A community embattled by data center proposals will have a respite on the beach this month.

The Archbald Neighborhood Association will host a beach party at Aylesworth Park, 511 Hudson St., on Aug. 23 from 1 to 4 p.m. to celebrate Archbald’s 150th anniversary this year. The “Archbald Summer Beach Party” will include swimming and swim lessons, live music, face painting, food trucks, a sand castle building contest, a pirate treasure hunt for kids, rowboat rides, tie dying, beach bingo, and other games and activities for kids.

“We tried to make as many things as possible free,” said Kayleigh Cornell, who co-founded the neighborhood association. “The only thing you have to pay for is the food trucks.”

It’s a family-friendly event for kids and adults, she said.

The Archbald Neighborhood Association served as an early rallying point for data center news and opposition in Archbald before the Stop Archbald Data Centers movement emerged in the fall.

There are currently six data center projects proposed throughout Archbald with a seventh looming, totaling 51 individual buildings, in addition to a data center developer seeking a roughly 400-megawatt natural gas power plant on Eynon Jermyn Road. The seventh project looks to build two more in the Valley View Business Park, potentially raising Archbald’s total to 53 proposed data centers.

For the beach party, Cornell wanted to highlight Aylesworth, which she pointed out isn’t far from a proposed data center campus. The seven-building Project Green Mountain data center campus would be less than a mile south of the park across nearly 271 acres at the Stavola Quarry east of the Casey Highway.

“If we’re enjoying our natural resources, we’re less likely to develop them, in my opinion, inappropriately for industrialized areas,” Cornell said.

She expects the beach party to be the neighborhood association’s biggest event of the year. The association kicked off Archbald’s 150th birthday festivities in February with a winter carnival. 

“It’s so important,” Cornell said of hosting community events. “We want to put more time toward these events, but it’s so hard when your time is kind of dedicated to putting out fires — like the data centers.”

Organizers prioritized the beach party as a positive event, she said.

“It’s so important to actually look at where are these proposed developments going to go, and how are they going to affect the natural character and just the places that we really enjoy?” Cornell said. “Then the more people that enjoy it, the more people that will rally around it.”