Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot



The kids in the building have been looking sad these past few days; a chapter of their childhood is being closed. Our playground is being torn down and a parking lot is being put up in its’ place. The land where our soon to be former parking lot stood on was sold by our new landlord and houses are going to be built there.

The kids came home from school to find the monkey bars gone. A group of them stood by the fence watching the workers as they went about their business of dismantling the props of so many childhood memories. They all looked so sad. Once upon a time a couple of landlords ago our playground was in bad shape, abandoned and the victim of vandalism. Parents weren’t even allowing their kid to play there anymore. Then one day my mom formed a committee to fix the playground. She went to the landlord who had been refusing to invest anymore money in the playground citing the vandalism and somehow managed to charm him. By the time she was done with him he agreed to match whatever she raised dollar for dollar in addition to purchasing new monkey bars and slides.

The playground project became a labor of love for the parents in the building. Eugene and the other fathers built us a professional basketball court, complete with lights for evening games. The boys of the building painted the court in Chicago Bulls colors. My father built the handball court and installed the monkey bars. The moms repaired the benches and the kids painted them. The teenagers painted the hop scotch and skelsies boxes. My mother’s Girl Scout troop planted a garden around the big rock that sits in the center of the playground. My dad and the other fathers put up a fence around the playground to keep the outsiders out of the playground. It took us a couple of weeks to get the playground back in tip top shape, pretty soon it was full of life again and there was no more vandalism. Our playground was a place for all the neighbors to come together during the summer. All it took was someone setting up a grill in the playground to get a BBQ going. Neighbors would look out their windows and spread the word to the neighbors on the other side of the complex and in a matter of minutes people would bring something down from their apartments and cook together. Different races, religions, nationalities sitting down eating together watching their kids play. I think this is the reason the people in this complex are all so tight with each other the seeds of our unity were planted in that playground nourished by grilled hot dogs, burgers and chicken.

People arriving home from work stopped alongside the kids of the building to look at the work and contemplate memories of summers past …
One of my neighbors recalled my parents annual “Labor Day /Back To School Picnic Jam” that would last well into the late night. That was my parents’ baby, they held for the kids every year. The whole building would pitch in we’d have sound equipment, music, a pop corn cart, snow cone cart, the tables set up with pies, cakes and cookies, barrels filled with ice and every imaginable flavor of bug juice for the kids, soft drinks and beer for the adults. Oh man and the food! Everyone would cook something and they’d set up a buffet in the grassy areas that would rival a catering halls spread. The jam got bigger every year with the tenants all chipping in to make it better every year. People dressed as clowns juggling for the kids, face painting, organized competitions with prizes for everyone even the ones who came in last.

Hands down the best part was when the sun would set and everyone would gather in the basketball court for the dancing. The DJ would throw on a mixture of the new and the old. Classic Motown and old school free style would echo in the streets. Imagine over 200 people dancing the electric slide. It was the best. At the end of the evening my parents would hand out bags of school supplies for the kids and our neighbor Ed would give each of the kids a dollar for luck. After midnight the music would get lowered and something soft would be played as everyone pitched in to clean up. Once that was done the kids would be sent upstairs and the adults would stay behind for another couple of hours, drinking the last of the beer as they all talked sitting on the benches underneath the trees.

Management says the playground will be relocated to the other side of the complex over by the apple trees, an area half the size of what we had. It wont be the same not for the 2 generations that grew up here and learned how to ride their bikes in this playground, it wont be the same for those of us who learned how to handle scraped knees gracefully in that playground. In the words of Joni Mitchell, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."



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Posted by @ 3:20 PM
2 comment from:  Emory Mayne,  Mia,