As Serenity Medina sat with her 6-year-old daughter, Kali, and some friends on the lawn of Suwanee’s new Town Center on Main and DeLay Nature Park on Saturday night, she marveled at everything the park had to offer.
Nearby, her sons — Jonathan, 15, Alex, 13, and Ethan, 11 — played football with other kids. Several people were playing beach volleyball nearby as well. Other people were relaxing by the park’s waterfront, watching a screening of “The Greatest Showman,” getting food from food trucks or watching performers who were dazzling crowds with juggling or handling rings and swords that were on fire.
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Credit: Curt Yeomans
“It’s amazing,” Medina said. “We moved here from Wisconsin and this is beautiful. We didn’t have anything like it (in Wisconsin) and it’s amazing that the kids can meet with other kids and play and (parents) get to spend time with other parents and have some adult time while the kids are still being entertained.”
Medina and her family and friends were among the thousands of Suwanee residents who filled the 25-acre Town Center on Main and DeLay Nature Park last weekend for its official grand opening celebration.
The park has been a long time coming for Suwanee. The park was part of a long term vision the city leaders came up with decades ago and the city acquired the property from the DeLay family 22 years ago.
Suwanee officials just had so many pieces of their vision to get finished — including Town Center Park, which is across the train tracks and Buford Highway from the new park — that Town Center on Main had to wait a generation to be built.
“This was prety much the first one bought, this was the one everybody always talked about and so we bought it and just had to sit on it and everybody said, ‘What are we gonna do?’” Suwanee Mayor Jimmy Burnette said. “It’s one of those things where we were busy doing so may other things because everything is happening so fast that we didn’t have any time to make plans.”
Eventually the city did come up with plans for the park. Now that the park is officially open, Burnette found himself at a loss for words to describe what it felt like for the city to finally reach the finish line.
Credit: Lee Heard
Credit: Lee Heard
Burnette made several trips to the park while it was under construction to see how everything was coming together.
“I couldn’t really describe what I feel about it,” he said. “But, every time I come here, there’s something new and it’s totally awesome to see it and to know what we’ve created here with both of these parks, we’re the second or third largest urban park in the state of Georgia.”
The park includes an elevated bridge and gathering space, a large lawn for events or recreation, a veterans monument, two ponds and a beach volleyball court. A staircase leads from the Suwanee library branch to the lawn as well.
A food and beverage business, Suwanee Circle, is expected to open in the raised gathering space next year.
A tunnel on the other side of the library connects the new park with Suwanee’s older Town Center Park on Buford Highway.
“It’s really the next generation of Town Center,” Suwanee Assistant City Manager Denise Brinson said. “In 2004, 2003, when Town Center Park was done, we were a population of about 10,000 people. Now we’re a population of about 23,000 people and I don’t know if you’ve noticed in Town Center Park but (the grass in) that middle circle is worn out a lot of times.”
Medina said that she especially liked the fact that the library was adjacent to the park.
“It’s great aesthetics and it’s perfect for when you’re bring the kids here,” she said. “They can grab a book and come out and read here too.”
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Credit: Curt Yeomans
But if the big test was whether kids would approve of the park, it aced that test in Kali Medina’s eyes. After an afternoon of watching the performers and playing, the youngster was chilling with her mom on the lawn as the sun slipped behind the trees surrounding the park.
But, she gave the park her seal of approval.
“I like all of it,” Kali exclaimed.
Credit: Gwinnett Daily Post
Credit: Gwinnett Daily Post
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