Akron Beacon Journal (OH)
Author: Gina Mace, Special to the Beacon Journal
Dateline: CUYAHOGA FALLS
The dedication of the Rain Garden Reserve was a homecoming of sorts for two Falls families.
Patrick McVan and his late wife, Peggy, raised their children in the Seventh Street home that was demolished to make way for what the city is calling a community conservation rainscape.
The Bojo family -- Rod, Shelley and daughter Michelle -- returned Friday to help plant a white swamp oak on the site of their former property as part of the 21st annual Arbor Day festivities.
They are one of three Sixth Street families who sold their homes to make way for one of the largest neighborhood gardens in the nation to soak up rainwater.
Designed to collect storm water runoff, the garden is composed of four city lots -- under an acre total -- on Sixth and Seventh streets between Lincoln and Silver Lake avenues.
Falls Mayor Don Robart said the city was declared a disaster area after floods in 2003 and 2004.
Robart said he saw the flooding in the McVan yard and surrounding area and had to do something.
`'We could have put Band-Aids on it from now 'til the cows come home, but it wouldn't have solved anything,'' he said.
The city created the Flood Prevention Initiative led by Service Director Valerie Wax Carr. The rain garden project came out of that initiative.
Carr credits city administrators, including Deputy Fire Chief Paul Moledor, for securing state and federal funding to cover roughly 75 percent of the project's $710,000 price tag.
Typically with a project like this, Carr said, you demolish, grade and reseed the properties and then just let the area flood.
She said the city wanted something better and thus the Rain Garden Reserve was born.
`'It is better than I imagined it,'' Carr said.
A walkway winds through the garden from Sixth Street to Seventh Street. Most of the land is taken up by a large dirt basin flower bed where young indigenous plants soak up the sun.
Within a year, city officials said, the plants will mature and spread.
Robart said he is so excited about the success of the project that he vows to find every low spot in the city that would be suitable for a rain garden.
SPECIAL SPACE
For the McVan family, no other rain garden in the city would be as special as the one in their old neighborhood.
With his daughter, Megan Ferda, and daughter-in-law, Vicki McVan, Patrick McVan walked over to a newly planted Autumn Blaze maple on his old property. A plaque at the base of the tree dedicates it to the memory of Peggy, who died in August 2006.
Her death came just a month before her husband got the call that the project was approved.
Moving from the home he'd shared with his wife for 31 years was difficult, Patrick McVan said.
''It helped that she wanted to move, too,'' he said.
The family donated money to the project in Peggy McVan's name.
''It was her space,'' Ferda said. ''It will be a nice place to bring the kids, to remember the house and remember Grandma.''
Copyright (c) 2008 Akron Beacon Journal
