Crews get Cass Park ready for makeover
Redevelopment includes work on new softball field
WOONSOCKET — The city’s ongoing effort to redevelop Cass Park’s facilities had members of the city’s engineering department out with their surveying equipment on Wednesday doing preliminary work for a retaining wall at the new girls’ softball field.
Scott Sanford, a CAD Engineering specialist for the city, said he and Tim Brundrett, an engineering assistant, were taking topographic measurements of the softball field area that would be used by a city contractor for the Cass Park improvements to install a retaining wall on the hill behind the field.
“We will supply them with all the grades and contours to be included in their design,” Sanford said.
The new field replaces the old city Little League field in Cass near Iron Rock Brook and features a footprint into the hillside behind it that was cut out by the contractors doing grading work for the softball facility.
The field’s grading work also continues at the site as fill is being spread for the base of the new playing area, and glacial boulders and other material from the hillside excavation moved from that area.
City Public Works Director Steven D’Agostino said on Thursday that the excavation work needed to be done to create a regulation-size girls’ softball field at the site. “The field had to be extended and we couldn’t extend it into the stream so we had to move it back,” D’Agostino explained. As a result of the change, the
city now plans to have a large block retaining wall constructed behind the field’s backstop, the public works director said. The wall, to be erected by J&R Precast Retaining Walls at cost of $30,000, will be engineered to hold back the area designed by the city and will hold engineering stamps on its design and application, D’Agostino noted. “It is very cost effective and a better wall than one with smaller interlocking block, D’Agostino said.
Cass Park was laid out in its current configuration in the early 1900s and has long been viewed as a natural gem in the city’s recreational holdings.
Iron Rock Brook’s waters create Cass Pond in the park, a man-made body of water, where local residents fish from the start of the fishing season through the summer and into the fall. The pond’s waters are stocked with trout and other fish for anglers by the state Department of Environmental Management sev- eral times during the season. The upper area of the park includes hardwood forest with large oak trees and slopes to the city’s Renaud Field baseball complex off Newland Avenue. Renaud Field situated next to the old Naval Reserve Base off Newland that is now used by Highland Daycare for its preschool programs.
The upper portion of the park also borders the John R. Dionne Track Complex off Cumberland Hill Road and Sylvester’s Pond, the site of a former ice house in the city and a second fishing area in Cass.
The city has been planning a major renovation of Cass for many years and has been putting aside grant funding, some awarded just recently, to carry out its improvement goals. The park’s basketball courts were moved from a low-lying area of the park near Cass Avenue to a more visible location at the now filled in park outdoor ice rinks near Woonsocket High School’s abutting land. The main parking lot was repaved by the city’s Public Works Department and the old bridge near the pond replaced with a new bridge.
There has also been talk of moving the high school’s football field from Barry Field on the other side of city to a new site within Cass Park as a way to have all the high school facilities in one location.
That would be a change from past city considerations of new uses for Cass Park and its still forested areas. The late Phyllis Thomas, a city historian and preservationist, and her supporters battled the city in court in the 1970s, when Woonsocket High School was being built and the construction work encroached on the park’s green space. Thomas won the bid to keep the school department out of Cass, and the park was left as it was until the new effort to rework the park began several years ago and improvements began to be made in the walking area around the pond and the dirt roadway that follows the remains of a historic path through the city.
D’Agostino said the city has been getting a high level of improvement work out of the previously awarded grant funding because it has provided as much of preliminary construction work and even the paving completed as an in-kind-contribution to the projects.
The city’s plans for redesigning the park are expected to be aired during a special City Council meeting next Tuesday beginning at 6:45 p.m. in the second floor conference room. City Council President Daniel Gendron requested the meeting include a discussion and review with Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s administration on the overall proposed Cass Park improvements, including the timing of the improvements and their associated costs and sources of funding.
The latest recreational development grant from the Department of Environmental Management, a sum of $300,000, will allow the city to implement more of its planned improvements for the park, D’Agostino said. “We are going to just keep plugging at it until we get it done,” he said. For the upcoming grant funded work, D’Agostino will be serving as general contractor and putting the individual projects out to bid by sub-contractors. That should save the city 20 to 30 percent on the overall costs of the work, he noted.
Mayor Baldelli-Hunt and Joel D. Mathews, city director of planning and development, will be presenting the council with an overview of the Cass Park plan at the council workshop, D’Agostino said.
“My focus is on the playing field,” he said of the ongoing softball field project. The new grant is expected to help the city build a new bridge at the old wading spot on Iron Rock Brook, nearby the softball field, where another deteriorated walking bridge was removed last year. “There will also probably be some new playground equipment and other overall improvements for the park,” he said.