Buena Vista Park was one of Santa Maria’s earliest parks, built more than a century ago by some of the city’s founders, and it’s today recognized as a historical landmark. The humble Camp Fire Cabin sits in the corner of the park at West Morrison Avenue and South Pine Street, right across the street from Santa Maria High School.
The small cabin has been a summer learning center for generations of Santa Marians, including Virginia Perry Souza, who helped found the Buena Vista Beautifiers, a group of concerned citizens who organize and volunteer to spruce up the park. She was compelled to act after seeing the reputation of the park go down over the years, from the number of transients squatting in the park to the dangerous speeds drivers sometimes achieve in the flanking throughways, a far cry from what she remembers the park being in her youth (she was a Camp Fire Girl), Souza told the Sun on a recent sunny Saturday at Buena Vista Park.
“That’s where it’s been; it has a horrible reputation no matter who you ask about this park, so we want to change that,” she said. “We want to activate this park so it’s an uplifting influence rather than just a static place where people crash and burn.”
Souza and volunteers with the Beautifiers organized an afternoon of effort on June 27 that supplemented the park as a whole, as well as the Good Samaritan Shelter’s summer outdoor school program, which is held at the park’s Camp Fire Cabin, she explained. Volunteers—including a group from Victory Outreach—as well as local businesses joined the effort with donated labor, expertise, and materials.
Morgan Stanley donated bark and bender board, Souza explained, while a large pile of dirt was gifted and dumped there by Nishimori Landscape and Design. The outdoor classroom was designed with the help of Allan Hancock College’s Early Childhood Education Coordinator Judith Al Porto, Souza explained, who helped model the limited space after Hancock’s outdoor classroom.
“These children are our human capital, so we need to nurture them in any way we can,” Souza said. “We hope this park committee will spawn other neighborhood park committees and engage communities so they feel they are being listened to by the city fathers and turn our town more into a bottom-up kind of governance system.”
Meanwhile, inside the historic Camp Fire Cabin, a group of volunteers was working on a fresh batch of yarn flowers. Fran Waggoner, Franca Bongi-Lockard, and Rena Perry (Souza’s mother) sat around a table, carefully crafting yarn flower buds and petals with long, trailing green stems. They hung the flowers on the chain-link fence outside the cabin facing the street.
They prepared yarn flowers for more than a week leading up to the event, Bongi-Lockard said, and were crafting more to add. The practice, known as yarn bombing, was thought up to add some plant-inspired beauty while respecting water restrictions brought on by the drought.
“Everybody keeps on saying this is the wrong part of town, but if you beautify it, it may become the best part of town,” Bongi-Lockard said. “To keep things beautiful, it improves things that otherwise might go their own way.”
Souza said that locals are invited to add their own yarn flowers to supplement the yarn bomb at Buena Vista Park, 800 S. Pine St. in Santa Maria.
Arts Editor Joe Payne wants an outdoor-meets-indoor music studio. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 16-23, 2015.