The Halteman Village community wants to turn the site of a vacant swim club into a usable greenspace. 

 

The city of Muncie acquired the area and designated it as a city park in 2019. A sign reading “Halteman Park” was put up and the site is regularly mowed; however, developing the park into a usable space is a work in progress.

 

The Halteman Village Neighborhood Association, Muncie Parks Department and faculty and students from Ball State’s College of Architecture and Planning have been working together to develop plans for the site.

 

Ball State professors from the landscape architecture department and neighborhood association president and professor J.P. Hall received an immersive learning grant called Building Better Neighborhoods from Ball State. This allows them to reengage a landscape architecture studio and get students involved with the project. 

 

Hall said the studio is focused on park planning and conducted community meetings and online surveys to get public opinions on the future of the site. They held one of these community meetings in February and gathered input from residents about what should be included at the park when it is completed. 

 

“We even had children draw images of what they would like to see,” Hall said.

 

From the list of responses at this meeting, the three most mentioned ideas were the replacement of the pool with a splash pad, a pavilion for picnics, birthday parties, yoga, evening movies and a new playground. 

 

With these ideas from the February meeting, the studio created a design plan and a report for the neighborhood association and Parks Department to use. 

 

Neighborhood resident Jake Hendershot said he looked over this plan with his daughter. 

 

“We were blown away. The plans have everything we could hope for in a park,” said Hendershot.

 

Once this plan is refined over the course of the summer, it will then move to the next phase, which is fundraising and development of the park. 

 

The Halteman Swim Club closed in 2017 when the neighborhood could no longer afford the taxes and maintenance costs, and the pool has sat vacant ever since. 

 

“Our kids were very young when the pool closed. We never had the opportunity to use it to its full potential,” said Hendershot. “Now they're both old enough to ride their bikes to the pool. It would be so nice to have that amenity in the neighborhood now.”

 

When the pool first shut down, Hendershot said he had hopes it would be bought, repaired and then reopened. However that did not happen. The neighborhood is going on its third summer with the vacant swim club. 

 

Hendershot said he hopes something will be done soon to make the space usable. 

 

“The sad thing is, as I walk through the neighborhood, more and more families with young kids are moving in. If the pool was open today, I can’t help but think it would be able to thrive like it did back in the day,” said Hendershot.

 

Contact Sarah Jensen with comments at sejensen@bsu.edu or on Twitter @jensenesarah