Brick by brick: Judith Engel, a resident of The Sanctuary subdivision on Waukegan Road in unincorporated Lake County, is building community spirit and a park shelter one brick at a time.
The mother of three children aged 1, 5 and 7, Engel had asked the Lake Bluff Park District to go halves with her on about $15,000 in improvements, including a picnic pavilion, to its Sanctuary Park in her neighborhood.
Armed with $1,000 in seed money raised through advertisements in a directory she published for the subdivision, Engel hopes to raise the remainder by selling 1,200 bricks–donated by Mutual True Value in Highland Park–that will pave the pavilion. Cost of a brick is $50 for an individual or family, and $100 for a business. Each brick will be engraved according to the donor’s wishes.
Including the $1,000 in seed money, she has raised $4,000 from cash donations and the sale of 41 bricks so far “People have written things like `cherish our children’ or `come and play’ or just put their names or names of their grandchildren on the bricks,” Engel said.
“We want more people to buy bricks,” she said. “They don’t have to live in the Lake Bluff Park District. People whose children play in the Little League that uses our field, businesses that want to advertise and just people who care about parks may want to have a brick here.”
To help keep the cost down and coalesce the neighborhood, Engel is organizing a crew of the subdivision’s homeowners to do the labor, supervised by a local contractor.
“I want it to be a real community effort. I want to make our development a neighborhood,” Engel said.
And she’s helping to build a community spirit one brick at a time.