Aesthetic Improvements

Aesthetic Improvements – Gardner MA

The City of Gardner Massachusetts has accomplished successes in making Aesthetic Improvements including, but not limited to:

Gardner’s Accomplishment in utilizing Aesthetic improvements dates from its furniture-making heritage as aesthetics is part of manufacturing quality, useful, furniture with eye appeal. Gardner residents have a love of art and music and this is represented by its increasing prominence in the community. Those skills are reflected in the City’s appreciation of beauty and a knowledge that how things look make a difference in the minds of those who come to Gardner, Massachusetts.

Gardner Massachusetts has a history of considering how things look when it constructs its buildings dating back to some constructed 100 years ago.

Gardner High School was designed as a pentagon and remains one of the most beautiful High School Buildings in the United States.

Gardner Middle School has a welcoming entrance filled with positive energy.

The Gardner Elementary School which opened in 2022 is a State-of-the-Art 21^st Century building which is a site (and sight0 to see, especially in the evening when it is lit up.

The City gets many compliments on its Levi-Heywood Memorial Library which is aesthetically pleasing both inside and out.

The Gardner Museum, located near Downtown Gardner has a facade in the shape of a chair as does the Gardner Police Headquarters Building which opened in 2015 and it is noted for its visual appeal.

Elsewhere in the Chair City, you will notice tree-lined streets with well-manicured lawns.

Streets are meticulously lined and the sidewalks are regularly maintained and replaced as needed.

Gardner has begun to invest heavily in street paving, allocating a higher percentage of funds than even a decade ago.

Through various programs, The Chair City incentivizes retailers to spruce up their storefronts to the delight of residents and visitors alike.

Beautiful Victorian lighting graces many of Gardner’s streets in the Downtown for a visually delightful experience.

Flower pots grace the Downtown in season.

Signage is conceptualized before implementation and a Wayfinding study was completed in 2023.

Like many high caliber cities, the City of Gardner Massachusetts uses consultants to aid in concept planning to provide an aesthetic appeal which assuring efficient construction aligned with environmental values.

The City of Gardner understands what happens in your mind when you develop a sense of place. The City has endeavored to provide a visually-pleasing experience and wants you to return to a place which you find uplifting to the spirit.

Some of those involved in Gardner’s aesthetics consider the physical, social, and cultural environments involved in perception and apply concrete and abstract principles in the accomplished and successful construct of the City’s aesthetics.

It is said that judgments of beauty can be sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once. The City of Gardner seeks to enrich the sensory experience, engage the emotions, and jump start the intellect all at once. Gardner may be a small City featuring urban amenities, but it retains the visual appeal of an attractive community. It can be functional while also looking good. The City of Gardner has accomplished and achieved the lofty goal of assigning an appropriate priority to aesthetics in its past, present, and future planning and this has aided in its success as a small City in North Central Massachusetts.

GardnerMagazine.com interviewed the City of Gardner MA Mayor Michael Nicholson about Aesthetic Improvements in Gardner. This is what he had to say:

Mayor Nicholson: If you’re looking around the Downtown, you’ll start to be seeing a lot of improvements that are in that area already. Between the new lights that have been strung between the Victorian light posts, the fountain that’s been installed in Bullnose Park, the new fountain that’s being installed as we speak over an Orpheum park, on top of our new raised flowerbed with new plantings along the fence. That’s out there too to give it more of that hometown feel. Pretty soon well see work being done over in the Maki Park area. We’ll have a 3 terraced location over there with a new outdoor stage, a permanent concrete cornhole facility and some outdoor seating opportunities as well. And that’s just in the Downtown alone. As you go over to South Gardner, you start to see some things spruce up for the summertime. We’ll have the American flag hanging on the Victorian light post as you go through, similar to what we see on Nichols Street around Memorial Day. The planter boxes and flower pots have been placed out around the City. So you’ll start to see a lot of those going out there too. And the aesthetic improvements that we have going on in the City, those are the small things that make a big difference when you add them all up together. And that’s been one of our main goals here that we have.

The Mayor spoke of initiatives with respect to storefronts and improving those.

Mayor Nicholson: So we are working right now with the Commonwealth Vacant Storefront Program. Last year was the first year that the City was designated a Vacant Storefront Revitalization District for both the downtown and the Timpany Boulevard corridor. What this does is allows us to attract more businesses in. And we let them know that if they are filling a storefront that was vacant for more than 12 months, they qualify for a $10000 grant from the city and then a $10000 tax rebate from the state as well. So that does help bring people in.

Mayor Nicholson spoke of the challenges faced by a small City like Gardner is terms of making aesthetic improvements:

Mayor Nicholson: I think the biggest challenge, believe it or not, Werner is getting out of our own way. It’s showing that Gardner is capable and has the potential to be a great city that really stands out. And you don’t have to go to these cities or towns along the coast for this hometown feel. You can get that right here in your backyard. But its getting out of the mindset of this isn’t how things were done before, This isn’t, that’s just not Gardner. And showing that it may not be Gardner today, but that doesn’t mean it cant be Gardner tomorrow.