Around Town

Traditional Japanese ‘Cherry Blossom Festival’ Coming April 30 to Mead Park

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Officials last week voted unanimously in favor of allowing an area organization dedicated to building knowledge and mutual understanding between Japanese and Americans to hold a “cherry blossom festival” next month at Mead Park. The Japan Society of Fairfield County’s traditional festival is to be held 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 30 following an 8-0 vote from the Parks & Recreation Commission. New Canaan resident and society board member Jackie Alexander said the cherry blossom festival—or “Sakura Matsuri”—is “a century-old Japanese tradition to celebrate spring when the cherry blossoms bloom.”

“It happens to be [the society’s] 30th anniversary, so we would like to do a Sakura Matsuri at Mead Park to share Japanese culture and open it to the public,” Alexander said at the meeting, held in Lapham Community Center. “It’s a family friendly event, with some music and some crafts.”

To include bonsai flower arranging and perhaps also a karate demonstration, the festival will be held in the colonnade, overlooking Mead Pond. The Japan Society of Fairfield County—founded in 1987 in Greenwich—also will donate a cherry tree to Mead Park, Alexander said, and is seeking a representative from the Consulate General of Japan in New York to attend a dedication ceremony.

Government

Parks Officials Propose 2017 Waveny Pool Rates

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Parks officials on Wednesday voted unanimously to recommend a new slate of fees for the popular Waveny Pool for the 2017 season. The proposed rates include modest increases for all types of passes at the self-sustaining facility, except for senior residents, who would pay $20 less. The pool was “very solid financially last summer,” Parks & Recreation Commission Chair Sally Campbell said during the group’s regular meeting at Lapham Community Center. “Our family passes went way up last year, which is why we decided not to raise the fees [by as much], because we thought it was just right,” Campbell said. Here’s a year-over-year breakdown of the new proposed rates.

Around Town

Local Landscape Architect Floats Plan for New Ice Skating Area, Footbridge, Model Boat Launch at Mead

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A prominent local landscape architect is proposing several improvements to the northern end of Mead Park that could bring not only a new walking path and footbridge along part of the pond but also a modest-sized ice skating rink and small area for model boat enthusiasts to launch their watercraft. Keith Simpson’s plans (see PDF at bottom of article) are conceptual and newly introduced, and many questions must be answered before the Park & Recreation Commission could offer its formal endorsement, Commission Chair Sally Campbell said at the group’s July 8 meeting. That said, after seeing the plan and spending time at Mead Park with Simpson visualizing it, Campbell added: “I think it looks great and it would just be a wonderful addition to the park.”

She said it must be clear just what it would cost to deliver the improvements Simpson is proposing, who would pay for it and how, whether the town would incur any new costs to maintain Mead and what extra safety precautions, if any, would be required. As it stands, the area directly behind the disused shed at the park’s edge (where Grove Street comes into Richmond Hill Road) is weedy and largely inaccessible as pedestrians approach the pond. Simpson’s idea is to clear out a 100-by-160-foot area—about the size of three tennis courts—for a wildflower meadow in the summer that could be flooded with several inches of water for family ice skating in the winter.