Liberty Gardens trail upgrade nears completion

HARLINGEN — You might call Liberty Gardens park the city’s duck pond.

The park and lake across from the library are perhaps best known as being home to hundreds of whistling ducks for most of the year, at least when they’re not nesting.

The park’s popular jogging/walking trail affords some pretty views as it loops around the small lake, but it has buckled due to the heaving of roots of the oak trees which also surround the lake, city officials say.

“We tore out the existing sidewalks that were there, the concrete sidewalks, because what was happening was the root systems of the oak trees were pushing them up and it was really a safety hazard,” Javier Mendez, director of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, said yesterday.

The parks and rec department has put in a ribbon curb next to the area where the sidewalks used to be, and has put down caliche which will be overlaid by paving bricks at a total cost of around $20,000.

“We have to go back in on the right side and pour another form and then we’re going to start laying the tile,” Parks Superintendent Jeff Lyssy told the parks board yesterday as he displayed a photograph of the work already finished. “We’re making very good progress — finally — on that project.”

Mendez said crews had been on and off the job at Liberty Gardens when more pressing business forced their deployment elsewhere in the parks system.

Mendez said he thinks the wait will be worth it.

“Jeff and I looked around for some brick pavers, and we didn’t want those small, standard four-by-eights, so we bought some really nice ones that are different sizes so we have to put them together like a puzzle,” Mendez said. “When it’s done it will look really, really nice.”

Mendez said a revised design will include one entranceway to the trail, with a courtyard-type area at the very end.

“If the pavers ever become uneven, then we can just remove them and put them back in,” he said. “It will be easier to maintain.”