St. Albert parks fans can pick up a piece of history later this month as city crews give away some of the city’s old parks signs.
The City of St. Albert is holding a historic park signage giveaway Sept. 26 at the Hemingway Centre (25 Sir Winston Churchill Ave.).
St. Albert’s parks had wood plank signs for much of the 1970s through 2010s, the Gazette’s archives show. Chocolate brown with cartoonish yellow lettering engraved into them, the signs were an iconic part of many residents’ lives growing up in this community.
City crews started a $1.15 million effort to replace the signs in 2015. In summer of 2017, the old signs started to come down, replaced by modern ones made of unstained, pressure-treated wood and aluminum done up in green, blue and yellow. The new signs featured the park’s name, hours of operation, and icons indicating permitted activities. Crews salvaged many of the old signs due to their historic value and have stored them in the old jail cells at the Hemingway Centre (which used to be an RCMP station) ever since, said city parks planning and stewardship supervisor Manda Wilde.
“We couldn’t let them go, but we couldn’t figure out what to do with them long term,” she said.
After years of debate, a few city staffers suggested that they simply take the signs home for personal use, Wilde said. That inspired the parks department to host this giveaway.
Wilde said anyone can come down to the Hemingway Centre this Sept. 26 to take home one or more of the old signs for free (although they will be encouraged to make a donation to the city’s Giving Local Charity Fund in support of St. Albert community groups). Collectors should bring help to move their new acquisitions, as most of the signs are heavy 10’ by 1’ slabs of wood.
Wilde estimated that the city had about 90 of the signs to give away, including the ones for Fountain Park Pool and Lacombe Park. Some of the signs are too damaged to distribute, and the Lions Park ones are being held back as they have the Lions Club logo on them. The Musée Héritage Museum will get first pick of the signs for its collection.
Wilde pitched this as a chance to pick up a piece of your childhood and keep as many of these signs out of the landfill as possible. She said she wasn’t sure what people would do with the signs, but hoped they wouldn’t use them as firewood.
“A lot of [City of St. Albert staffers] are planning on putting them on their backyard fences,” she said.
The giveaway runs from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 26.
Details on the giveaway are available on the City of St. Albert website.
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