A few days a week, I take our kids to a nearby playground at Palmer Park. It is a distinctly urban experience. Opal climbs in her City Mini stroller and I push her as Zola rides her scooter alongside me. It is four or five blocks to the park. Sounds idyllic? It is a trek.
We travel the first few blocks to the end of our neighborhood and carefully make our way across the six lanes of traffic that make Claiborne Avenue practically a highway. Safely across, we weave down tree-lined Neron Street's cracked and sinking sidewalks to cross at busy South Carrollton Avenue. At this intersection, the street narrows, and cars are shifting lanes either to merge or changing lanes to speed ahead as soon as space allows The grassy neutral ground in the middle of the street provides a safe spot for moment, but we have to watch for streetcars rumbling by.
Once we cross under the arch at Palmer Park, Zola takes off. Her foot hardly touches the pavement as she scoots across the expanse to the playground. At the play structure, she takes off her helmet, and waits for Opal and me to catch up so she and her bespectacled shadow can storm the castle together. I settle in on a bench to survey the other families. The crowd is mixed, black and white, old and young. Toddlers, preschoolers, and primary school kids play next to fifth graders; grandparents and fathers visit with moms and babysitters. If the girls are lucky, an older kid will organize a game of Red Light-Green Light or Duck Duck Goose. Sometimes someone will agree to race Zola through an obstacle course she's laid out. One day she joined a girl with a husky voice collecting cicada exoskeletons for her mom's art. Mainly, Zola leads Opal around, creating imaginary personas for both of them or showing Opal how to wait in line for the swing and always taking the first turn.
Sumner and Ramona never played at this playground. Soon after we moved into the neighborhood in 2006, we visited the park. I don't think we walked. The streetcar didn’t make it all the way to the end of the line because of Katrina’s damage to the tracks. The intersection of Carrollton and Claiborne housed a vacant supermarket, a rotting gas station, and a Chase bank that was housed in a doublewide while they determined if they should build a new bank. At the time, despite Phil's warnings, I figured the park on the fourth corner couldn't be that bad. It was a mess. The litter was overwhelming, broken glass and discarded food packages everywhere. The metal play equipment was a wreck. We opted to make the best of the big open space and kicked a ball. There was one other family there, but they were far away and conversation was impossible without a way to focus children's activities. The other dozen or so people at the park, who were sitting or sleeping on the benches circling the war memorial or under the flag, were probably homeless, possibly mentally ill. My street smarts told me that this wasn’t safe. So, we didn't use Palmer Park. Instead, we drove beyond our neighborhood to play at Audubon Park or City Park, where the play equipment was safer and there were people to play with.
Palmer Park in 2006 reminds me of the beloved little house in Virginia Lee Burton's book of the same name. In this book, the main character is a quaint house built on a hill in the country. The little house has neighbors on other hills, but no one next door. The only fences are to keep animals in their pasture. Soon enough, the little house is surrounded by a subdivision of little houses where fences mark gridded property lines and the road in front of the house is a thoroughfare. Next thing she knows, the other little houses are torn down and replaced by row houses, perhaps tenements. High rises loom on the horizon. A streetcar runs on the thoroughfare and on the next page the streetcar is sandwiched between a raised commuter train and a subway. Finally the row houses are torn down to make way for high rises. But just like the widower Carl's house in the movie Up, the stubborn little house remains in the middle of a changing landscape that wants to swallow it. The house is suffocating, falling apart, possibly abandoned. It seems an impossible situation. The city is no place for a sweet little cottage.
Palmer Park is like the little house, a spot of nature that continues to survive in the city. All it wants is to be used and loved. In 1831, the plantation that was where Palmer Park now sits was purchased by investors. Two years later, they divided the whole area into plots of land. This investment property became the village of Carrollton. The handful of plots where the park is now were designated as public space and named Hamilton Square in 1861. Thirteen years later Carrollton was annexed by New Orleans. I read all about this in Kevin McQueeney's Palmer Park: A History. I imagine the natural, open space of the square quietly observing houses rising on the plots surrounding it. McQueeney details other big moments the little park must have relished: political rallies, croquet games, Mardi Gras parades, Christmas caroling and music concerts. There was an ongoing public argument about how the space should be used, as a promenade or as a park for playing sports and recreation. Plans for sports fields, pools, and playgrounds were defeated several times over.
Sadly, I imagine the park was aware of the persistent racism woven into its history. The 1902 name change from Hamilton Square to Palmer Park was made to celebrate a Presbyterian pastor best known for his defense of slavery and echoed other New Orleans civic renamings as part of the post-Reconstruction assertion of white supremacy. I hope the park bristled at its new name, knowing it was designed to glorify slavery and cement segregation. For a century, the park observed slaves and later black citizens systematically excluded from basic relaxation and recreation. In 1934 a black-owned shoe shine business was removed from the park while white vendors were allowed to stay. Oral tradition suggested that the land for the park was donated long ago by an African-American but the park's centennial booklet, published by white businessmen, put that "rumor" to rest. The park was most likely integrated after 1958 when the federal government threatened to intervene in New Orleans and force compliance with the Supreme Court's 1954 park integration ruling. Post integration, a group called the Concerned Citizens of Carrollton fought efforts to build a playground. In a 1972 advertisement they placed in the Times-Picayune newspaper, they suggested that building a playground would lead to a rise in crime and white flight. While the white residents of Carrollton fought to keep the park for whites only, the park yearned to be shared with black citizens who passed by it each day.
After everyone was finally allowed to use Palmer Park, in the 1980s the park fell on worse times. This was a rough patch for the little park. Litter and vagrancy were serious problems. More troubling, assaults and robberies were frequent. I suspect the park's concerned citizens abandoned it at this time. No one gave it the attention it needed. So the park's heart was breaking, trapped like the little house. The park, like the little house, was in a melancholy stupor.
By the way, Burton's little house is rescued. A descendant of the original owners of the house pass by and, feeling a connection to the house, decides to save it. He moves the little house, an effort that makes the whole city, or at least the city's traffic, pause for a moment. The little house escapes the city and finds an untouched hill in the country, much like the one it started on.
As a child, this book really troubled me. I liked the little house, but I also really liked the hustle and bustle of the city that grows around it. I wanted to leave my hometown and go and live in a place where people were densely concentrated, even if that meant a scarcity of open space and no animals in green pastures. I wanted the exhilaration of the people speeding around the city, but I hated the that little house was orphaned. I wanted to find a way for the little house to make it without have to run to the suburbs.
What has happened at Palmer Park might be the answer to what troubled me about the fate of the little house. Palmer Park was also rescued, but just like many of the shiny, remodeled houses that face the park, it remains right where it always was. A new, brighter lease on life is in the air. In 2007, the New Orleans Arts Council began hosting a monthly art market in the park. In the first week of 2011, a couple of national charities partnered with volunteers to put in the new playground that we now use all of the time. The vacant grocery was torn down and a new market and drug store filled its footprint; the doublewide bank is gone and an attractive brick one rose in its place; and the rotting gas station became a quick-change oil place. Sumner and Ramona can now walk to the store to get me cilantro or ginger (two ingredients rarely used in Louisiana cuisine) when I need it and I had my oil changed in less than 15 minutes yesterday. Just like the little house, I would guess that most of this "revitalization" was initiated by descendants of people who grew up in or around Carrollton.
What could possibly be wrong about this? Now when I am at the park I can enjoy diversity, which research says is good for my kids. Getting outside to play and exercise is much easier than it used to be. Once a month I can shop locally, buying handmade things from my artist friends. I can bring the whole family to lunch during the market and each of them will find something to meet their discerning tastes. If someone litters, I can play at collecting garbage as a hobby, but I can also let Zola run barefoot on the rubberized playground without concern she'll cut her toes. The city doesn't feel as threatening and oppressive as it did when I first moved here. All of this is good for me, right? This is what appeals about gentrification.
