ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 10, 1997 TAG: 9703100092
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: PROBLEMS IN THE PARKS A SPECIAL REPORT
SOURCE: DAN CASEY THE ROANOKE TIMES
In the early 1980s, big plans existed to revive Roanoke's Washington Park; now, residents have united to push the effort.
About two years ago, St. Gerard's Roman Catholic Church decided to hold an old-fashioned picnic.
What better place, organizers thought, than just a few blocks down Orange Avenue at Washington Park? Named for famous black educator and Franklin County native Booker T. Washington, it's the largest park in the Northwest quadrant, close by the church, and a place particularly dear to middle-aged and elderly black Roanokers who can recall summertime picnics that drew crowds from as far away as Martinsville and Danville.
Church members set out for Washington Park on a brief mission to reconnoiter. What they found stunned and appalled them. Plans for the picnic were quickly changed to Southwest's Wasena Park.
"There wasn't anything there to satisfy our needs," recalled Freddie Monk, a St. Gerard's member and retired nursing aide who picnicked and played in Washington Park as a young girl.
"The shelter was busted. The toilets were nasty, with broken seats. The bridge across [Lick Run] was deteriorated. We had to go across town to Wasena Park."
``I got angry,'' she added. ``I said, `Here's a park just two blocks from us. It's sitting there, terrible, idle.'''
Out of that shock and dismay was born the Inner City Coalition for Selective Development. Monk is its president.
Working with Total Action Against Poverty, the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority, Virginia Tech, the city, church groups and private businesses, the coalition hopes to transform the largely neglected 41-acre park into a first-class recreational facility - the Northwest equivalent of the gleaming River's Edge athletic complex in South Roanoke.
``If you took [the $2.8 million spent on River's Edge in the 1980s] and put it into Washington Park, you could create a regional green space that would draw people in from all over the region,'' said Martin Jeffrey, TAP's director of community development. ``It's a regional green space, but it's been neglected.''
At one time, in the early 1980s, there were big plans for Washington Park. A consultant hired by the city recommended building an amphitheater on a curved slope leading from the upper park to the lower park.
There would be a baseball field on upper Washington Park, and bathrooms there. Scores of trees would be planted and a fitness trail would snake through the park. Large light columns would be erected for a football field, with bleachers for spectators. A second picnic shelter and children's playground would be built near the park's outdoor pool.
Washington Park got the second playground, the picnic shelter, the football field and the light columns. But there was no money for the amphitheater or football fans' seating - or the baseball diamond, the upper park bathrooms, the fitness trail or many of the trees shown on the plan.
Monk appeared before City Council last September with her plan and a plea for some seed funding that could match private grants the group was seeking.
On the recommendation of City Manager Bob Herbert, council deferred the question to an upcoming capital budget planning process. It may be deferred again to a major parks study that the city plans to undertake this year.
The city later promised the group a $10,000 grant because Washington Park won a contest last fall in which shoppers at Valley View Mall voted it their favorite park.
John Coates, director of Parks and Recreation, later sweetened that offer, adding $3,500 for a survey map; $2,000 worth of new benches and trash cans; and $3,000 worth of cleaning, grading and seeding.
Monk isn't giving up. She's continued to meet with city officials, business leaders, neighborhoods, community groups and private foundations.
"That park has been sitting there all of these years and nothing has ever been done," she said. "This is for our children. That's what this whole thing is all about."
Here is her vision of what Washington Park could be:
On the lower end, along Orange Avenue, there would be more trees, shrubs and many flowers.
A much larger picnic shelter than the one that stands there now, which can accommodate only four tables, for church or community picnics.
Bathrooms would be separate from the shelter area - or their entrances would not be adjacent to tables.
The small plot of weathered and rusty playground equipment would be replaced with a sprawling complex of up-to-date equipment manufactured from recycled materials. TAP, which has designed the playground equipment, calls it "Barefoot Park" and notes that it would be within walking distance of 1,500 families.
An amphitheater would be built, with seating along an existing grassy slope and a stage at the bottom on part of the lower park's parking lot.
The boarded-up log house on the site, which used to be a caretaker's cabin, would be restored. Monk's research dates that building to the late 1700s, making it one of the oldest buildings still standing in Roanoke.
Behind Lincoln Terrace Elementary School on the upper end of the park there would be an interpretive nature trail that would connect to a network of city greenways.
Also on the upper end, there would be an indoor pool offering year-round swimming that would be open to the public. An outdoor summer pool is already in the park.
Jeffrey, the recently elected president of the Roanoke NAACP chapter, gives the coalition's plan a better-than-even chance of succeeding.
"That's in large part due to the existence of [the coalition] and the commitment of people like Freddie to making this happen," Jeffrey said. "The one thing that's been absent is a broad-based community effort that's made up of people of various interests from neighborhoods, joining forces to push the issue. They're commanding some attention that Freddie would not get by herself, or even a couple of Freddies."
The city recognizes the need to improve sites like Washington Park, but hasn't made specific project commitments because money is limited and parks aren't the only need. Park improvements accounted for $4 million on a $159 million capital projects priority list the city staff recently prepared. The most money the city would have available to spend, however, based on current tax rates, would be $37 million over the next 10 years.
LENGTH: Long : 116 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: JANEL RHODA THE ROANOKE TIMES. Freddie Monk is presidentby CNBof the Inner City Coalition for Selective Development, which is
promoting the rescue of Washington Park.