Ground broken on Cass Park project
An old warming hut is knocked down by an excavating machine Monday, making way for proposed basketball courts at Cass Park athletic complex.
WOONSOCKET — The city broke ground on the first phase of the proposed Cass Park athletic complex Monday, demolishing the old “warming hut” and regrading what’s left of a defunct skating rink at the 61-acre site adjacent to Woonsocket High School.
“This is the beginning,” Mayor Lisa BaldelliHunt proclaimed as the jaws of a mammoth excavating machine chomped down on the roof of the longabandoned wood and concrete structure. “This is a project that will benefit the entire community, not just the high school. It will show people that we not only value education, but the qualify of life in our city.”
The so-called warming hut used to support the activities of a long-defunct hockey rink once located at Cass Park. The building provided shelter for players to lace up their skates and come in from the cold when they weren’t on the nearby ice, but it’s been abandoned for years.
Now, Baldelli-Hunt says a $388,000 grant from the state Department of Environmental Management will be used to finance the construction of two new basketball courts at the site of the former skating area and the reconstruction of the parking lot adjacent to Cass Pond.
But the mayor’s vision for Cass Park doesn’t end with basketball courts and a new parking lot. The central component is a new football field for the Woonsocket High School varsity squad, replacing the current gridiron at Barry Field – more than three miles away. She says the existing configuration is a logistical nightmare for players and their families, adding after-school transportation to the other side of town to all the complications of squeezing football practice into their busy lifestyles.
The new field would be built on a portion of Cass Park near Renaud Field, the varsity baseball diamond for the Villa Novans. Renaud Field has already been substantially upgraded in recent years, but Baldelli-Hunt says there are a few loose ends that will be tightened up as part of the park improvement plan.
Another component of the park makeover calls for rebuilding the footbridge over Iron Brook, which meanders from the park’s namesake body of water, Cass Pond, to the Peters River, a tributary of the Blackstone.
The overhaul also calls for a better drainage system that will reduce the tendency of Cass Pond to fill with sediment, improving the habitat for marine life in the popular fishing area.
Though the design is still evolving, the city is presently working from preliminary drawings produced by the Planning Department within the last few years. But the mayor says it was her uncle – former Mayor Charles Baldelli – who first proposed converting Cass Park into a full-scale athletic complex, anchored by the high-school football stadium, while he was in office in the mid-1980s.
Baldelli-Hunt says it’s an ambitious but laudable goal for one of the largest remaining tracts of open space left in the city. The mayor said it could take years to bring to fruition, and it’s still unknown what the full cost would be or where the money would come from.
But she says she intends to aggressively pursue the whole range of options available to assemble the financing for the project – philanthropic sources, as well as state and federal grants.
To stretch the available funds as far as possible during the current phase of work, Public Works Director Steve D’Agostino says the city will serve as its own clerk of the works and use in-house labor wherever it can.
“The project manager is the city of Woonsocket, so we’re saving money by not paying 20 percent for a general contractor here,” he said.
Loam scraped off the bed of the old hockey rink to create a flat surface for new basketball courts will also be stockpiled for landscaping projects in the park later, D’Agostino said.
One guiding principle will be to preserve the park’s rural character as a destination for passive recreation, despite the creation of new athletic amenities, the mayor says.
The Cass Park project is the second major recreational initiative that Baldelli-Hunt has spearheaded. Last year she celebrated the completion of the $2.6 million makeover of World War II Veterans Park – an effort that actually predated the start of her administration in 2013. The former state lawmaker had been lobbying colleagues in the General Assembly to include funding for the park in the state budget for several years prior to her election as mayor, and eventually she succeeded.
“It’s one of the things you hear in the city all the time – there’s nowhere for children to go,” says Baldelli-Hunt. “Recreation has been overlooked for far too long.”