I grew up in this community.

I grew up in this community.

My name is Mark Boben, and I'm the president of the nonprofit GND Development Alliance.

And our purview is to revitalize and transform the Gary New Duluth Recreation Area.

In 2009, the park was shut down due to budget shortfalls by the city.

We took it over in 2013 with an agreement by the city and with the city that we would raise the money, come up with a vision or design, do the work and operate the Rec.

We opened up the community center Memorial Day 2015.

From there we moved out in front field, turned it into two soccer fields, added an open air performance pavilion.

The next phase after that was building a dog park.

In addition, we built a community garden, a multi activity sport court.

The final phase that we worked on was completed last year, a state of the art and concrete skate park.

It's versatile, it's challenging, a lot of steep obstacles, but it's fun overall.

So what we are doing here truly resonates with with the public.

There's something here for everybody.

The slice from PBS North,