Take back the park
MATT DRISCOLL: IS LIKE VESPUCCI >>>
As News Tribune business columnist Dan Voelpel reported in today’s paper, Local Life Tacoma is a nonprofit organization designed to pump new life and energy into the downtown area. The idea is the brainchild of local life coach Paul Sparks – who along with two colleagues recently created Local Life Tacoma.
On Tuesday night Local Life Tacoma held there first event, called “Go Local or Die 2008.” According to Voelpel’s article, around thirty people showed up at Veritas Mortgage Group’s financial education center on Broadway (where the event was held) and those in attendance heard from a panel of “downtown’s young, nouveau leaders.” Those nouveau leaders included: Morgan Alexander, founder of Tacoma Streetcar; Patricia Lecy-Davis, president of the Downtown Merchants Group; Kevin Freitas, founder of the Feed TacomaNorth End Neighborhood Council. blog; and Eric Bjornson, vice chairman of the
Along with all the go local talk on Tuesday night, some at the meeting (according to Voelpel’s article) decided they needed to “take back” Frost Memorial Park, which sits near 9th and Commerce, and draws a regular and sometimes unsavory crowd of homeless and hooligans.
Today was the day to take back the park, or so it was reported. According to Voelpel’s article a group of do-gooders was supposed to flood the park today and reclaim the small green patch from the “ne’er-do-wells,” during lunch-hour.
I’ve never seen a park be taken back, so naturally I was interested. I didn’t know exactly how a park is claimed, or re-claimed, and it sounded exciting. I sat at Frost Memorial Park, during what I consider lunch hour – from 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
Maybe I’ve got a skewed perception of lunch hour, or maybe the park had already been taken back and I hadn’t realized it, but after sitting and smoking cigarettes for an hour at Frost Memorial Park, waiting for the onslaught of Local Life Tacoma’s conquest, or even a “ne’er-do-well,” I came back to the office a little disappointed. Maybe I left too early? Maybe everyone showed up right after I left? But during my time at the park I saw only one woman who looked like she was there to take back the park, carrying a tray of pink sprinkled cookies and anxiously waiting to be joined by the masses. (Nothing says take back the park like pink sprinkles.)
As far as I could tell the masses never came. Eventually the women with the cookies left, too.
So who owns Frost Memorial Park? Local Life Tacoma? The ne’er-do-wells?
Neither. Before I left I claimed that bitch for the Weekly Volcano and decided to call it a day. Taking back parks is hard work.
