Memorial Park in Greater Sudbury’s downtown has been revitalized. The city celebrated the refreshed green space on Tuesday, with the sunny summer weather cooperating for a beautiful day in the park. “We’re encouraging people to come here, have lunch in the park, use the park because it’s a very welcoming space,” said Mayor Paul Lefebvre. Work crews were busy this spring doing most of the work, including laying sod, planting flowers and raking mulch. Fencing has been up around a portion of the park since last fall. “To allow the grass to recover and develop a plan to do some pruning to reconfigure some of the spaces and really just a lot of manual labour, which we saw our parks crew and some contractors doing over the last few weeks,” said city CAO, Shari Lichterman. After getting a negative reputation during the pandemic, Lefebvre said he’s hopeful the changes will encourage residents and tourists to visit Memorial Park. “We’ve tried to make it … user-friendly to host events,” he said. “During the week, we will have a number of events and we already know a lot of users want to come in and rent this space.” The revitalization cost $150,000, which the city said came from existing budgets. “In terms of value, we’re really conscious of doing a lot of work in-house,” said Jeff Pafford, the city’s director of parks and recreational services. “Our park services team performed most of the work that you see here today. We were also able to repurpose some lock-stone that was collected from other downtown projects and that allowed us to create the vendor space.” Along with the new space for food vendors, there’s also weekly programming planned for the summer in the park. A list of events is available on the city’s website. The space became a central public green space in 1917 and became known as Memorial Park years later to honour veterans and their service.
