McGill Park
Park’s Phase 1 Completion Introduces City’s Expansive Vision Plan for Twelve-Park System
The City of Canal Winchester, Ohio has enjoyed significant growth and development in recent years, including the arrival of BrewDog brewery which has created local jobs while helping transform the City into a regional central Ohio destination. As the City continues to build off this momentum and improve its quality of life for all, it recognized an important need to define a vision for its parks. In 2017, it initiated a process with OHM Advisors to design a systemwide parks master plan to create and define a vision for its park system and strategy to achieve that vision.
The design team worked closely with the City in the master planning process and the community through an initial public open house and an extensive series of working group meetings, stakeholder interviews, public meetings and community survey to inform the master plan for the entire park system. Nearly 1,000 residents provided feedback about how they currently use each of the parks and what they might like to see in the future. At the plan’s completion in 2018, the City determined to move forward with developing the 83-acre McGill Park—just one of 12 parks systemwide.
McGill Park is a mixed-use, multifaceted recreation experience for a wide range of community park users, intended to be the City’s premier park that will serve residents and a continued growing population for decades. Phase 1 was completed in June 2022. It pays homage to the site’s agricultural heritage with a planned preservation of a property farmhouse and includes four irrigated soccer fields to meet the community’s needs for tournament athletic facilities starting in spring 2023. Paved parking is situated throughout the park, and stormwater is directed to grassy swales to infiltrate and slow runoff. Also included is a nature-themed destination playground for all ages with children’s climbing walls, slides, multiple swings, playhouse, log steppers, rope climber, two overlook platforms, zipline and parkour climber. The park connects to a neighborhood with a new one-mile-long multipurpose path along Walnut Creek leading to the rest of the City’s shared use paths.
Future park phases will add more athletic fields, dog park, year-round event center, tennis/pickleball courts, creek trail and overlook, kayak/canoe launch, and three-season shelter house and multiple other shelters to enable a variety of park programming and public uses, broadening the entire scope of the Canal Winchester parks system.
Project highlights: parks and recreation master planning, landscape architecture, urban design, playground structure conceptual design, community engagement
