Today took me to another neighborhood with lots of 1960’s vintage ranch houses.  Like several neighborhoods of similar age, it was quiet, both in the sense that it appears stable (there were few, if any, houses for sale in the portion I walked through) and in that it was literally quiet.

I tried something different today.  I’ve been hoping to work trails into the discussion because trails contribute to the walking experience as much as most of the streets I’m walking along.  The difficulty may be in working them into the project, as there isn’t a reliable, unified source for trails.  Lexington-Fayette County maintains and provides data on bike trails, for example, but the data set doesn’t include the park trails I walked on today.

Still, walking through the park gave me an opportunity to think about parks and how they work.  Large parks can be nodes of activity, an interface between communities that invites conflict and serendipity.  Smaller parks that serve limited, more homogenous areas, don’t have that same allure of spectacle even though they may similar facilities.

Dixie Park is on the small side but could benefit from big park allure because of its location within the neighborhood and the fact that unlike many of Lexington’s smaller parks, it’s accessible from it’s neighborhood’s feeder route.  It also has a unique amenity in it’s small disc golf course.

What works: Park located centrally within the Eastland area with connections to several streets.

What doesn’t: School pickup rush hour along the northwest portion of Eastland!