Downtown garden more than the sum of its crop

Waukegan's Green Town Project savors first fruits

WAUKEGAN -- As a cold September wind flowed in from the north, bringing with it tidings of the autumn to come, Victoria Wiedel looked around a garden in the city and was reminded of when summer was new.

"We started around Memorial Day when it was just piles of mulch and compost around here ... It was a lot of moving dirt and getting dirty," Wiedel said of the all-volunteer effort that turned a vacant city lot into The Green Town Project's first community garden.

"It's been really fulfilling to come down and see this develop," she added. "Before this, people would come down the street and not even see (the lot). Now, they slow down and stop to look at it."

As Wiedel spoke, people walked up to purchase $20 memberships in Project Green Town, which aims to make Waukegan an environmentally friendly city on a scale similar to what Chicago has attempted in recent years, with everything from community gardens to wind-power projects to green roofs on buildings.

At a public reception Friday at the group's demonstration garden on South Genesee Street, Newton Finn, Green Town executive director, said he feels the effort is already paying dividends even as it sketches out an initial five-year, $2.7 million effort.

"Of all the things I've been involved in, this is the one that has knit everybody together. There have been volunteers from all over the community," said Finn, listing such participants as the Waukegan Park District, Waukegan Township and the Youth Conservation Corps.

The city also played a key role, allowing Green Town to use a lot that has sat empty for around 15 years after the departure of a dry cleaner. While the site is eyed down the road for the final phase of the Marquette Place condominium project, the city hooked up water service to feed the multiple beds of flowers, vegetables and eight-foot sunflowers.

Larry Sell, a Lake Villa resident who served as an agricultural consultant on the garden, said all the visible results are impressive but secondary to the spirit involved.

"What's nice about this (is) it's bringing people together," he said. "I've made all kinds of friends with people I never knew before ... That's what a community garden is all about."

For more information on The Green Town Project, visit www.waukegan.com or call (847) 599-0202.