Fairfield’s Petra Park finished, to open in May

FAIRFIELD — Construction is complete on Petra Park in Fairfield, a new park in the city’s downtown that features raised planter boxes and tall wooden pergolas.

The park is named after Petra Stanley, a Fairfield resident who attended Maharishi International University and was on its board of trustees. When Petra died of cancer in 2016, her husband of 29 years, Alex Stanley, sought a way to commemorate her, and purchased what was then an empty lot at the northeast corner of North Main Street and West Briggs Avenue, a block north of Central Park.

Stanley presented his vision for a new park at that location to the Fairfield City Council in 2018, and now three years later, his vision has become a reality.

“I am thrilled with it,” Stanley said. “The woodwork, the east entrance, the pergola … it’s all perfect. Petra would have loved that park.”

Stanley said the park is just like his wife: sophisticated and urbane.

“It’s something you’d see in a big city,” Stanley said. “It’s nice for a small town to have a classy park like that.”

Stanley said he is especially pleased with the sculpture of an oak leaf inside the round pergola in the center of the park. Stanley asked Fairfield artist Dale Divoky, whom Petra greatly admired, to create a sculpture for the park. Stanley had such confidence in Divoky that he gave him free rein to make anything he wanted.

“He is very good at making very realistic sculptures of human faces, and I knew that if he made a statue of Petra, it would look exactly like her,” Stanley said of Divoky.

However, Stanley didn’t like the idea of having a commemorative sculpture so close to another commemorative sculpture, that of Lee Gobble on the east lawn of the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center across the street. He said it would make the area feel like a “mausoleum.” Divoky came up with the idea of the oak leaf because this part of Iowa was once an oak savanna.

Another feature worthy of note is the mirror and ballet bar on the adjacent building to the south. Stanley said the ballet bar is an homage to Petra’s love of dancing.

“When Petra was a little girl, she wanted to take ballet lessons,” Stanley said. “And when she got to the ballet class, she already knew how to dance, so the teacher looked at her and told the other kids, ‘Do what she’s doing.’ We wanted to bring this element of Petra’s dancing to the park, and with the oak leaf statue, it creates this impression of leaves dancing in the breeze.”

Ownership of the park will be transferred to the city of Fairfield during one of the council’s meetings in May, either May 10 or May 24. From that point forward, the Parks Department will be in charge of maintaining the park, though Stanley said there shouldn’t be much to do since the park was designed to be as low-maintenance as possible. The flowers in the beds are all perennials, so they won’t have to be replanted, and they will be fed through a drip irrigation system.

Fairfield City Engineer Melanie Carlson asked the public not to use the park until it becomes city property. After that, the park will be open to the public, and can be reserved for special events just like other city parks. The park has access to electricity, and the Parks Department has discussed showing outdoor movies there.

Dennis Reynolds of Reynolds Urban Design and Urban Planning designed the park, and said he was pleased that the final product is so close to the initial vision Stanley presented him three years ago. He said it was rewarding to see a site that was not being used turned into something beautiful that the whole community can enjoy.

The park was built on land that was once the Tribune building. In 2014, a portion of the building collapsed, and its owner, Ross Walker, decided to tear the whole thing down. It has been largely unused ever since, except for a brief time when it was used as a music stage during one of the FAIRfest music festivals.

Reynolds said that, after the building was torn down, what remained was a terrazzo tile slab, which he and Stanley decided to keep in place rather than dig up. He said terrazzo floors, though common in Europe, are unusual to see in American urban parks because they are about five times more expensive than typical concrete.

“I don’t know of any other park in the U.S. that has a terrazzo floor,” Reynolds said. “Maybe Petra Park can be famous for that.”