Maya McFadden Photo
Hill youngsters and Crystal Fernandez install signage at Kimberly Park.
Ten-year-old Cristian Estrada and his brothers Joshua, 9, and Jeremiah, 5, took turns plunging a shovel into the dirt on Kimberly Avenue to bring more beauty to their neighborhood park — this time in the form of installing a Friends of Kimberly Park sign.
That was the scene last Tuesday at the Hill park beside Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School. The sign installation came after the city, as part of its own effort cleaning up trash in that same park, removed dozens of plants the boys had been growing with their fellow community members.
Two years ago a group of Hill residents agreed it was time to beautify and bring community back into Kimberly Park. Since then, group co-founders Carlos Reis and Crystal Fernandez have organized neighborhood gatherings and cleanups at the park, racking up over a hundred volunteer hours in 2022 and 2023.
Many trash bags of litter and planted seeds later, the park has now established a Friends of Kimberly Park group in partnership with the Urban Resources Initiative (URI).
The Friends of Kimberly Park was established to preserve the neighborhood’s green space and provide residents with opportunities to bond with their community members while keeping up the park.
“This was something discarded that we made beautiful again, like bringing new life here and healing,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez: "Which one spells your name, Jeremiah?"
Fernandez and three of her four sons — Cristian, Joshua, and Jeremiah (her oldest, Alexander Almanzar, 16, could not attend due to being in school) — gathered at the Kimberly Avenue park entrance Tuesday with URI urban forester apprentice Roan Hollander and URI post-grad associate Joshua DeAnda to install the sign that establishes the park as a community green space site.
Funding from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s Urban Green & Community Garden Initiative grant program was allocated to Kimberly Park last winter. The grant will allocate $101,500 toward drainage improvements, benches, trash cans, requisite demolitions, and basketball court improvements.
As of last Thursday, the city’s Chief Landscape Architect Katherine Jacobs provided the Independent with the update that the grant paperwork is currently with the city for legal review. Once reviewed, she said it next will require a signature from the mayor, and then it will be returned to the state to be countersigned by the attorney general.
“At that point, we will finally have executed grant documents and will be able to start work! We are optimistic that we will be able to start work in the spring of 2024,” Jacobs concluded.
While waiting for the grant funds, the Friends of Kimberly Park have focused on the park’s Kimberly Avenue entrance by cleaning up daily litter and dumping, and beautifying the area to make it more welcoming.
File photo
The park entrance freshly beautified this summer ...
Maya McFadden photo
.. and last Tuesday, after installing the new sign.
This year, the Friends of Kimberly Park planted 48 perennials and dedicated a total of 59 volunteer hours to park upkeep. In their inaugural year, 171 volunteer hours went toward park improvements with 22 volunteers. The team has been focused on the park’s Kimberly Avenue entrance as it waits for the grant funding to do upgrades for the remaining green space.
When Fernandez and her three sons arrived at the park entrance Tuesday, they noticed a pile of trash nearly flowing onto the sidewalk and that dozens of the plants the community planted in the summer were gone. The city had removed them.
“It looks like they just used a giant machine to run everything over here,” said Cristian as he hugged his mother, who shed tears about the loss of work Tuesday.
Fernandez added, “We are saddened that all of this work is gone. And this won’t discourage us from starting again. We want to shed a light on this and the larger problems that have led to this; the lack of affordable housing, the increase in the unhoused population, and the illegal dumping, among other things. There is so much we do at a grassroots level, and we need changes to be made at the city and state levels to address the inequities in our neighborhoods.”
What the entrance looked like before the Nov. 4 city maintenance job, which deemed conditions poor.
On Friday, Deputy Director of Parks and Public Works Stephen Hladun provided the Independent with clarity about the city’s removal of the plants at the park’s entrance.
He said that staff from his department went to Kimberly Park on Nov. 4 to perform scheduled tree removal, trimming, mowing, and maintenance work, and to address poor sight line concerns at the park caused by the tree canopy.
“In addition, upon arrival at the site, P&PW staff found a significant amount of debris, litter, and overgrown vegetation, and also conducted additional cleanup work in order to clean and clear the pathway leading into the park and along the fence-line abutting the school.”
The pile of trash to the right of the entrance was left behind by the city and cleaned up by Fernandez and her boys Tuesday.
Hladun continued. “P&PW is very appreciative of the community members and volunteers who have invested their time to beautify this space. P&PW staff also welcome the opportunity to work together with the Friends of Kimberly Park and others involved on how best to continue to care for this space moving forward, including replacing any perennials that may need to be replanted in the spring planting season due to the necessary fall cleaning and maintenance work that was required.”
An "Accessible Space For People To Come Together"
To begin Tuesday’s sign installation, Fernandez marked the spot for the sign with a tree branch and got approval from her kids.
They then each suited up in gardening gloves, some with the help of their mom.
Fernandez, who is the director of Green Jobs Corps program at Common Ground, broke ground for the sign post at the center of the entrance path. The boys soon joined in to help dig a 2‑foot-deep hole, using their hands, a post hole digger, and shovel.
When it was his turn, Joshua stood on his tip-toes to use all his might when pushing the shovel down into the rocky dirt.
Fernandez breaks ground.
This past summer, Fernandez and her kids came to the park on a weekly schedule to clean up accumulated trash in the park due to the lack of a trash bin. Half a dozen community events were hosted for park clean up and planting days.
Neighbors around the Hill, Fernandez’ Common Ground Jobs Corps students, and the Alpha Beta Alumnae Chapter of Lambda Theta Alpha joined for clean up and planting days.
Roan Hollander, Joshua DeAnda, Jeremiah Estrada, Cristian Estrada, Crystal Fernandez, and Joshua Estrada.
Over the years Fernandez has aimed to teach her boys about the value of building community and coming together to solve problems.
The goal is to make the park an “accessible space for people to come together,” Fernandez said.
Over the summers, Fernandez brought chalk, bubbles, and pizza to invite neighbors to join together and help with improving the park.
“The best part of everything is seeing everyone join in,” Fernandez said.
Along the way they built connections with neighbors they’d never met, and they learned about invasive plants and how to tend a garden.
Hill residents have spent the last two years keeping up with trimming the trees, weeding, re-mulching, and planting flowers at the park’s entrance.
After installing the sign, Fernandez and her kids filled two 13-gallon trash bags with litter.
Over the course of the day’s park cleanup, the boys attempted to convince Fernandez to make a trip to Dairy Queen for a treat like they did during work days over the summer. However, their attempt was unsuccessful.
The litter pile included trashed shoes, cups, food wrappers, and syringes.
Fernandez said over the summer her son Cristian spent a lot of time learning about the perennials they planted and always remembered to advise volunteers and his friends that you must pull weeds out from the root to get rid of it completely.
On Tuesday, Cristian discovered worms, a slug, and a family of pill bugs.
While cleaning up, two Spanish-speaking seniors passing by told Fernandez that they are sad the flowers and plants are gone from the entrance.
They also shared their concerns with Fernandez about the lack of resources for those living unhoused who sometimes spend nights in the park.
“If we don’t want litter, we need trash receptacles. If we don’t want economic refugees sleeping in the park then we need to provide more resources to them,” Fernandez said.
DeAnda reminded Fernandez that “growth and nature isn’t ever linear” and encouraged her to continue working to improve the park despite the loss of two years of work.
Congratulations to the Friends of Kimberly Park for the grant to improve the park, and thank you to them and all the volunteers who help to maintain and improve and plant in the park.
Shame on the city’s Parks and Public Works department for plowing over all the plantings in the park, if you don’t know the difference between a weed and an invasive and an intentional planting, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing the work of beautifying or cleaning up the parks. This is why public works and the parks departments should be two separate departments working together when necessary, but leaving the parks work to the experts in flora and fauna. If the parks department worked with the Friends of the Parks organizations and community garden organizations, they would have a huge group of knowledgeable flora and fauna expert volunteers to help them with their mission of making the parks, gardens, and other natural areas cleaner and more beautiful.