Area Parks
Frank Fetch Park
By Matt Cochrell · Broker/Owner, MDC Realty Limited
Last updated
If you have never stopped by this beautiful park I would highly recommend it. It’s amazing to me how many people that either live in or near German Village have never stopped by or don’t even know that it is there. It’s a great little oasis located along Beck St (map below). Frank Fetch is considered to be one of the founders of German Village and partly responsible for the wonderful neighborhood that exists still to this day. There is a picture of the plaque and I transcribed the text below.
Frank Fetch was a dedicated city employee who recognized that the “near south side” of Columbus could be more than the neglected area it had become. In 1959, he made that dream a reality when he renovated 767 Wall St., on the outskirts of what would later become German Village. While others had completed renovations, Fetch went further, opening his house for tours, and later, along with other visionaries, helping form the German Village Society. Following his lead, the annual Haus und Garten Tour was established in 1960 and has inspired tens of thousands of lovers of historic architecture ever since. Fetch is still considered the “father of German Village.”
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The Man Behind the Name
The park exists because Frank Fetch made it exist — and in a larger sense, so does the neighborhood around it. Fetch was the resident who, in 1960, organized neighbors to resist the demolition plans threatening the district and founded the preservation movement that became one of America's great neighborhood-rescue stories. He is remembered as the Father of German Village, and the full account of what he and his neighbors saved is in our history of German Village.
In 1962, Fetch and fellow German Village Society members acquired the Beck Street lot, razed the deteriorating house on it, and worked with city parks staff to create a public garden in its place. The city renamed the park in his honor on January 23, 1985.
A 19th-Century Bier Garten, Reimagined
Landscape architects designed the space along the lines of a 19th-century German Bier Garten: brick walls and pavements, flower planters, a decorative pergola, dense seasonal plantings, and gas lights that glow amber at dusk. The garden beds are maintained by volunteers from the German Village Garten Club, and the plantings change with the seasons — tulips giving way to summer perennials giving way to autumn color.
Visiting
Find it at 228 East Beck Street, a short walk from the Book Loft and the Third Street corridor's shops and restaurants. The park is a natural rest stop on any German Village walking day: benches under the pergola, coffee from Stauf's a block away, and some of the neighborhood's prettiest streetscapes on every side. Pair it with a loop through Schiller Park, the neighborhood's 23-acre anchor, for the full range of German Village green space.
