by Elsa Johnson and Bob Brown

Join the Spirit Corner neighborhood on Sunday, June 30 for a neighborly get together to celebrate this friendly, quirky, ‘spirited’ gathering space. The event takes place from 12 noon to 2 PM.

I recently saw this short piece by Bob Brown on Next Door Neighbors. It was charming, and spoke to what makes a place special, the space being, in this case, Spirit Corner.

Serendipity at Spirit Corner

It never ceases to amaze me how our little Spirit Corner green space is put to such unexpectedly wonderful uses!  This morning as I walked Ori down the block, I saw a group of little children and parents at Spirit Corner.  When we walked onto the site, I saw that they had a large silver cooking pot sitting on our tree-stump table and a copy of the book “Stone Soup.” 

I saw the children collecting stones and sticks and dropping them into the pot.  When I asked what they were doing, I was told that they were on a little outing to act out the story of Stone Soup.

Since I didn’t recognize anyone in the group, I asked one of the adults how they had chosen to do this at Spirit Corner.  The lead person in the group said simply, “This is such a magical place.  The children love coming here.”

Moments later another visitor arrived at Spirit Corner.  It was a lone deer, who surveyed the activity on the site, apparently decided that all was well, and then proceeded to munch leaves on one of the trees, while the children continued to make their stone soup.

When we designed Spirit Corner, none of us expected it to become the site of a Stone Soup cook-off!  Just as none of us expected a group of Tibetan monks to hold a ceremony here and consecrate the site (as happened last year).  And certainly none of us expected Spirit Corner to become a Pokemon Go gym, which it is!

We named Spirit Corner after the spirits who were assumed to inhabit the house that sat here vacant for over 55 years.  Maybe we should expand the name of the place to become “Serendipity Place at Spirit Corner”!  What do you think?

The Origins of Spirit Corner

How did Spirit Corner come to be? A few years back (8? 9? 10?)  Green Paradigm Partners (and Gardenopolis Cleveland Co-Editors) Tom Gibson and Elsa Johnson taught a class on permaculture (Tom) and design (Elsa), which was attended by Cleveland Heights resident Laura Marks, who was at that time living on upper Hampshire Road in the Coventry neighborhood. Instead of working with her own plot Laura chose to work with a plot across the street. This was a small corner lot that had had a house sit vacant on it for 55 years. A mythos had grown up around the structure. I was supposed to be haunted. It was a little spooky, and very, very sad. Finally came a release from its misery, and the house was torn down (in itself an event that is always a little sad, though it was a very tight cramped fit on the lot).

Laura wanted to see the space become a public green space. She got the neighborhood engaged in this project and we worked closely with Laura and the neighborhood to design a space that the neighborhood could call its own. It included two gathering ‘pods’ and a walk-through pathway that crossed the site diagonally. It was originally intended to follow permaculture concepts and include appropriate permaculture plantings, and also include as many native plants as possible.

Delightfully, the City of Cleveland Heights was willing to support the project, and supplied many of the trees, as well as ground bricks for the path, and some tree stumps for children to climb and play on.  A friend who was deconstructing a tepee donated the long pole supports, which were used to create a sense of enclosure in which a picnic table now resides. Several benches were donated, and two more were constructed from raw materials. A man driving by saw the neighbors building a stone wall and stopped to help. The neighborhood took the space, made changes, donated plants, and made it their own.

Spirit Corner, as the following pictures show you, is not a groomed, polished public space. It is rough and ready; full of weeds as well as flowers; a place where imagination can find space to play. It is a place where this is not forbidden by the unwritten codes of ‘Behavior for Polished Public Spaces’.

It has not evolved exactly as intended: It has strayed from its permaculture intentions, and, to be completely honest, as a landscape architect, there is a part of me that is disappointed by Spirit Corner — that it is not that more polished public place. It will never win an award from the Society of Landscape Architects.

But perhaps that is a good thing. It is a place to hold a stone soup cook-off; that is irreplaceable.

Spirit Corner is one block east of Coventry Village on Hampshire Road. Parking is available in the city parking deck off Coventry.

The Biggest Little Farm is playing at the Cedar Lee Theatre through June 13. It tells the story of how one family converted a conventional lemon farm into a successful organic orchard with diverse crops and wildlife.

The filmmaker and his wife, John and Molly Chester, were interviewed on Fresh Air.

If you have the time, you should see this film! Showtimes here.