Peoria Focus Online - 2008, Issue 2

Lake Pleasant Parkway Completed

Landscaping Project Provides Final Touches

When Lake Pleasant Parkway opened between 95th Avenue and Williams Road earlier this year, a vital transportation link finally was complete. A median landscaping project for a larger stretch of the road – from its origin at 83rd Avenue and Beardsley Road six miles north to Pinnacle Vista Drive – was completed just prior to opening the road to traffic.

It was important to enhance the road’s aesthetic appeal while making it ready for traffic because Lake Pleasant Parkway is a transportation corridor for much of the northwest Valley. Many people will form impressions of Peoria as they travel the road.

“There are some streets that just have a presence all their own, and that’s what we wanted to create with Lake Pleasant Parkway,” says Jeff Sargent, the city’s landscape architect.

New landscaping in the
Lake Pleasant Parkway median.

The parkway’s landscaping design theme reflects the natural history of the area – and the developed landscape through which drivers travel. The median features drought-tolerant plants and different kinds of rock laid in natural, river-like curves. In residential and urban areas, small walls provide something a little different.

In residential zones, these walls curve to symbolize the irrigation canals used by the Hohokam and other tribes native to the area. In the urban areas, straight segments of wall reflect the engineered canals used in more-recent history. All of the walls feature a blue accent band, created with highly reflective paint that shimmers in car headlights to evoke the feeling of water.

The walls are certainly the most visible part of the median today, but as the plants grow over the next few years, they will blend into the overall landscape theme.

“It will take some time for the plants to mature, but in the next couple of years we hope that people will see this as one of the Valley’s very scenic roads,” Sargent says.

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