Come July I’ll have been living in Liverpool NY for 41 years. By now you’d think I would have seen pretty much everything there is to see in the area; after all, it’s not a metropolis by any stretch of the imagination.

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen some things that I’ve never seen before. It turns out that there are some new changes at the park and some existing things that I’ve either never truly seen or paid any attention to. I have picture of some of these things to share and others I’m just going to talk about.


Johnson Park

The first thing to talk about is Johnson Park, which is right in the middle of the village. I’ve driven by it thousands of times and looked over every once in a while when there were musicians playing but until last Friday I’d never actually walked over there. I have to say that I was lucky to have a perfect weather day to see the beauty in the park. I walked over to the gazebo and the stage and wished I was still singing because I think it would be pretty neat to be up there in front of a lot of people.

While I was there I took a look across the street at the church with the purple doors. I actually was not only part of a wedding party there once but I sang a duet with someone else during the ceremony, Endless Love, which turned out to be the only duet I ever sang. Next door… when did they put that Masonic Temple in there? lol It’s been there for decades, way before I moved here, yet I’d never noticed it before.

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Next we have this barrier that’s been put up near the Salt Museum side of the lake. I’m assuming it’s there to bar anyone who’s not bringing a boat to put up at the marina from coming in. That almost makes sense except there are a few other access points where people could come in if they wanted to, especially the access road near what I call the yacht clubhouse, which is unimpeded. At this point it just looks goofy hanging there on its own, but maybe they’re planning on doing something with the other roads in the future.

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At the other end of the lake on the Salina side are these couple of shacks where people can rent kayaks. I never knew there was a place in the village where people could rent such a thing because one, I don’t swim and would never do it and two, because I’ve never seen anyone kayaking on the lake. I’m not even sure whether these are wood or some kind of plastic but I’m sure they weren’t there a couple of weeks ago… even though I’m not the most observant person in the world so it’s possible they could have been there as long as a week, even though I walked at the lake 4 days last week.

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From where I sit, a great reason to not kayak is because we all know that the lake still isn’t clean, no matter what the press covered last year when they allowed people to swim in the lake for the first time in decades. Other than the Syracuse crew team I haven’t seen anyone else swim in the lake. Based on seeing this thing today I’m glad I can’t swim. It’s the first time I’ve seen it, and I know it’s there to clean up the lake, yet I saw it dumping dirt in, which was confusing to me. Frankly, I’m not sure how that’s cleaning up anything but I’m not a scientist so I’m going to assume someone knows what they’re doing.

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The final thing I’m going to mention is finding out that the Clay Town Hall has solar panels providing around 80% of its energy usage, totally covering them during the day and only using what’s needed to power a few things in the evening. I was told that there’s only one other town in the area that has solar panels; how cool is this? Saving the town money and protecting the environment at the same time; who could ask for more?