Blanchard Park: 84 Acres on the Little Econ
Jay Blanchard Park is Union Park's front yard: 84 acres of Orange County parkland on the Little Econ River at Dean Road — fields, courts, playgrounds, a YMCA family center and the greenway running through.
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Every community has one place where it gathers, and in Union Park it is not a main street. It is a county park: Jay Blanchard Park, 84 acres managed by Orange County Parks and Recreation at 2451 North Dean Road, where the Little Econlockhatchee River bends through the grounds and the Little Econ Greenway runs its paved miles along the bank.
What the park holds
The inventory is the full county-park register: playgrounds and picnic pavilions, multipurpose fields and sports courts — tennis and volleyball among them — river access for canoeing and fishing, and natural, passive stretches along the water where the park goes quiet. The Blanchard Park YMCA Family Center stands at the park’s entrance, giving the grounds a second, indoor life of gyms and programs. Parking and access come from Dean Road and Rouse Road, and the greenway’s trailheads tie the park into the wider east-side trail web.
The community’s living room
Union Park is a corridor community — its commerce is a strip, its government a county — and Blanchard Park is where it becomes a place: youth sports on the fields, walkers on the greenway at dawn, families under the pavilions on Saturdays. This hub covers Union Park’s restaurants-that-aren’t and corridors honestly elsewhere; Blanchard is the entry that needs no caveat. It is simply one of the finest neighbourhood parks in east Orange County, and it belongs, wholly, to Union Park.
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