More Central Park improvements good for the city

It's a fine thing to see the city of Naperville and the Naperville Park District working together to come up with more improvements for Central Park.

At tonight's City Council meeting, the council is expected to follow suit along with the district and approve hiring a landscape architecture design consultant to be funded jointly by the city and the district.

Central Park is owned by the city and leased by the district.

In recent years the city has replaced the old, crumbling band shell with an outdoor community concert center and has made other improvements.

The 3.78-acre park, located downtown east of Washington Street at East Benton Avenue, is beloved of the city's longtime residents and has been the musical home for the Naperville Municipal Band. Residents flock to its band concerts, held each Thursday night in the summer months.

As the city, Park District, and the consultant consider what further improvements to carry out, we would strongly urge them to do two things.

The first would be to add both permanent public restrooms and permanent seating to the concert center.

Those items should be paramount in any list of improvements and will add to the comfort and enjoyment of the park by its users.

Secondly, we would like to see the city and district consider adopting a plan put forward some time ago, and still promoted, by former city Councilman Don Wehrli.

Wehrli says he has a plan that shows how the park could be 20 feet wider on the east and west ends, and 5 feet wider on the south without losing parking spaces.

Wehrli says quite rightly that, "The park was not given to use for parking of cars. It was designed for the people of Naperville."

We have endorsed this suggestion in the past and consider that if it can be accomplished without losing any parking spaces - or just a few for that matter - it ought to be done.

In the early 1970s Central Park lost out to the downtown need for parking by being trimmed to accommodate more spaces.

That need is not so pressing now, and though we would prefer to see all the spaces stay, if some are lost it won't matter quite so much considering the greatly increased availability of parking since that time.

Central Park deserves the attention it has been getting for the past few years and is getting now, and making it a little bigger certainly wouldn't hurt.