Alley Beautification
We worked with our Design Committee members to design a new look for the alley that connects Court Square and Water Street. After a good professional powerwashing, volunteers stenciled a design on the sidewalk and local wood workers built planters, trash receptacles, and a trash shed for Finnegans. The look and feel of the space is night and day!
Downtown Park
We have been serving on Build Our Park’s Board of Directors helping to lead the community-based initiative to design and fund a new urban park behind city hall. HDR Design Committee volunteers helped create design schemes and digital fly-throughs so people could imagine what their experience in a new park could be like. This project is on-hold until the completion of the downtown master plan but we look forward to picking up where things left off to create this wonderful amenity for the community.
To learn more about the project and to get updates, visit Build Our Park’s website – http://www.buildourpark.org/.
Holiday Decorations
As part of our hope to make downtown Harrisonburg THE shopping destination of the Shenandoah Valley, HDR purchases decorations to illuminate downtown during the holidays. We are lighting up downtown with new, energy-efficient snowflakes and partner with HEC to hang them! Our volunteers help us decorate Court Square and the Spring House (for which we also bought new, easy to set up LED decorations).
Parking
We worked with City staff to lead a parking study for downtown to get expert recommendations on how we can manage our parking inventory better and make coming downtown easier for people using all modes of transportation. The study concluded in 2019 and we are working with city staff again in 2020 on implementation.
Downtown Master Plan
We have allocated funds and are ready to partner with the City on a downtown master planning process. We are excited to have a road map to the future of Harrisonburg’s best asset. Master planning efforts always include robust community engagement, so we look forward to seeing you at some of the discussions to help shape downtown together. We helped develop an RFP that is being posted in the summer of 2020 with the hopes of starting the process later this year.