MONTAGUE — Montague’s work on its downtown bike and walking path is continuing over the next couple of weeks. A permanent pathway linking the path to the Montague Artisan Market is being put down now, soon to be followed by a new walking pathway through the Marilyn Voss Garden of Sculptures located just south of Montague Foods and stretching across the walking bridge into Whitehall.
Montague city manager Jeff Auch said the Downtown Development Authority has been working to improve the public parks in the city, which led to the new projects.
“This connector one will probably be done in the next week and a half,” Auch said of the new path to the Artisan Market. “The one through the little park, then, would be maybe two to three weeks after that.”
The path in the sculpture garden will include “borders,” said Arts Council of White Lake-Nuveen Center director Erin Peyer, and will not look like a typical sidewalk. That’s just the beginning of the work to be done in the sculpture garden, though.
Peyer added that the city will also move some soil around to create some slightly different elevations within the garden, bringing a dune-like feel to it. That is a more long-term plan, Auch said, and will be completed sometime in 2025.
“It’ll probably be another year to get all the landscaping and re-contouring and all the sculptures redone,” Auch said. “Our fiscal year started July 1, so it’ll take this fiscal year and then the full next one to get all that kind of put back together.”
As part of that project, the ACWL-Nuveen Center will temporarily store the sculptures later this year and will place them back once the project is complete. They are also planning to do some revitalization work to at least one sculpture, the light blue Swimming Up Stream sculpture, which will be “sandblasted”, Peyer said, to remove visible rust from it. The center will be touching up other sculptures too; they were first placed in the Marilyn Voss garden nearly 20 years ago. On top of that, a new plaque is slated to be added to the garden to replace the “dated” one. A recent grant from the White Lake Community Fund will allow the ACWL-Nuveen Center to do all that work.
“Just this Monday, we hired a landscaper, and he went out to four of the sculptures and redid the landscaping,” Peyer said. “The goal of ours over the next couple years is to make improvements....We’ve got a big to-do list to improve the sculptures.”
The path to the Artisan Market, meanwhile, will replace an old gravel path that previously existed. Auch said the new path will resemble a “connecting sidewalk.” There will also be a small connecting path to link the Weathervane Inn, just across the street from the market, to the bike path.
The Artisan Market, which is open 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday, announced the new path in a July 10 Facebook post and expressed its excitement over the development.
“Thank you to our community who keep supporting us and helping make our boardwalk of goodness successful,” the Artisan Market said in the post.
