At RichmondMagazine.com, Harry Kollatz has a really well-done update on the dredging of the marshy bottom in Forest Hill Park and the re-establishment of the once-beautiful lake. Check it out. The city has been talking about doing this for at least 10 years. Good to see it getting done. John R. Pope, director of the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities, thinks so too. Writes Kollatz:

Pope was quite pleased to announce something good and needed. And for about a half-hour in the exquisite spring light, nobody thought about baseball stadiums or recessions. Big men in hard hats and glowing green mesh vests stood with their hands on their hips and smiled.

Pope enthused, “I have to say, that in 30 years in this business, in projects from Missouri to West Virginia, this is the most exciting I’ve ever been a part of. To take a landscape that had been let go and to bring it back, to restore it to what it was, for the benefit and enjoyment of this community and the city, I can’t tell you how gratifying that is to get done.”