Edgemont Park set for nearly $900,000 revamp

By LINDA MOSS
moss@montclairlocal.news

Edgemont Park’s nearly $900,000 makeover will include new matching benches and lights, widened paths and a new entrance driveway for the on-premise shelter building.

The planned work will make the 15.5-acre park “more usable, more friendly, and just more pleasant to be in,” said John Cronogue, a member of the Friends of Edgemont Park steering committee. There is no start date yet for the work, according to Katy Wowk, township director of communications.    

Several weeks ago the Township Council awarded a $873,000 contract to Abraham General Construction LLC of West Orange to do improvements at the park, which is wedged between Valley and Edgemont roads. The money for the improvements includes $600,000 from a bond ordinance, $320,000 left over from Union and Park street improvements, and $23,000 from a Green Acres grant, Wowk said.

The biggest change at Edgemont Park will be the reconfiguration of the entrance to and parking lot for the Edgemont Shelter House, which is where many of the township’s senior services are offered. A circular driveway, a loop with a separate entrance and exit, will be installed. Right now there is only one opening for drivers to enter and exit.

“I think they’re reconfiguring it to do two things,” Cronogue said. “One, the parking lot itself is not going to be up right against the house. There’s going to be a bit of a buffer or green space between the parking lot and the shelter house ... And it [the driveway] also is going to have a kind of a horseshoe or ‘U.’ You go in one side and out the other side so you don’t have that traffic issue of people coming in and out of the park in one place there. They are going to lay out the parking spaces kind of around that ‘U,’ and it will be green in the center, as well.”

The number of parking spaces will be about the same, and the U-shaped driveway will “hopefully” create “a better flow of traffic in and out,” Cronogue said. There will also be an area set aside for the senior bus to park.

Right now there are five or six different kinds of benches around Edgemont Park, with a number of them dilapidated and in disrepair. In some cases the benches have weeds or get mud around their bases when it rains, Cronogue said. As part of the renovations the benches will all be replaced with ones that have decorative scroll-work, similar to the benches now in Anderson Park, he said. The new Edgemont benches will also be placed on concrete pads, which will eliminate the problem of the mud and weeds, according to Cronogue.

The street lights at Edgemont Park will be replaced by ones with “more [of a] gaslight look and feel” and will resemble the lights at Anderson Park, Cronogue said. The new lighting will be LED, and there has been a lot of work done about balancing their brightness so they don’t disturb neighboring houses but are still effective for the safety of those in the park, he said.

Over time, the goal is for all of Montclair’s parks to have a consistent look in terms of their lighting and benches, according to Cronogue.

Edgemont Park’s paths will also be widened as part of the improvements. Now they are too narrow for Township Department of Community Services trucks to easily travel on to get access to the park’s interior, according to both Wowk and Cronogue.

“When the trucks come in to pick up trash and things like that they’re going off the edge of the path,” Cronogue said.

Two water fountains, one near the shelter house and the other near the playground at Edgemont Park, will be replaced, he said. The one near the playground is now in the middle of a grassy area, and it will be relocated to a more accessible spot, according to Cronogue.

The new water fountains will be similar to those now at Anderson Park, which have three levels, one standard, one lower for the handicapped and one ground level for dogs.

There will also be efforts to replace two so-called “eyebrow windows,” which are now boarded up, on the shelter house, which have been boarded over, Cronogue said.

As part of the improvements the contractor will also be planting 30 trees of five different varieties.

Eric and Diana Von Hoffmann, local landscapers who have been involved with the Friends of Edgemont Park, were retained by the township to put together a plan for the improvements, according to Cronogue.

“So they [the Von Hoffmanns] were aware of what our wish list,” Cronogue said, and incorporated them into the work at Edgemont Park.