Louisville is most assuredly a city of parks. There are the grand parks like Cherokee and Iroquois – the Olmsted Parks that invite activity on a large scale, that pull Louisvillians in from all over the city along their stately parkways. They are parks worth driving to. And then there are the neighborhood parks – the half-acre postage stamp of green that you really shouldn’t notice unless you live in the neighborhood, but if you do, you probably know intimately. It’s where you take the kids or the visiting nephews to kick around a soccer ball; the place you walk to on a sunny autumn afternoon with a paperback book; the place where you run into a friend and end up sitting on the playground swings and talking for over an hour. These parks take on the character of the neighbors that surround them and use them; they are extensions of front porches and back yards.
The Louisville Metro Parks Assocation manages more than 100 of these neighborhood parks. Lucille Grant Park in the Phoenix Hill neighborhood is not one of these. And the way Cindy Brown Kinloch (she’s the executive director of the Neighborhood Association) tells the story of the park’s creation, it becomes even more than a neighborhood park – more like a community park, conceived and built and sustained entirely through the efforts of residents working together.
She begins the story in 1994 when New Directions Housing Corporation moved into the neighborhood. New Directions is an organization that builds and maintains affordable housing while working with neighborhood and community-building groups. Its yearly Repair Affair mobilizes hundreds of volunteers to make basic housing repairs for scores of low-income elderly and disabled homeowners across the city. The building itself was a gift from the community – the former home of the Casa Grisanti Restaurant, a Louisville establishment for more than 30 years. After closing the restaurant in 1991, the Michael Grisanti family donated the 1.5 acre parcel of land at 1000 E. Liberty Street to the non-profit housing corporation for its offices.
True to their mission of community involvement, New Directions met with representatives from the Phoenix Hill Neighborhood Association as they made plans for what to do with the donated space. For their part, the association was trying to create more green space – specifically, a park – but struggled to get assistance from a metro government that insisted the city had enough parks. At the time, the neighborhood’s public green space was limited to pocket parks located within the Clarksdale public housing project and the tiny, triangular Rubel Park hidden inside the area enclosed by Broadway and Rubel and Barret Avenues.
New Directions had connections with the Christian Church Disciples of Christ, and the church’s statewide organization raised most of the money needed – nearly $20,000 – to finance the creation of the park. And so a park was built, adjacent to the New Directions parking lot, complete with playground and benches and a wide open grassy space perfect for pickup soccer games, lazy picnics and ferocious rounds of red rover. When the work was completed in 1997, there was still the issue of naming the park. The neighborhood association decided to honor a longtime resident of Phoenix Hill, Ms. Lucille Grant, who celebrated her centennial birthday the year of the dedication.
By all accounts, Ms. Grant was a cornerstone of the neighborhood, a nearly lifelong resident who didn’t know a stranger, who could often be seen standing at her fencepost, waiting to talk to any passers by. Lisa Thompson, Assistant Director at New Directions, says that you “didn’t leave Miss Lucille’s house without a smile on your face. And if it was summer, you can bet you’d be leaving with a homegrown tomato, too.”
But even if you had never had the pleasure of speaking with Miss Lucille, you’d surely know her modest Phoenix Hill home, which was host to an expanse of beautiful purple petunias every spring. Cindy smiles and recalls that the elderly woman “was very poor, didn’t have any money, but every year she made sure that she had petunias planted and they would just cover the whole side of her house.”
Miss Lucille wore a purple dress on the day of her park’s dedication in July of 1997 and more than one person used the word “regal” to describe her to me. “She was sitting there, tears streaming down her face. She was so excited to have the park named after her,” Cindy remembers. “And it was just a wonderful day.”
A Tale of Two Parks
The years marched on, Miss Lucille passed away, and the park, well-loved, began to show signs of wear. At the same time, another neighborhood found itself in dispute with the city and Metro Parks over the closure of their park. In 2008, the city announced the closure of five local swimming pools, including the small pool in Breslin Park, at the corner of Lexington Road and Baxter Avenue in the Irish Hill neighborhood. The pool was also popular with children and families who would walk from adjacent Phoenix Hill. Perhaps more than any of the other pool shutterings, the proposed Breslin Park closure sparked a public outcry from the affected neighborhoods and began what would become more than a year-long battle with the city.
Tom O’Shea, of O’Shea’s Irish Pubs (in Phoenix Hill), spearheaded the fundraising efforts to save the pool, raising nearly $20,000 through his family of restaurants. The business owner got pledges of financial assistance from several other area businesses and the cause drew support from surrounding neighborhoods as well. In the end, however, their efforts were no match for a city government intent on cutting costs in recessionary times, and the pool was filled in.
But the money already raised couldn’t very well be returned to the hundreds of O’Shea’s patrons who had dined out on Monday nights in support, and so Tom decided that the funds should be allocated to the neighborhoods – Irish Hill and Phoenix Hill – that had invested the most time and energy into saving the pool. Not being able to find a project that would equally benefit both areas, the money was split between the two and the Phoenix Hill Neighborhood Association decided to dedicate it to the refurbishment of Lucille Grant Park.
As Cindy explains, “the park was nice enough, but it just wasn’t extremely safe and usable.” The big open field, for example, runs along the busy Chestnut Street corridor which was a dangerous attraction to wayward soccer balls and Frisbees. With the money from Breslin Park, the association was able to install an attractive, wrought-iron style fence along that side of the park along with a beautiful new sign. A sidewalk and concrete slab were poured to support a small pavilion that had been donated by Wesley House, a community center formerly located in Butchertown, when they moved to a new location further south in the city. Volunteers from O’Shea’s weatherized the pavilion and built a new wooden container for a trash bin, in addition to staining and installing new park benches and other general landscaping improvements.
There is no place like this place
The park re-dedication was scheduled for Sunday, September 11th of this year. When I met the day before with Cindy and Todd Hine, the Neighborhood Association president, they were worried about attendance with the cold, drizzly weather that had just set in. As it turned out, Sunday was a beautiful day, brilliantly sunny and warm with just breeze enough to remind you that summer’s hottest days were over and fall had arrived at last.
My fiancé and I ride our bikes to the park from Clifton and leaned them up against a freshly mulched catalpa tree. After a quick scan of the park and the crowd gathered there, I decide I don’t need to bother locking our bikes – and I think that says a lot about a place. Musicians are setting up under the New Directions overhang while neighborhood kids swarm over the playground and swings and – a special treat this afternoon – an inflatable bouncing tent.
Neighbors greet each other, dogs sniff each other and the older folks sit on benches and lawn chairs and take it all in. A gaggle of young girls notice the photographer from this paper and start hamming it up, making ridiculously comic poses as he laughs and keeps telling them to just “act natural.” Todd, the association president I had just met the day before, waves from across the way and introduces me to other friends and neighbors and we talk for awhile about Phoenix Hill, about dogs, the good food from Webb’s, church ladies and their hats – in other words, nothing in particular, as if I had lived next door to them for years. Afterwards, at home, my fiancée will ask, “So you knew all those people?” “Nope,” I shrug, “they were just from the neighborhood.”
Then there’s a few short speeches from people involved in the park’s re-dedication: Cindy is one, and also Lisa Thompson from New Directions. She talks about walking through the old Casa Grisanti’s, shortly after the family had donated it to her organization. “And all around the building,” she says, “we kept finding these little signs that said ‘Hospitality starts here.’ And from the moment we came to Phoenix Hill and met with the neighborhood association, we have been met with gracious hospitality.”
Afterwards, in the park named for the woman who so graciously welcomed neighbors and visitors, the kids flock to the pavilion where Cindy is serving ice cream. The late afternoon sun casts long shadows across the park and the musicians – a local group called Down to Earth – resume playing. A woman on conga drums accompanies the guitarist as he begins to sing, “Come gather ‘round me/There is something you all should know/There is no place like this place.”
–Natalie Weis
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