City of Muskegon Employees Give the Northern Stretch of Western Avenue a Touch Up with Fresh Mums and Hydrangeas.

City employees have rolled up sleeves and pitched in to brighten the landscape from the Century Club to the Farmer's Market. Western Avenue from Seaway Drive to Terrace Boulevard looks ready for Fall on the first day of Autumn. We have firefighters planting hydrangea bushes from PW, Proven Winners. We see police officers off duty making sure removal of beach grass is done so that that valuable plant can be planted on the dunes of Pere Marquette. A row of aluminum stock tanks almost a half mile long have been filled to the brim with earth and planted thick with mums. Over at the farmers market barn, hundreds of plants, shrubs and mums, await their time to be buried up to the roots by a Civil Servant. Worry not. City Hall has hardly shut down by this field day, and plenty of first responders await the alarms we hope never arrive. The city is at full strength. One clerk filled a hole with dirt, Mum ready to grow. She answered a call on her cell phone, "City Hall, how may I help you"? And she made arrangements for issuing of a passport. If this is a Frank Peterson led team building exercise, more please!

So the northern stretch of Western Boulevard got an uplift with fresh bushes and ornamental planting, street side flower beds plumped up with mulch. Like many streets in Muskegon, Western takes a dog leg and proceeds West. At that dog leg in Western, a team of locals have raised funding for a dog park, and all is set for the park to open to the dogs next year.  Dogs and the humans who love them will be able to roam freely off the leash.

Western continues past the manufacturing facility for Shaw-Walker, an empty facility that now awaits renewal as offices, film studios, manufacturing pods and housing. The lovely Fricano Event Center stands on the water, offering an ice cream parlor and a pizza parlor and an indoor hall carved from a warehouse with tall ceilings. Then Western terminates among an industrial park, most of the brick factories torn down by now. Much of the land has been marked for sale. Change is coming for the most Westerly section of Western. It might take ten years, but change is coming.

I've been watching for nine years now, and there has been changes every day.

Photograph by Andy Mabbet