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EDITORIAL
Paving paradise
It seems inevitable that whenever the issue of downtown
parking comes up, someone is going to mention paving over Beatty Hughes
Park for more parking spots. Sure enough, earlier this month at a Village
Council meeting, a property owner did just that, suggesting the Village
use half the park as a place for cars. Council members were actually receptive
of the idea, and placed it on a list of capital improvement needs.
But paving over all or part of Beatty Hughes Park
was a bad idea when it was first introduced and it continues to be a bad
idea.
The park, also known as the Corry Street park or
Little Park, is the only truly quiet, peaceful, green spot in downtown.
It offers Yellow Springers and visitors a sort of oasis to the loud, noisy
scene on Xenia Avenue and Dayton Street. People eat lunch there, they read
or play music, they lie on the grass. The park offers a retreat that other
downtown places do not. It is for these reasons, in part, that more than
10 years ago the park was named one of Yellow Springs sacred spaces by a
school project that surveyed villagers to identify local sacred spots.
Some who support turning part of the park into a
parking lot say that unsacred activities, such as drinking, also occur there,
presumably at night. But the Village can do some things to address these
problems, including erecting more lights to illuminate the park after dark
and patrolling the grounds more often. The Village could also do more to
spruce up the park: a gazebo or band stand could be built in the park; a
few picnic benches could be added; better maintenance of the grounds would
make it more attractive; the Community Band or other groups could be encouraged
to perform in the park, which could help more appreciate this space.
There are no easy solutions to address downtown
parking, but Council is poised to take some action when it will consider
the second reading of an ordinance changing some downtown parking time limits
at its April 5 meeting. Among the items in the proposal is one that would
decrease the time limit in the Corry Street parking lot to 2 hours from
24. The best of Council’s ideas is not included in the ordinance:
post better, clearer signage around town directing out-of-towners to long-term
parking on the periphery of downtown, which could free up more spaces closer
to the center of town for local customers.
Paving Beatty Hughes Park might seem like an easy
solution to a longstanding problem. But easy is not always better. Little
Park is the only downtown park and it should be embraced, preserved and
enhanced, not blacktopped. Paving even a portion of the park would ruin
its atmosphere. Gaining additional parking spaces would not be worth the
loss of this peaceful green space.
Joni Mitchell got it right when she sang: “Don’t
it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you got/Till it’s
gone/They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot.” Let’s not
pave paradise, let’s not pave one of downtown’s sacred areas.
—Robert Mihalek |
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