Pizza & Playground Plans Prevail At Kensington Park

How about an upgraded splash pad — one where there’s not only refreshing spray, but the really cool kind where buckets of water fall on your head?

How about grills and picnic tables? And swings and a play apparatus, but one not made of metal because that gets too hot. Maybe a sandbox, but be sure it has a cover to keep the cats out; exercise equipment too, and with all that still keep enough open space for touch football.

Friday afternoon those were among the thoughtful and often detailed wishes on the lists of some 40 neighbors who gathered at the Kensington Playground off Chapel Street in the Dwight neighborhood. 

They were there to mark the end of the legal battle in which the Friends of Kensington Playground had sued the city for its agreement to sell the park, a green space in an area of the city with likely the least of it, to a developer who had plans to convert the land into also much needed affordable housing.

However, in June, after the developer, Boston-based The Community Builders (TCB), determined not to go forward with its plans to build 15 units of new affordable housing on the playground site, the city was in a position to move to dismiss the suit.

Click here to read a summary story of the debates and the legal battle.

The pizza, ice cream, and fun-filled gathering on Friday, however, was not so much a celebration, said the Friends’ founder Pat Wallace – and certainly not a victory lap in what amounted to a contest between two unarguable public goods: affordable housing and green space.

“It was a hard-fought contest on both sides,” Wallace said as she served up tasty slices from a dozen boxes of pizza, ​“and everyone was civil in a way that exemplified democracy. Now it’s over and now we want to work together to make it the best park and playground it can be.”

And the first step was listening to what neighbors wanted. That was why the price you paid for a slice or two or three, in effect, was filling out a survey and talking about future features you’d like to see created at the tree-filled rectangle midway on the block between Chapel and Edgewood.

As she looked around at the happy throng, Wallace reflected that when she helped start the Friends, the community was not organized around the park at all – which, in the absence of the necessary level of municipal maintenance, was the reason the park had been over the years often more abused than utilized and loved.

Now it’s different. ​“Now we have a neighborhood of adults and kids who know it’s great, and that’s what it takes.”

Wallace said the next step is to continue the surveying – you can fill one out by going to the Friends of Kensington Playground site or by calling Wallace at 203 – 285-5077. 

Once that’s complete, the Friends plan to make a complete report on community wishes to the Dwight central community management team in September.

However, the hard work required to keep a park friends group active and mobilized and able to fundraise or pressure the city, or both – a challenge even in a neighborhood with more stable housing, money, and resources – was exemplified in the experience of Josh Randall.

He’s a botanist by training and a member of the Friends who over the years of the campaign had contributed his research on the ecological and health value of the London plane trees and elms in the park. 

In the run-up to Friday’s event he learned that humans in the area are a lot more transient than the maples and sycamores.

“I called 15 people [who had filled out initial organizing surveys two and a half years ago], and only three were still in the neighborhood,” he reported.

That speaks to the transiency of people, he said, in a neighborhood that obviously still needs more permanent affordable housing.

“Parks are social places, and they’ll reflect the social crises and inequities of the communities around them.”

Danger – like the city re-purposing a green space to achieve another end – exists when there’s not an attentive community, he added.

But that wasn’t the order of business Friday. Pizza was, with sausage and mushrooms, tomatoes, and green peppers. 

So were the many drawings the kids were making of fountains and merry-go-rounds and the recollections of 15-year-old Leslie Perez, a student at Career High School, who frequents the park after school to hang out, she said, with her cousins.

Wallace said $5,000 remains in unpaid lawyers’ fees that the Friends must fundraise for in order to bring the legal chapter of the park saga to a close. 

She is also hoping that some of the substantial ARPA funds in the city’s treasury might be deployed for the upgraded equipment that eventually may come to the park; otherwise the Friends will have to fundraise for that.

Then there are larger issues that the group in the context of their battle for Kensington has put before the city and the Parks Commission, and thus far have not been acted on.

Chief among them is a request for a policy on green spaces citywide. Based on research the group has done, along with a gathering of support it has accrued from community management teams citywide, that policy statement, said Wallace, should include a commitment that all of the city’s green spaces must have at minimum a working splash pad, some kind of play apparatus, and shade-giving mature trees.

“This doesn’t have to happen overnight,” she said, ​“but it’s a goal to aspire to.”

Friday, what did have to happen, and absolutely immediately, was the provision of more pizza to the growing number of Friends of Kensington Playground; Wallace and her crew prevailed there too.