Festival highlights improvements made to small neighborhood parks
Angela Sapp hurried over from her downtown home after a friend texted to say longawaited improvements to their neighborhood park, Our Park, in Third Ward, were about to be unveiled.
Sapp regularly attends events at the Shape Community Center, the nonprofit adjacent to Our Park, and had been looking forward to the green space’s transformation.
“I had to be here to witness it,” she said. “It’s been a long time coming. I’m really happy to see this happen.”
On Saturday, the park hosted the second Love Our Parks Fest, an event showcasing recent enhancements to five parks that were part of a new initiative by the Mayor’s Office of Complete Communities.
Love Our Parks launched in February, when Houston Parks and Recreation Department director Kenneth Allen and Mayor Sylvester Turner discussed the most at-need parks in the city.
The city’s signature parks — Memorial and Hermann — have conservancies for maintenance and expansion, Allen said. But smaller neighborhood parks are often under-resourced.
The mayor tasked Allen’s department with identifying five parks to target for revitalization by the end of December. Our Park was selected, as well as Malone Park, also in Third Ward, Catherine Delce Park in Kashmere Gardens, Earl Henderson Park in Near Northside and Woodruff Park in Magnolia-Manchester.
“It’s extremely important to bring all of our parks up to a certain standard first,” said Allen. “So people have enjoyable spaces for leisure and to recreate, a place where they can sit down and see some nice trees, some grass, a nice playground.”
Allen estimates that work at the five parks costs about $1 million. Several donors contributed, including Cheniere Energy, which gave $180,000.
Our Park was treated to sidewalks, fencing, landscaping and playground equipment.
The Love Our Parks Fest is an opportunity to invite the community out to celebrate, Allen said, as well as generate ideas for programming within the park — movie nights, for example.
On Saturday, Our Park attracted planned and impromptu visitors.
Beth Luvisia moved to Houston a mere week ago. A student at Smith College in Massachusetts, she is in the city for eights months for a clinical social work internship. She showed up to the community center for a volunteer orientation session and happened by chance on the festivities. She sat on a bench watching a group of women line dance under the gazebo.
“There’s a lot of culture,” Luvisia said of her first impressions of Houston.
Third Ward native Elaine Hunter has lived in Houston her entire life. After some time away, she moved back to the neighborhood in 2013. She said Our Park used to be “a mess,” but she pointed to the recent improvements: the grass, the walkway and the new playground. “It’s a whole lot better,” she said.
Hunter lives around the corner and comes to the park regularly. Her visits have become more frequent since the revitalization.
Around 11 a.m., Turner took the makeshift stage to make a few remarks.
“We want to inspire more citizen engagement and forge a real connection to neighborhood parks,” he told the crowd. “We want people to be proud of their neighborhood parks.”
While Aretha Franklin and Earth, Wind & Fire played over the stereo, some attendees sat around chatting while others participated in various activities.
A petting zoo with piglets, goats, chicks and two horses was a hit with kids. Children and adults alike shot hoops at an inflatable mini basketball court set up by the Greater Houston Police Activities League.
The Lake Houston Wilderness Park stole the show with live snakes, draped around the shoulders and fingers of two brave staffers.
“People can see on days like today how valued these parks are by the residents who live in close proximity to them,” said Complete Communities director Shannon Buggs. “You shouldn’t have to live next to Memorial Park in order to have a good park experience.”
In a corner of the park, artist Israel McCloud was in the process of painting a mural, as people came and went admiring his work and taking pictures. He’s been commissioned to do one for each of the revitalized spaces in the program.
“It was always a nice community hub for the people,” McCloud, a native Houstonian from Third Ward, said about Our Park. “But I think it’s now getting more appreciation, and we’ll get a lot more interaction with the community.”
His mural, once complete, will be a colorful expression of the multi-generational nature of parkgoers. On Saturday, he worked on green foliage and a depiction of an elderly couple walking along an undulating pathway.
In the days to come, McCloud will focus on the remainder of the painting: a family of three, a woman with her hands stretched out to the sky, two hands releasing a dove, and a young boy running with a smile on his face.