Field Has Changed; Dreams Don’T Small Strip Of Green Is Still A Kids’ Paradise

We called it “the field.”

The six-block-long green space near Downriver Golf Course meandered between the homes on Wellington Place and Park Boulevard. We knew the city maintained it because sometimes we’d spy on its maintenance workers. And we loved the smell of freshly mowed grass. We’d roll down the hilly part of the field, stopping just before the street.

That was summer in the field in the years of my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early ‘70s.

In autumn, we’d build make-believe homes, separating the rooms with pine needles. In spring, we played baseball with the 11 kids in the Codd family. In winter, we sledded down the alley that dead-ended at the field.

The field is still there, though the children who play there now call it “the strip.” The adults in the neighborhood saved it from development more than 40 years ago in an act of community generosity and preservation that continues today in a more formal way through the Conservation Futures tax paid by every resident of Spokane County.

The field had no playground equipment on it then and it still doesn’t, but we didn’t care and neither do today’s children. They do what we used to do: build forts in the bushes along the edge and hold contests to see who can jump up the fastest on the city’s green maintenance equipment box.

“It’s kind of like our hidden place,” said Lauren Zaro-Jacobson, 11. “No one knows it’s here.”

Rees and Georgia Pritchard bought their home on Park Boulevard in 1953. They called the undeveloped six acres across the street “the wasteland” because the weeds grew as tall as children.

Three years before, Arch and Ginny Logan had moved to Wellington Place. The wasteland grew behind their home. Their son, Bruce, caught bullsnakes and took them home to show his mother.

Rees Pritchard and Arch Logan, both retired doctors, are now in their 80s. Their wives have passed on. On a recent hot day, my mother and the two men reminisced about the field, sitting under one of its shade trees.

These neighborhood “elders” passed on the story of the field to Lauren and her 8-year-old sister, Meghan. The girls, and dozens of their friends, make up the neighborhood’s newest generation. Their mother, Anne Zaro, listened, too, and was so moved at one point in the story, she cried. “It is such a wonderful gift to us, to our children,” she said.

Pritchard told the girls: “We heard one day that a developer was going to buy it and put little houses on it. Doris Brown started to get people interested in buying it. She found out if she collected enough names of interested people who lived by the property, we could pay for it.”

Arch Logan’s wife, Ginny, got involved, too, signing up dozens of homeowners on Wellington Place and Park Boulevard. Families paid a certain amount each month, based on how much of the field was in front of or behind their property.

My mother remembers her bill as $20, paid monthly over several years. The neighbors paid for the land, but turned it over to the city for use as a park. This initial effort to save the field took place sometime before 1957, when our family moved to Wellington Place. My parents paid on the field, but it was an obligation they inherited when they bought the home.

The exact dates when the payment plan started and ended are unclear because little formal documentation remains about the history of the field.

Taylor Bressler, park operations division manager for the city of Spokane, searched through Park Department records. He found only one reference to the field in park minutes from the 1960s when the sprinkler system was enhanced. A deed search on the property turned up a document from 1937, when the county sold the land to the city for $3.

By using the information gathered from the neighbors and what he knows of city property and park development, Bressler pieced together this likely scenario:

The field was probably platted as a boulevard around the turn of the century. Early planners sometimes did that with parcels that were oddly shaped.

In 1937, the city bought it from the county. And sometime in the 1950s, the city probably did consider selling it to developers, maybe because its long, thin shape would have been ideal for small homes and maybe because open space already existed nearby, including Downriver Golf Course, Riverside State Park and Audubon Park.

Neighbors probably organized themselves into a limited improvement district, which means homeowners who benefit from an improvement in their district pay for it. It probably took five to 10 years to pay off the field, and then it was given to the city and designated as park land.

If the neighbors hadn’t acted when they did, “it would have ended up developed for sure,” Bressler said.

All over the city and county of Spokane, there are acres of land that feel special to those living nearby, just as the field felt precious to the parents and children of the 1950s. Children play, hike and ride their bikes in those acres or let their imaginations and dreams wander.

Much of that land would be prime for development, but some is being saved in its natural state, thanks to the Conservation Futures tax.

Passed in 1994, the property tax - which adds an extra $6 a year on property valued at $100,000 - is earmarked to preserve land for natural areas and river access.

Spokane city and county residents have nominated more than 100 properties for preservation. A citizens subcommittee, made up of city and county park board members, explores the sites and makes recommendations. Spokane County commissioners make the final decision.

The tax generates about $1 million a year. Since 1994, 13 parcels - 2,680 acres in all - have been preserved throughout the city and county. Two of those properties were donated, and three other property owners donated $296,000 for the care and maintenance of the property they sold the county.

Because of the program, you can now hike on 2.5 acres on the Spokane River near Downriver Golf Course, or explore 455 acres adjacent to Liberty Lake County Park.

It’s a program that owes its roots to the “field mothers” of my childhood - the Mrs. Logans and Mrs. Browns and others who were ahead of their time, walking door-to-door to collect signatures to save some green space for their children.

In 1979, I moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for my first newspaper job. I covered a small but rapidly growing community called Coral Springs. I told the city attorney one day about the field. He then told me how he had grown up in rural Florida, but all the wooded areas he played in as a child were now gone, smothered in houses. “I’ve lost my touchstones,” he said sadly.

I returned to Spokane to live in 1985, and the field was still there, a place of comfort. In February 1996, on the day of my father’s funeral, the field was knee-high in snow. My niece, Laura, and I trudged the length of the field and I showed her the places where we once built pine-needle houses and buried our treasures. A touchstone in a time of grief.

On the recent day Rees Pritchard and Arch Logan shared their memories of the field, the Zaro-Jacobson girls took us for a short walk. They showed us their fort in the bushes. “We had it all nice and clean and then the boys came and put coffee cans in it,” Meghan said.

Pritchard looked out at the expanse of green grass, shimmering in the sunlight. He said, “I wish there could be more days like this.”

For the children of the neighborhood and the adults who revisit their field of memories, there always will be.

Map: `The Field’