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Sustainable Hanover Committee Gets Approval for School Street Park

Aug 08, 2017 04:35PM ● By Linda Ditch

Photo by Luis Ángel Cardoza Rojas

The Sustainable Hanover Committee has received approval for a new park on School Street that will feature a sustainable landscape. Committee member Larry Litten answered a few questions about plans for the park and how interested citizens can help.

Q: How did the idea for the park come about?

A: The Sustainable Hanover Committee decided it needed to address several environmental issues associated with landscape practices by creating several sites—to be called Sustainable Works Around Town—where solutions to environmental challenges could be demonstrated. The School Street site is the first of these. 

Q: What are some of the features planned for the park?

A: The park will be a green oasis in downtown Hanover, a place where visitors to downtown can take a break, where visiting and neighborhood children can play, and where local employees can relax and eat lunch. The specific environmental challenges to be addressed in the SSP are a rain garden, slowing and retaining storm water runoff, native plants that produce pollinator habitat, and edible landscaping. Small signs will provide information on both the challenges and the solutions, and direct people to a website that will offer more information. The designers believe that both contemplation and play are important for sustaining life, so the park will have an area that promotes quiet being-in-nature and a small natural play area.  

Q: Why do you think it will be a positive addition to Hanover?

A: This will be a natural area in downtown Hanover, its first real park that provides several values of a park, but which is a park plus—a low-key source of information about some important issues. It will definitely beautify this particular site. The funding, construction, and maintenance processes will all be a means of community building.

Q: What’s the next step in the process?

A: This is a public/private collaboration, with the Town of Hanover providing the land, the labor and equipment for the construction, and minimal maintenance. The Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation has provided critical initial funding. Additional private contributions—from businesses, neighbors, others who care about Hanover or about environmental issues—will be necessary to complete the project. We are also recruiting “SWAT” teams to create these Sustainable Works Around Town. Each site will also have a “friends” group that will work several hours a year maintaining the site.


More information on the park can be found at www.bit.ly/SchoolStPark. Questions and volunteer offers can be sent to [email protected]. Donations can be made online at hanovernh.org/donate (write “School Street Park” in the what-is-the-payment-for space) or by mail to Town of Hanover, P.O. Box 483, Hanover, NH 03755.

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