By Meagan Kelly
The city is hoping a $1-million redevelopment project will help stop basketball players, dog owners, and children from stepping on each other’s toes in two Centretown parks.St. Luke’s Park and Jack Purcell Park are popular sites for sports enthusiasts and dog lovers, but because so many other people use the small parks too, there has been some conflict over the green spaces in the past.
But in late September, the city’s recreation department unveiled initial redevelopment plans for the parks that aim to help.
“We decided the time was right to look at these parks and see if through some redevelopment and consultation if we could bring them up to the 21st century and try to resolve some of the issues in them,” says Paul Landry, the project’s senior manager.
Brodie Osome, 38, has been shooting hoops in St. Luke’s Park since he was 16. He has since gone on to play professionally in university and in his native country, Kenya.
“We have an excellent opportunity to set this as a role model or an example to other areas in the country,” says Osome.
The need to redevelop both parks became apparent after a feud between basketball players and parents last spring in St. Luke’s Park.
Some nearby residents and park users were upset with the older players allegedly swearing, drinking, and urinating in the park. As a result, the city lowered the height of the basketball nets in an attempt to drive them out.
Eventually, the city apologized and put the nets back up when it realized very few of the players were causing disruptions. The situation resulted in a debate about the shortage of municipal green space and how to redevelop crowded St. Luke’s Park and Jack Purcell Park.
For St. Luke’s Park, city developers have since proposed increasing the size of the basketball court and switching its location with a nearby field house closer to the easy side of the park to make room for it. In this case, the field house would conveniently act as a separator between the adults on the court and children in the field.
But moving such a large structure is why the project could have a $1 million price tag.
“I don’t see it as a cost, I see it as more of an investment,” says Osome.
He says moving the field house is important, but not because the basketball players are participating in the activities “a few bad apples” did last spring.
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“You do need something that is separating guys who are 250 pounds running 30 miles an hour. Even kids running across or on their bicycles or the elderly on their walkers, you need a barrier,” says the player.
But not all St. Luke’s users are on the same side. David Disante, who has played tennis and other sports in the park since he was a kid, says the $1 million proposal is “useless.”
“It made me laugh in my chair,” he says.
Disante says he thinks everyone in the park gets along just fine the way it is.
“That old mantra, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I stick with that, it’s not broken, it just needs some mild re-modifications and refurbishing and it will look good,” he says.
But developers say it is important for the project plans to focus on resolving conflicts between users in spaces like St. Luke’s Park, and also Jack Purcell Park.
In their plans for the park, which is primarily used as an off-leash area for dogs, the city is trying to solve long-standing issues between the pets and other users, including children.
“It’s nice to see a situation where after 10 years or more trying to negotiate boundaries so that we can keep the dogs there and keep the kids happy . . . [we’re] finally getting down to a solution,” says Janet Mrenica, who takes her golden retriever, M.J., to Jack Purcell Park everyday to play with as many as 75 other dogs.
Dogs are excluded from Jack Purcell Park between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., to avoid interaction between children coming from nearby Elgin Street Public School. But because there is no barrier other than a mound of dirt and a few trees, children who are afraid of dogs are approached, or even chased, when a few irresponsible dog owners do not carefully watch their pets.
Developers have tried addressing this problem in some of their proposals by putting a fence on one side of the off-leash area. They also included adding a second tennis court to act as a barrier between the school and the field.
But Mrenica says she still has concerns.
She says the project is going to take too long because developers are taking on many unnecessary projects, like turning the baseball diamond into a soccer field and redoing some of the playground equipment in the nearby school.
“Build one thing at a time, don’t go off in 10 different directions,” says Mrenica. “The fence is priority for Jack Purcell. If there’s hardly any money, you put it where the priority is to minimize the conflict, and then life goes on.”
But Landry disagrees.
“People are always a bit flabbergasted when you start adding up the cost of things,” he says. “If we’re going to upgrade those facilities we might as well make those changes in the park making it easier to share.”
Landry says pleasing everyone is hard to do in “postage-stamp-size parks,” but will take residents’ concerns into consideration before he reveals his new plans in about a month and a half.
Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes says she doesn’t think the project will face much opposition when it reaches council next spring as construction will be phased over several years.
Still, she says it’s important for Centretown to get part of the recreation budget.