CHAPTER 15Four seasons: Summer

All photos in this chapter are © by Joe Konz 

When many Southside Indianapolis children talk about Garfield Park, a high percentage of then think foremost about the park’s refreshing summer attraction: the aquatics center adjacent to the Burrello Family Center.

For many years, the park had an Olympic-sized pool situated approximately where the parking lot of the Garfield Park Arts Center is today. The new and current aquatic center was built along Pagoda Drive northwest of the previous location and opened in 1996. 

In addition to recreational swimming, the park’s pools for many years have been used to teach swimming lessons and to avail youths to join the park swim club, enabling swimmers to practice and improve strokes and participate in competitions. That continues to happen in the new pools. 

The first three photos of the aquatic center pools below were taken in 2004 and 2006. The four below those are from June 19, 2010. 

Summer also brings people to the park to enjoy other activities and attractions — strolls, family or one-on-one picnics, the Sunken Garden, Blake's Garden, the tennis courts, the asphalt basketball court next to the aquatic center, the playgrounds, live outdoor theater and concerts at MacAllister Amphitheater and in the Sunken Garden, just to name a few. 

People also turn to the park for various fun festivals, art displays in the arts center, and even soccer or touch football on the open meadows. Pickup basketball is a very popular summer park activity. The foursome in the first photo below were enjoying time on the court adjacent to Burrello Family Center in 2004. The three-on-three game immediately below that was from 2005.

For a while, the Indy Vintage Base Ball League held games and tournaments at the park. Participating teams brought relatives and friends, and other baseball fans who just happened to be in the park would stop to watch the action, as shown in the photos immediately below. (A full chapter in this series will be devoted to Vintage Base Ball.)

It also isn’t unusual to see people running, walking for exercise, skating or playing pickup or organized soccer in the open field behind the arts center, or softball at the ball diamonds.

Above and below: On June 25, 2007, just as I entered the park from the south end by the Confederate Prisoners Monument, I noticed striking lavender-colored cone flowers had been planted around the monument. I came close and started looking for a good floral composition when the movement of a plant-hopping pollinating bee caught my attention several feet from me (above). After taking a few pictures of it, the bee decided to pollinate a bloom very close to me, enabling me to grab the photo below.    

Above and four photos below: From Aug. 6, 2004, a metal hunter (above) in the soccer field west of the arts center, the softball diamond (below) looking toward the arts center and pagoda.

Goal posts (above) and posts and soccer goal netting (below) in the meadow west of the arts center, and the pagoda (second photo below). 

It was almost 5:30 p.m. when I reached these plants during an afternoon outing on Aug. 11, 2008. The sun was lowering —  not quite the golden hour yet, though — but the light was becoming dramatic enough to light up the leaves as you see in these images above and first three below. 

Almost two years earlier to the day, Aug. 12, 2006, I took the photos above and below, in another late-afternoon outing. 

Jacob Gardner, founder of the indie non-profit Cataracts Music Festival that was held in Fountain Square for its first two years (2011 and 2012), couldn't get the Fountain Square community to get behind him in his quest to stage a third rendition of the festival  in 2013. Performances had been held on residential home properties on the fringe of the Fountain Square merchants district. (Ironically, I was in Fountain Square the same day as the 2012 festival, but I was photographing the one-time Fountain Square Grand Prix cycling competitions.)  

So Gardner hunted for an alternative locale for Cataracts 2013, which turned out to be Garfield Park. He charged admission ($10 a person) for the first time to help defray expenses. Some 40 acts of psych rock, garage rock, hip-hop and punk performed on Aug. 24. I walked through the park late in the day and remember hearing the bands, but I was far enough away that I couldn't see anything past the security rope-off points. 

I did stroll through the park again two days later and photographed these festival remnants (above and first three photos below) that were still there. I have no idea what any of them are and/or mean. But any ground debris left behind by festival-goers had been cleaned up nicely by then.  

If you were fortunate to be in the Sunken Garden after the sun set at night, you could enjoy the spectacle shown above. At some point in the past decade or so, however, the park made a point to close the Garden before dark, so any such photography had to be done through spokes in the fence surrounding the Garden.

Next up: Four Seasons: Winter

Previously in the Garfield Park in Pictures series:

Introduction

Chapter 1: “America, We Remember”

Chapter 2: The Garfield Park Arts Center

Chapter 3: Bean Creek and Pleasant Run

Chapter 4: New Bean Creek pedestrian bridge

Chapter 5: Blake’s Garden

Chapter 6: Burrello Family Center and James Garfield statue

Chapter 7: Conservatory Crossing yuletide decorations

Chapter 8: Conservatory proper

Chapter 9: Conservatory permanent tropical plants and rain forest exhibit

Chapter 10: Garfield Park Farmers Market

Chapter 11: Fire Station 29

Chapter 12: Fireworks

Chapter 13: Four Seasons: Autumn

Chapter 14: Four Seasons: Spring