Sacramento’s Oak Park Art Garden could be revitalized with community ‘oasis’ project

A new project on Sacramento city planners’ desks could bring new life to a slice of Oak Park open space.

The project by Sacramento nonprofit Alchemist Community Development envisions a new-look Oak Park Art Garden at 3834 Martin Luther King, Jr., Blvd., that would revitalize the neighborhood gathering place. A Sacramento first is already in the ground there — a community orchard of fruit-bearing trees that can be gleaned by the park’s neighbors.

Shipping containers on the garden’s grounds will host neighborhood tool and e-bike lending libraries where neighbors can check out tools and bicycles for household jobs and quick trips.

The planning and design application for the project is now before the city of Sacramento’s planning division. If approved, the park at Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard and the 12th Avenue Bypass is set to be completed in Summer 2025, said Alchemist executive director Sam Greenlee.

In a neighborhood with little green space, Greenlee says the improved garden with the orchard’s shade canopy will be a respite from Sacramento’s punishing summers in a spot that already is a neighborhood signpost.

“It’s a very prominent property, an identity marker for the neighborhood,” Greenlee said Wednesday. “A lot of people travel through that intersection and there are no drinking fountains. It’s one of the things that we’re happy about. It will be an oasis.”

An oasis of sorts, too. Drinking fountains in a stretch of Sacramento where public fountains are in short supply.

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The planned addition of drinking fountains hint at the park’s more rugged roots. Alchemist picked up the largely undeveloped .39-acre lot from a resident in a lease-to-own deal in 2017.

“The neighbor sold it and wanted it to go to community benefit,” Greenlee said. What began as “very volunteer, a very scrappy space,” Greenlee said, soon drew an array of community support. The Sacramento Kings Foundation, local nursery retailer Green Acres, the California Native Plant Society, and Sacramento Natural Foods Co-Op all lent help to the urban park.

Since then, the garden has been home to the community orchard, a native plant garden and public art, all tended to by neighborhood volunteers, Greenlee said. But the park’s lack of amenities and infrastructure has been a roadblock.

“While the Art Garden has served as a wonderful resource for community engagement through volunteer landscaping and art projects, it is not conducive to other kinds of community engagement or gathering, lacking some of the critical infrastructure needed to support that kind of activity,” Alchemist officials said in detailing the project.

In 2022, the state awarded Alchemist more than $694,000 in park development grant funds to develop the art garden as a designated Small Public Place. Alchemist recently received another $300,000 in community redevelopment block grant funding to allay any increases in construction costs.

The garden project was the first awarded to a nonprofit rather than a municipal government entity, say Alchemist officials.

The parks grant funds helped the community nonprofit purchase the land in 2023, and will go to installing Americans with Disabilities Act-approved restrooms, hook up to city utilities and erect the tool and e-bike lending centers, among other amenities.