block apart. Some of the churches didn’t start out as Baptist. One of the physically most impressive was once an Evangelical church founded in 1888, the same year Hamlin opened the exposition. Most of these churches are on the East side of the street, but I’m doing what is physically impossible by freely crossing over now so I don’t have to drag you through the entire home trip.
As you near Martin Luther King Park, Deaconess Hospital, now The Deaconess Center, is a large 60s presence of metal grids with glass and pastel panels. A little further, beside the park, a bit of Parade Street is left and reminds me that Olmstead called the Park “The Parade” on the original sketches. Its really impossible to decipher how the parkway with its wide tree lined median merged into the park. The Kensington veers around the west side of the Park, lopping off a corner and descending again to subterranean depths. Very few people are in the park this Sunday morning. Sadly, the wading pool that takes up such a large segment of the park is long in disrepair. It’s already in the high 80s. I think of the photo I’ve seen of turn of the century (the previous two) immigrant kids cooling off in the pool, most of them fully clothed. I can imagine the African American kids who now mostly live around here enjoying the same pleasures. And I note that in my own neighborhood a large federal project was devoted to restoring Hoyt Lake. Why can’t it happen here?
Basically the way the politics have worked is that after WWII people were given incentives for their flight to the suburbs and then atrocities like the Kensington were hacked out to convey them in and out of the city speedily and with minimal awareness of their surroundings . The communities left in the cities, now increasingly Black and Hispanic, were vivisected and degraded, with some of their most pleasant spots, like the Parkway, obliterated. As early as the 70s people like Pitts were saying that we never would let this happen now. Recent events such as the bridge controversy may bear this out. The results aren’t in. But what about rolling it back? If we can talk (just talk, so far) about getting rid of the Niagara extension to give the riverfront to the people, why can’t we talk about giving Humbolt Parkway back to people on the East Side? We just restored circles on Richmond at Ferry and Porter. Let’s do the big one. Let’s give the city back to the people who live there.Many thanks to librarians at the Historical Society for assistance in finding the historical materials mentioned here.