sell my house or stay and see what I can do.”
She began by paying her gardeners to spruce up the schoolyard on Sundays. "I have a fastidious nature," she laughed. Then, with partial reimbursement from the Hancock Park Homeowners Association, the men fanned out to clean up litter on surrounding streets.Later, Medeiros joined a committee at the school, and then brought landscape designer Carlos Antillon on board.
The first phase of the beautification came about after Councilman Tom LaBonge had asked a developer to install more dramatic landscaping around a new apartment building on Wilshire. “His field deputy, Nikki Ezhari, let us know that hundreds of plants being removed were available,” said Antillon.
Following Antillon’s plan, teams from community service groups as well as skilled laborers, paid for by HPHOA, installed the donated plants—from birds of paradise and agave to blue fescue and statice—in beds along the front of the school building on McCadden Place.
That was in 2008. Today, with the Garden Party proceeds in hand, the second phase can be implemented. Plans call for installing five full-grown sycamore trees that will provide shade and highlight the architecture of the school that was built in 1924. Seating will be installed underneath; a reading garden will feature a bench donated by the HPHOA in honor of longtime board member Chickie Byrnes. There are also future plans for a third phase that will provide additional development of planters along 6th Street and Wilshire Blvd.
“Given the context of what’s going on with the city and budget cuts and working to get test scores up… there is always so much going on here at the school,” said assistant principal Yoon. “But Joanne and Carlos and others in the community have been willing to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work. Something beautiful is growing here, and that is so inspiring,” she added.
For Medeiros, it’s all about community building. “We’re not complaining or pointing fingers. We are working together. There’s a dialogue now, and I am meeting neighbors I never knew I had.”
|
|
Home
Current Issue
