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Requiem for a park |
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Saturday, 01 August 2009 |
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By Joseph B. Nadeau It only takes a short walk into World War II Veterans Memorial State Park these days to see that the park’s longtime role as a gem of local summer recreation is no more than a footnote in local history.
The lawns and trees planted in the mid-1970s when city leaders envisioned a beautiful island of greenery smack dab in the middle of the long bypassed Social District remain and recently were even trimmed and manicured by volunteers.
But World War II Park is also now the best visual symbol of Rhode Island’s economic crisis Woonsocket can muster.
No one staffs the park as a result of state Department of Environmental Management budget cuts and its maintenance by the informal group of city residents taking on the volunteer clean up work falls short of the manicured condition its 13 acres of land running between Social and East School streets boasted in the past.
Local children who once crowded the park’s sandy beach and played in the park’s cooling pond water under the watchful eyes of state-certified lifeguards would find it difficult to walk through the weed-choked wetland occupying the deepest section of the park’s drained swimming pond.
The kids themselves for the most part have been replaced by members of the city’s growing homeless community who routinely leave their tent camps in nearby woods or nighttime roles on nearby city streets to spend the day in an adult summer camp around park tables and its sheltered picnic areas.
The park bathhouse, rebuilt by the state just two years ago at a cost of $600,000, is locked and tagged by the graffiti of local youth gangs. The nearby changing shelters warn of new roles under abandonment with an odor of urine and feces and the assortment of used condoms and discarded underwear and socks littering the spaces inside.
Frank Hilton, 47, a homeless man from Newton, Mass., living in one of the local tent camps, was sitting with groups of adults around a sheltered picnic table on Wednesday and said he was there because he had nothing else to do but hang out in the park.
“When I came here I got involved in drugs and I lost my wife, lost my family, lost my kids, I lost everything,” Hilton said. Hilton said he has now been clean and sober for 11 months but still hasn’t been able to find that job that would get him into an apartment. So his days are spent sitting at the World War II park picnic tables talking with other homeless people as he puffs on home-rolled cigarettes containing the tobacco he collects from butts on the ground.
Even in its abandoned condition, World War II Park remains a “gorgeous” spot in the city, a spot that the state should seek to reopen, Hilton said.
“I think they should staff the place so that it would be a benefit to the city,” Hilton said. “What do the kids have to do?” he asked.
Cathy Gagnon, 48, a resident of Park View Manor on Pond Street, she said stops by the park regularly to talk to people she knows at the picnic tables, and remembers how different the park had been when the pond was filled with water and children played there.
“I would see kids down here all the time,” she said. “There were millions of kids here and now they have nowhere else to go,” she said.
Susan Del Signore, 54, of Congress Street, still uses the park as a gathering point for her family during the day and occasionally as a spot to try sort out some of the street life problems they have encountered.
Del Signore said she had words with her 28-year-old pregnant daughter there earlier in the day over her relapse into using drugs and living on street. Del Signore said she hoped she was able to turn things around for her daughter just like she hoped things could be turned around for World War II Park.
Since the state closed the park no one but the volunteer group and park regulars like herself have been maintaining the grounds or picking up litter left by nighttime visitors and those unaware of what World War II Veterans Memorial State Park once meant to the city and the state workers who diligently ran it.
“It’s too bad, it’s like what Carol said, it was beautiful down here,” Del Signore said as another daughter’s child, Anastasia, 8 months, blew bubbles at her while being held by an aunt.
The city’s mid-1970s reconstruction of the old World War II Park’s sand beach swimming area into a mid-city vegetated oasis won it awards for landscape design not long after completion of the grant-funded project. The land owned temporarily by the city was returned to state ownership for operation as a state park in Woonsocket.
The park was also selected as the permanent home of the city’s annual Autumnfest fall festival where crowds of many thousands have spent their Columbus Day weekend walking past craft booths set up along the park walkways, listening to entertainment acts on the park’s stage pavilion, or sampling an assortment of local foods and festival snacks offered by local businesses and area civic organizations.
Joel Mathews, city director of planning and development and a participant the park’s 1970s redevelopment, was disappointed by the state’s move to cut the park’s funding from it’s budget and feels something good has been lost in the heart of Woonsocket.
“So much time an effort went into the redesign and after it was completed, the park was so well used and well maintained it became a point of civic pride,” Mathews said.
Older city residents will remember when World War II Park was just a large sandy area running from East School Street to Social Street with a pond that was filled from the Mill River for swimming during the months of summer, according Mathews.
There was no reason to visit the empty stretch of sand the rest of the year and that is one of the reasons the redesign became so popular, Mathews said.
The new design featured a shallow skating pond fed by a fountain near the entrance on Social Street, tennis courts, a volleyball area, a wide variety of ornamental and landscaping trees set out to shelter the park interior from the surrounding urban landscape, and of course the completely reconstructed swimming area and beach. The design included a chlorination system for purifying the stream water creating the artificially constructed pond and a related aeration system helped make the water quality as good as Lincoln Woods State Park in Lincoln, Mathews noted.
The new swimming area supervised by lifeguard chairs at either end featured a laned-swimming area in front of the park headquarters building similar to that found in swimming pools. A diving board pier was located in the middle of a deeper section of the pond and the beach area was kept swallow for younger children and families. The supervised beach swimming area remained in use through last year.
In recent years, the state has had difficulty in recruiting lifeguards in time for the park’s scheduled opening and its protected swimming used declined as a result. Last year two people were hurt seriously in accidents at the pond while lifeguards were still being sought to staff the beach.
The park pond was not filled this year as result of the state’s move to cut the park’s approximately $200,000 in annual operating funding from the state budget and no state workers have been reported to be on duty at World War II for regular maintenance.
Michael Annarummo, city director of Public Works and Administration, said Wednesday that the park current state of disrepair may well be the result of an impasse between the city and the state over who should own and run World War II Veterans Memorial State Park.
As a result of the budget cuts, Annarummo said the city has been instructed by the state not to enter the park to conduct maintenance projects without prior permission of the state.
“We had some discussions about maintenance of the park and they indicated it would be inappropriate for us to go in there without their permission,” he said.
And while that edict may be connected to the as yet unresolved talks over the park’s future use, Annarummo said its more recent use as an adult day camp is raising new pressure on the city, and the state, over what should be done with World War II Park.
“That is an issue that is going to have to be addressed in the not to distant future,” he said.
While the park’s deterioration from a focus of past community pride has been swift and pronounced, Annarummo, a former DEM director, said it could be a point of pressure the state is exerting to win a resolution to the ownership debate.
While World War II was completely abandoned this year, Annarummo said he knows of no similar move at any other state-owned park facility in the state’s 39 cities and towns.
“To my knowledge this is the only one that the state has not been maintained and it seems to me that we have been singled out,” he said.
It is also surprising that the state did not find a way to direct any of its federal stimulus funding to World War II park’s maintenance even though some of that money may have been used to help hire summer staffing for other state parks, some even in northern Rhode Island.
“Many of these things that are happening in communities are being driven by things that are happening at the state level and happening in state government,” he said.
What the future may hold for World War II Park remains undecided at the moment, but Annarummo said some of the possible scenarios that have been raised include yet another park redesign to a smaller recreational facility giving the city some of the land for a planned new fire department headquarters.
The state went out to bid for a children’s water activity park as a replacement for the swimming pond and that design would free up a significant portion of the land now tied up in the beach area and the man-made watershed.
What the city can’t do, Annarummo said, is take on the $200,000 annual operating cost of the park that now exists between Social Street and East School.
“If the city ever takes on ownership of it, it would have to be for a specific use,” he said. “Maybe a water park and a school,” he said. Maybe the use would be for the fire station and the small park. That will all depend on where the talks with the state end up, according to Annarummo.
Charlene Gerber, 20, of Second Avenue, wasn’t thinking of fire stations or state budget’s as she rode her daughter Catarinah, 15 months through the park in a stroller on Thursday while taking advantage of time off from Wal-Mart and the warm sunny weather.
Gerber and Catarinah’s path took them pass the Korean and Vietnam obelisk erected by the United Veterans Council in 1976 and the two 105mm USMC Howitzers the state Sen. Alphonse Auclair had brought to the park in another dedication ceremony in the 1990s.
“It’s a shame it’s close,” Gerber said while recalling the many years she had spent as a child and teenager playing in the pond’s swimming area.
“It was nice and I used to come here all the time,” she said. Now, Gerber said the park is no longer a place for children to visit on their own as a they once could.
There are no longer any park staffers to chase away adults who go to there to drink or do drugs as had been the case in the past and Gerber said no one should go to the park once darkness falls.
“It’s not safe for anyone at night,” she said. During the day, World War II can still be a place to find some shade and quiet while remembering how it used to be the summer spot in Woonsocket. There aren’t many alternatives for young families who don’t have transportation, according to Gerber.
“I took the beach bus at Depot Square to Lincoln Woods once but it was too crowded,” she said. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 04 August 2009 )
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