Corbell Park is located in south central Tempe at Lakeshore and Chilton drives. This 11 acre park is one of Tempe’s larger neighborhood parks and was dedicated in honor and memory of Victor Corbell, an Arizona pioneer and prominent Tempe business leader on April 7, 1984. 

Victor Corbell was born into an original Arizona pioneer family on January 31, 1894. His father, Charles Asher Corbell, homesteaded in the area near Baseline and McClintock and Victor later owned his own ranch, a 320-acre site near what is now McClintock and Guadalupe roads. 

After graduation from Tempe High School and Tempe Normal School, Victor served in the Army Signal Corps during WWI. In 1921, he married Anna Miller whose family lived in the area across the road from what is now the Lakes Community. Corbell served as president of the Salt River Project for 16 years and was a member of the SRP Board for nearly 35. 

Victor was also active in many community and civic affairs. He served as director of the Arizona Reclamation Association and was a member of the Colorado Water Resources Committee and Central Arizona Project. When he was first elected to the SRP Board, the utility had 4,350 customers. At his retirement, SPR had grown to serving more than 157,000 customers. 

He also served as president of the First National Bank of Arizona, was president of the Tempe Rotary Club and served on the Tempe Union High School District Board for 20 years. He died in February 1980, but his contributions to the community will continued to be recognized through the designation of one of Tempe's 49 parks named in is honor and located close to his family home.

Park size is 11 acres.

About the playground artist-designed rubber surface

Chris Jagmin
Kids Play, 2021
Rubberized Playground Surface

 

As the oldest sibling, Chris Jagmin liked to entertain his two brothers and four sisters. He wrote scripts for plays that they would then put on for the neighbors, and he designed board games for them all to play. After an Indiana snowfall, he would get up early to shovel out a pathway of mazes for a day-long game of fox & geese (a game of tag). When thinking about these Tempe play areas, Jagmin remembered how much fun they had running around those mazes. Inspired by this memory, each park has a pathway that kids can discover and make up their own game to play on, whether alone, or with others. As the children play around these paths, Jagmin hopes that the colorful images of flowers, bees and butterflies spark a bit of their imagination, and take them to a magical childhood place.

Read more on Tempe Public Art's map. Photo by Michael Williams.

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