Yearning for the Watervliet parks of old
When Scott Burke was a kid, the park called Pershing Green was the center of life in the Port Schuyler neighborhood. Or at least it felt that way to him.
There was a wading pool, monkey bars, swings and more for smaller kids, and a basketball court for bigger ones. Teenagers also gathered at the large memorial at the center of the park, wasting time in ways that weren’t always productive. All in all, Pershing Green was part of what, in Burke’s memory, made Port Schuyler a fantastic place to grow up.
“The park was always hopping,” Burke, 61, told me. “There were always people, and it was vibrant.”
Times have changed, and so has the largest park in the neighborhood south of the Watervliet Arsenal. A square faced by homes, it is mostly open
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lawn now — “barren,” Burke called it — with a single picnic table, a smaller memorial to Gen. John Pershing, a hero of World War I, and not much else.
Kids don’t seem to play there, even on warm spring days when school is out.
There are, no doubt, broader cultural and societal reasons for that. I won’t be the first to note that today’s kids are spending much more time inside staring at screens or that adults, generally, seem far less tolerant of the noise children make when they do venture out.
But to Burke, the changes at Pershing Green symbolize how Watervliet, like so many other cities, has failed to invest in its green spaces. The parks are run-down, he said, and the city’s children, its teenagers especially, don’t have enough to do and lack adequate places to gather.
This isn’t just a casual observation for Burke, who lives across the river in downtown Troy. He recently retired after a career teaching at Watervliet High School. He knows the city’s children and wants the best for them.
“For so many of these kids, this is their summer,” Burke said as he gave me a tour of the city’s parks. “They don’t have a vacation home on Lake George.”
When Burke offered the tour, I didn’t hesitate. A column about parks and their importance could never be a bad thing, I figured. And you can learn a lot about a place and its priorities from its public spaces.
We hit most of the parks in the city, including the aforementioned Pershing Green; Clinton Park north of the arsenal; Hudson Shores Park on the river; and Brotherhood Park, a few blocks from a grocery that should still be St. Patrick’s Church. (Sorry, I don’t move on easily.)
Brotherhood Park is where raucous behavior at the basketball court, adjacent to a playground, led Mayor Charles Patricelli to order the hoops removed last year — a decision that Burke, who thinks the city holds its kids to 1950s standards of behavior, criticized as wrongheaded and simplistic.
“If you’re a teenager in Watervliet, forget about it,” he added. “You’re just tagged as unruly.”
Patricelli sees it differently, unsurprisingly. He said the decision to remove the hoops was about sending a message, telling the court’s users that more was expected of them and that bad behavior wouldn’t go unnoticed and unpunished. (The hoops are back, at least for now.)
But the mayor, when we spoke Friday, didn’t disagree that Watervliet’s parks would have benefited from more care and investment. Then he spent the next half hour talking about changes that are in the works or planned.
Patricelli cited new playgrounds being built at 15th Street Park and Clinton Park, which is also home to a new dog park. He talked about the splash park and slides under construction at the city’s pool (funded by private donations). He mentioned a hoped-for tunnel under Interstate 787 that would provide pedestrian access to Hudson Shores and the plan to turn part of the Congress Street Bridge into a pedestrian parkway.
Patricelli also said he hoped to move the basketball court at Brotherhood Park to a new location away from smaller kids and said he has spoken with neighbors about doing something, concerts perhaps, that would enliven Pershing Green.
“These are all little pieces of the puzzle,” Patricelli said. “I really do feel good about the progress that we’re making.”
Fair enough. The point of this isn’t to pick on Watervliet. It is a small city of just 10,000 people, and it isn’t flush. If its parks aren’t as lively and shipshape as they once were, well, you could say that about most places.
Still, maybe you can understand where Burke is coming from.
Sure, he’s nostalgic. But when he remembers how things used to be for kids, he sees no reason why they can’t be better now. He isn’t wrong.