Park Place Vacant Lots Will Become Long-Sought Park For Hillyard Neighborhood

It’s no place to play.

Children dodge puddles and rocks as they dash onto a gravel road, chasing a wayward ball.

A basketball hoop over a driveway is the neighborhood gathering place. The game ends when the cars return.

Esmeralda Golf Course sprawls a block away, but the manicured lawns are off limits to young rough-and-tumble types.

“Those kids don’t have a park to play in,” said Joyce Harbison, president of the Hillyard Steering Committee. “They have to walk down Freya, which is busy and has no sidewalks. There is nothing within a mile for them.”

That will be changing soon.

Creating a children’s park became a priority for the steering committee several years ago. It became reality last month when two vacant lots were bought and park designs unveiled for the neighborhood.

“Wow! It’s a great idea,” said Tyler Cooley, 9, a smile covering his face.

“Will there be basketball courts? I’m really into basketball,” said his pal, Taurean Jones, 10.

The pocket park will include basketball courts, a children’s play area with equipment, grass and restrooms.

“Please, don’t put bark on the playground,” begged Danelle Jones, 7. “It gets in your shoes and pokes you.”

Finding park space in older, densely-built neighborhoods is as hard as finding money to build them.

By using federal community development grants, the Hillyard Steering Committee bought two weedy, trash-strewn lots for $25,000 on the corner of Longfellow Avenue and Florida Street.

“It’s exciting to me,” said Harbison. “I’ve been on the steering committee for eight years and it’s wonderful to actually see this come to fruition.”

Part of the park will be fenced to keep kids and balls out of streets or neighbors’ yards.

Some neighbors are worried the park will provide a place for drug dealers to do business in comfort.

But Debbie Clem-Olsen, a landscape architect for the parks department, recently completed a course in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. She said some of those CPTED principles will be used to help make the park safe.

“This is a pretty visible location,” she said. “We’ll place the restrooms so they aren’t blocking views or provide a place to hide.

“People will be out there doing fun park things,” she said. “The neighborhood will have to watch out for their park.”

There will also be lighting and mesh fencing to define the park boundary. Shrubs will be low and trees trimmed.

If all goes according to plan, park toys will be installed and trees planted in April as part of the Spokane Youth Summit “Bridging the GAP” project.

“It’s a barn-raising type of event,” said Joanne Benham, the city’s youth director.

“It’s a big call to service,” she said. “We want to do something to galvanize the community around a community need.”

Benham said 225 teens took part in the youth summit last month working on the Spokane Marketplace downtown. She expects the same number for the spring event.

“We want to do something that lifts a neighborhood,” she said.

The park is still unnamed, but Loren Park, after city planner Loren Kondo, is being considered.

Kondo was a city planner for 20 years, guiding neighborhood development projects, including several in the Hillyard area. He died of a heart attack two years ago at age 43.

The city parks department has a four-page policy outlining procedures and requirements for selecting park names. The park board has final approval.

Dave Perry, real estate agent for the city, said there has been a recent surge in neighborhood pocket parks in established sections of the city. Another pocket park is planned on Parkwater, near Trent Avenue.

“Pocket parks are a fairly new concept for Spokane,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for a neighborhood to have their own thing, do it the way they want and take ownership in it.

“I like these projects. They offer a lot of fun, positive community involvement,” he added.

The Longfellow neighborhood is one of the poorest in the city, a hodge-podge of houses, manufactured homes and industry. But recently, a string of new duplexes were built along Longfellow Street, filling up with young families.

“This will be a user-friendly, childfriendly place for moms to take their kids and run them down so they’re ready to take a nap,” said Perry.

Seven-year-old Aleesha Kincheloe is already dreaming of playing in the park.

“Make sure it has a telephone there,” she said in a soft voice. “So we can tell mom we’re having fun and will be late coming home.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Planting Saturday SAFECO donated $20,000 to the Spokane Park and Recreation Department’s “Reforest Spokane” campaign to replace trees damaged during ice storm. The city will begin using the money Saturday by planting nine trees in Hays Park in the Hillyard neighborhood beginning at 9 a.m. SAFECO employees and Boy Scout Troop 412 will help with the planting. The event will include an education talk on trees and proper planting techniques by Jim Flott, the city’s urban forester.