Our new project has to do with public space. I challenged W@1 to find lesser known, out of the way public parks around town and to write poems in honor of them. The idea came to me because of Alice Ingram Park, a tiny gem of a public space about half a block from where I live. It is situated on the corner of Elliott Road and Franklin Street, in front of the neighborhood fire station. I've skirted or walked through this park dozens of times on my way up Franklin Street or across Franklin to Whole Foods Market. For a public space, it certainly has a private, almost spiritual feel.
I know nothing at all about its namesake, Alice Ingram, but I'll take a stab and guess that she was a gardener, and had lots to do with the Chapel Hill Garden Club. It was the Garden Club that funded the creation of the Park, in 1990. A brass plaque affixed to a brick knee wall says the Park was dedicated in 1998. I reached out to the current President of the Chapel Hill Garden Club for more information, who put me in touch with Bitty Holton, a long-time club member. Ms Holton has no idea, either, about Alice Ingram.
The intersection there is busy and noisy, as Franklin Street leads west to NC 15-501 and I-40, east to downtown and campus. Across the street are Village Gate Plaza and just up from that, Eastgate Shopping Plaza. Besides the fire station, nearby are three banks, a nursing home, and law office. There's also a mysterious business named "Japan Tobacco Co., Inc." as well as a dentist. I imagine people walking the streets of Tokyo and Yokahama yellowing their teeth with fine imported North Carolina tobacco.
In the midst of all this commerce and traffic is little Alice Ingram Park. Go ahead and map it. It's there. I've searched online for information about the park and its namesake but haven't found much. Other than that name on the brass plaque, it's all a bit of a mystery.
Shade is provided courtesy of a large willow oak, a tree that I thought might be an American elm but which my wife says is something else, and four redbuds. A cement walkway runs diagonally through the center, from the corner southwest to the knee wall just in front of the fire station. Another path curves around the inside edge, from Elliott Road to Franklin Street and the city bus stop. Someone etched a hop-scotch into the concrete of that one while it was still wet. I've hopped it many times. But I've never seen anyone else do that.
The park has a single trash can that says linger . . . but recycle. Recently, I noted it was lined with a fresh plastic trash bag. Good to know the city still drops by to check on things. My wife reminds me that there used to be a little pond as well, but that was filled in long ago. She speculates that homeless people were bathing in it. More likely, it just became a nuisance and expensive to keep clean and in good repair. In fact, the park could use a makeover: new beds of flowers, some tree trimming, some brick work.
You can sit there, too, and people sometimes do. There's no bench, but the brick knee wall is often occupied by somebody who's come there to wait for a bus on a hot, sunny day. Noisy as traffic can be at this intersection, Alice Ingram Park somehow retains a cloistered feel, maybe because of its ample shade and border of redbuds, holly bush, and wrought iron fence. It is a bowl, sloping slightly down from the edges toward the center, offering even more of a sense of privacy and remove. (Actually, the bowlish design is common around this part of Chapel Hill, which rises as you go up Elliott Road to Coker Hills. Thunderstorms almost always wash downhill toward East Franklin Street. At the bottom of the bowl is a big drain, like in a sink. The bowl is designed to capture runoff when it gets too much for the surrounding street sewers to handle. The single drain slowly disperses water under Franklin Street, likely toward Booker Creek.)
Why would I suggest a project like this? I mean, besides having something for W@1 writers to write about? This little park's attraction for me, for one thing. I'd like to think that the writers of W@1 also have their own private-public-sacred spaces. Poetry often wants the out of the way, the overlooked, the neglected for subject matter. (Looking at you, Emily Dickinson!) But I thought it'd be a good idea for our writers to consider community as a subject to write about or out of, to examine what it means to have a physical space set aside for citizens. In this year of social distancing, political unrest, and cultural upheaval, pondering community through a poem might be a useful project to undertake.
Not at all sure what this project will net, but we all might at least learn of some new parks around town that we hadn't visited before.
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