Zelienople Lions to replace fabled fountain
ZELIENOPLE — A new king waits to replace the sitting one, but then that’s just all part of the circle of life, isn’t it?
The iconic lion fountain that’s served as a fixture for Zelienople since the 1960s remains a landmark and meeting place for residents and visitors, but its insides have been malfunctioning, said Lion Club Secretary Linda Flora.
The heir to its throne has already arrived, too, she said, and should remain in storage at the public works facility throughout the months ahead. Then the borough plans to install the new fountain sometime in the spring or summer, as part of Zelienople’s Main Street Project.
“The lion that is there now, the internal parts of it need to be replaced, and they cannot be fixed,” Flora said. “It is in bad shape. And we fixed it a couple times and had it gone over and had it repainted and everything, but it is not able to be done correctly anymore. It needed to be replaced.”
The new lion fountain will cost over $5,000, but none of the money needed will come from the borough, Flora said. Instead, the Zelienople Lions Club will cover all those costs through donations and grant funding from the Lions Club International, she said.
English Lutheran Church has donated an especially large contribution toward the replacement, Flora said. Borough resident Marlene Mussig, who died in May of 2021, had served as a very active member of both that congregation and the Lions Club, and a plaque in Mussig’s honor will accompany the newly coroneted lion fountain when it is installed, Flora said.
Flora estimates that the grant awarded by Zelienople Lions Club amounts to a couple thousand dollars.
The upgraded fountain won’t be any different from the original, apart from a spout in the back of it, which can fill water bottles, Flora said.
As for the fate of the original beast, it will retire to Zelienople Area Public Library, said borough manager Don Pepe.
“It’ll take awhile probably for that to get refurbished, because it’s been awhile,” Pepe said, referring to the last refurbishment of the current lion. “There’s no hurry.”
He added that the older fountain will be refurbished, not as a fountain, but as an outer shell, for display purposes.
“The old one, quite frankly, was just tired out,” he said. “What you see out there is just a fiberglass shell.”
“The Lions Club have always owned it,” he said. “And the borough would help them with doing some of the repairs and whatnot, but for the most part, the Lions Club did all the fundraising, all the repairs on it over the last years. And then what happened was, this thing had to be repaired so often, that it didn’t make any financial sense to continue to fix an old box.”
Flora said that several other Lions Club headquarters within the area also maintain lion fountains in different locations throughout their boroughs or townships.
“I didn’t grow up in Zelienople, but I know from being around here that that seems to be a landmark at that corner,” said Flora, whose belonged to Zelienople’s Lions Club for 23 years. “When people are giving directions, they’ll say, ‘Come into the lion fountain on Grandview Avenue at the corner, and you turn here and you go this way or that way.’”
“It seems to be a landmark, and kids love to stop there and get a drink when they’re out with their parents,” she said. “And so it seems to be something that’s very well-noted in the borough, and people are used to having it there.”
