Places to play with pride

BY KEITH EDDINGS

keddings@eagletribune.com

LAWRENCE — More than $7 million worth of work is underway rehabilitating existing parks and building new ones at former industrial sites, rail beds and empty lots, projects that will create new opportunities to ride a bike or get wet and polish the image of a city once too broke to do much more at its parks than cut the grass.

At a former machine shop on the North Canal, bulldozers have shaped 11,000 cubic yards of sand castings left behind by the shop into a 30-foot mound that will offer 360-degree

See PARKS, Page 4

James Barnes, director of Lawrence Community Development, and Susan Fink, manager of financial and administrative services, look over the construction being finished in the Campagnone Common across from Lawrence City Hall. The city, state and federal government are spending millions of dollars to improve the city’s parks.

TIM JEAN/Staff photos

Tomas Lopez, left, and Jaxell Negron, both Green Team members at Groundwork Lawrence, look at the view from a hill being created at the new public park at the former Ferrous site, next to the Merrimack River.

Continued from Page 1 views of the city when it opens at the center of a $2.8 million riverfront park later this month.

At Campagnone Common, work is wrapping up on a four-year, $2.2 million renovation that buried utility lines, rebuilt walkways, modernized a playground, upgraded lighting and installed a drainage system to collect the rainwater that once ponded across the common.

On a Newbury Street lot empty since the St. Lawrence O’Toole Catholic Church was demolished in the 1980s, a splash park surrounded by a small amphitheater will open in August.

On another forgotten few acres at Osgood and Cambridge streets that have been empty since the gymnasium of the former Kane School was demolished more than a decade ago, a $600,000 soccer field — still rare in a city of baseball diamonds — will open next year.

At 22 baseball fields across the city, outfields are being replanted with 1.3 million square feet of seed and infields are being resurfaced with 129,555 square feet of clay and 92,205 square feet of stone dust.

And at a former rail bed that ran behind Broadway from the Merrimack River to the Methuen line, planners are studying how to convert the narrow strip into a biking and hiking trail and rehab the crumbling corridor of mostly empty industrial buildings on both sides of it.

All that comes on top of other recently completed park projects, including the 2.5-mile Spicket River Greenway that opened two years ago, and the grassy bowl that opened this spring at the site of the former Oxford Paper plant at the east end of Canal Street.

“We’re taking spaces that have been in dire need of attention, and making them places people can be proud of,” said Mayor Daniel Rivera. “The Ferrous site (which is the former machine shop), the splash park, the ball fields are all places where people have been saying, ‘Man, they really should fix this place. The city should do something for kids. The city should take care of its parks.’ We can do these things, sometimes with help from the state.”

That tether is being loosened. The $750,000 rehab of the 22 ball fields is the first major parks project in at least five years entirely funded by the city, according to Jim Barnes, director of Community Development. Every other project at least since 2000 has been funded by state and federal money.

More aid has come from Groundwork Lawrence, a nonprofit community development agency that is helping manage the development at the Ferrous site, the spray park and the soccer field at the former Kane School.

Groundwork Lawrence’s imprint is heaviest at the former Ferrous Technologies site at the juncture of the North Canal and the Spicket andMerrimack rivers, where the agency used the $2.8 million state grant to purchase and redevelop the five-acre property into a passive park, with a plan turn it over to the city when work is completed.

Much of the property’s weedy dense undergrowth has been removed. A hiking trail has been built along the river, ending at a 20-foot waterfall over a granite dam that holds back the water in the North Canal. A shelter that will provide cover for picnic tables and space for environmental education programs is mostly finished But the park’s most stunning and improbable feature is the steep mountain of earth and sand castings that has been sculpted near the entrance, where it picks up a trail that loops around the mound and provides an easy walk up to the granite slab benches at the top.

From there, visitors will get sweeping views of some of the city’s iconic features and buildings, including the river, the Ayer Mill clock tower, Lawrence General Hospital and the jumble of mills— including Riverwalk, Everett and the Old Stone Mill — on both sides of the Merrimack.

For now, access to the park will be limited to a bridge over the canal a few hundred yards down Island Street from the park entrance. In the future, Groundwork Lawrence hopes to replace a closed dilapidated wood plank bridge over the canal with something that can bring hikers and cyclists directly into the park from Canal Street and the Spicket River Greenway. The cost would be about $750,000, but the view over the crossing would be worth millions, said Brad Buschur, project manager for GWL.

“People will come up on the waterfall and think, ‘Am I in Lawrence?’” Buschur said.

“We’re an extremely dense city,” added Heather McMann, GWL’s executive director, explaining why the Ferrous park and the other park projects the agency supports are important. “The Ferrous site provides all the key things — environmental improvement; providing families a place to recreate, to exercise, to just de-stress; and preparing the rest of the (west end of Island Street) for economic development.”

The impact of the other park projects now underway may not be as broad, but a local youth baseball coach said it’s as deep.

“When I take the kids to play at another field, the No. 1 question I get is, ‘How come our fields don’t look like this?’” Sy Uliano, a Lawrence Fire Department dispatcher who has coached the Lawrence Central Little League and Babe Ruth for 40 years, said in a recent interview. “I tell them, ‘You’re from a city that just doesn’t have the money.’ That’s the only thing I can say. They want to play with pride, but when they see how other cities are compared to ours, the pride isn’t there. People may think that’s not a big thing. It’s (just) a ball field. But it is a big thing for Lawrence.”

Above, new LED lights were installed as part of the construction being done in the Campagnone Common across from Lawrence City Hall. The city, state and federal governments are spending million of dollars to improve the city’s parks. At right, construction workers from Moriarty & Sons Inc. of North Andover spread gravel as they finish construction.

TIM JEAN/Staff photos