On land once ravaged and torn, a new park is being born.

Benches, gravel paths and a cluster of tree trunks and boulders acting as outdoor classroom seating are already in place on city-owned acreage along Jennings Creek, marking the foundation of not only Bowling Green’s newest park but a space to provide comfort to those affected by the city’s 2021 tornadoes.

“Bringing all of this to life, you will see at the very end a true depiction of how strong this community is,” Cameron Levis, special populations coordinator for Bowling Green Parks and Recreation, said Wednesday while he surveyed the project he had been dreaming about for years.

“We learned that post-tornadoes,” he said. “We talk about it, we’ll continue to talk about it for decades to come. This space is just another example of that.”

The development south of Bowling Green’s Creekwood neighborhood did not come to fruition overnight.

Metropolitan Planning Organization Coordinator Karissa Lemon oversees the city’s greenway network. The section behind Jennings Creek Elementary and Henry F. Moss Middle School was due to open in spring of 2021, so Lemon visited the site and came away thinking the area was ripe with opportunity.

Levis said he came out to the area ahead of the section’s grand opening block party and, like Lemon, knew immediately that the green space along the pathway was the perfect place to build something.

“Your mind just starts racing – ‘how can we enhance this space, how can we make this a place that people want to come to,’ ” Levis said. “How can it be a destination? For lack of better words, how can it be a park?”

From there, Lemon and Levis assembled a vision document to hold all of their ideas, cataloging the ways a park could be of use to the nearby neighborhoods and the schools next door.

Internal conversations about the park continued into the summer, but Levis said development was never a high city priority.

On Dec. 11, 2021, that area of Bowling Green changed forever.

The Creekwood neighborhood sustained a direct hit from the EF3 tornado that churned through the city in the dark, early morning hours.

Seventeen people lost their lives.

According to the Warren County coroner’s report, 12 of the 17 deaths occurred along Moss Creek Avenue, directly adjacent to the proposed parkland. Jennings Creek was forever altered as it had to be dammed for victim recovery.

“There became a lot more incentive for us to be in this part of our community, because we had such a desire to want to serve the individuals who were affected by the tornadoes, just to bring some hope to this neighborhood,” Levis said.

Lemon said that once recovery efforts began to settle down, “I think the opportunity was ripe for us to keep dreaming.”

The pair went back to their ideas with a different focus.

Levis said the mission of the project shifted to creating a space that can replace traumatic memories with happy ones.

Subsequently, assistance and interest started to pour in.

“That’s really what made it catch fire,” Levis said.

Lemon said the Bowling Green Noon Rotary club approached the city with some grant funding for storm repair.

“We were told to get some ideas on paper immediately, and so we did,” she said. “We worked with the noon rotary to secure some funding as kind of a first step to revamp the space and really make something more out of it than what it was.”

She said the noon rotary provided two $10,000 grants to assist in creekside remediation and help further the pair’s dreams.

Additionally, she said the Bowling Green A.M. Rotary club provided twin $10,000 grants for Western Kentucky University’s Center for Human GeoEnvironmental Studies to fill the area with educational features so visitors can learn about creek ecosystems.

Matt Powell, environmental manager for the city of Bowling Green, said Scotty’s Contracting and Stone was chosen to handle development.

According to Powell, Chris Higgins of Scotty’s said “we’re not going to send you a bill for any of this.”

“I think that’s such an example we’re seeing overall about this space where people just want to be a part of what we’re trying to create,” Levis said.

The support didn’t stop there.

The Bowling Green Board of Commissioners on Tuesday approved a grant application for $250,000 in Kentucky Community Development Block Grant Coronavirus Community Project funding to further enhance the space with a boardwalk over the creek wetlands.

Powell said additional announcements are still expected for further components of the park. A short term goal is to build a shade canopy over the outdoor classroom to beat the heat.

Levis said not to expect an off-the-line playground to be installed in the park. The plan is to keep things natural and allow visitors to “feel, in all honesty, like they’ve escaped the city.”

Besides the tie to the natural disaster, he said Bowling Green is growing, and there is no better time than the present to preserve natural land.

“You can’t go back and add natural spaces. You can’t go back and add natural parks,” Levis said. “These are the kinds of spaces our community is missing.”

Today, new saplings stand meters away from storm-damaged trees, the only immediate evidence of the violent morning that gave the park its mission. A new creek access point has been installed so youngsters can take a closer look at the babbling waters.

“We’re not trying to erase anything, we’re not trying to pretend things didn’t occur there that were incredibly tragic,” Powell said. “But we’re trying to do things with the space such that the things that we do with the space are the first things you think of.”