Tales of a Pocket Park

James Schwitters Family Park

Last Thursday I was down in El Paso for an appointment with my eye doctor, and afterwards I drove up Mesa Street to our old West Side neighborhood to see the pocket park that had been constructed at the site of our old house.

When Dr. K, Sara (our dog) and I moved from Tucson to El Paso in 1990 we rented a house at 6204 Fiesta Drive.  A year or so later, when the owners decided to sell, we bought the place.  It was a modest gray-brick ranch-style house, three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths on a regular-sized city lot in a decent neighborhood about four miles from the University of Texas-El Paso, where we'd just got teaching positions.

The only problem with the place was the front yard, which was completely "landscaped" in black lava rock (gravel).  There was a large, oval-shaped white-brick planter landscaped in white gravel with a huge Texas Ranger (Purple Sage) growing right in the middle of it, but that was the only plant life out there.  Since the place now belonged to us I decided something had to be done about the yard.

I shoveled and raked the black gravel into three large piles, ripped up and disposed of the black plastic weed-blocking sheets underneath it, and put a classified ad in the El Paso Times offering free black lava rock to anybody willing to pick it up.  To our astonishment all of the gravel was gone in two days.  I put in a simple drip-irrigation system, called a local sand and gravel company to deliver the amount of gray chat (crushed rock that bonds together when wet) I'd calculated we'd need for the area, then spread the chat evenly across the yard.

That was the beginning of the process that saw us (me, primarily) Xeriscaping (it was a relatively new concept then) the front yard with plants native to the northern Chihuahuan Desert.  We put in Prickly Pear Cactus, Cholla, Ocotillo, Hedgehog Cactus, Feather Dalea, Fairy Duster, Apache Plume and Creosote Bush.  Over the years we cared for our desert landscape meticulously, pruning, trimming, adding an occasional new plant for variety, but making sure we didn't crowd the space.  And periodically, when I was out working in the yard, somebody walking past would stop and say, "Nicest yard in the neighborhood."  That gave both Dr. K and I a real sense of pride.

Almost a decade later we decided we'd had enough of the big-city pollution (of every kind) and we moved north to New Mexico, where we bought a house on a 1 1/4-acre parcel of natural Chihuahuan Desert.  Six months after we'd gone I got a letter from one of our neighbors saying we would not believe what the new owners of 6204 Fiesta Drive had done to the place.  Our neighbor included several photos just to make sure we understood she wasn't exaggerating.  First, they had painted the entire house Pepto Bismal pink.  Then they had ripped out all of the native plants and re-landscaped the yard in white gravel.  The only thing they left in place was the Texas Ranger in the white-brick planter.

Then came the devastating floods of 2006.  That summer, between July 27th and August 7th, 15" of rain--almost twice the yearly average--fell on the city causing severe flooding and destroying nearly 300 homes.  On the west side a wall of water surged down the Franklin Mountains, crossed Mesa Street and took out three homes on Fiesta Drive, including our former house and that of our next-door neighbor.  The people who bought our house didn't have flood insurance.  Nor had we.  Who needs flood insurance in the desert?  They lost their home and nearly all their possessions.

Our home stood where the green-umbrella-covered slide pavilion now stands

Several years later, after the city had finally torn out the last vestiges of the homes, residents of the Coronado Neighborhood Association, led by a man named Charlie Wakeem, began a push to have a pocket park built at the spot where our home and our neighbor's had stood.  It literally took years for the city council to approve of the idea and, subsequently, to give the go-ahead for the plans.  The park was over a year in the making, and several times during its construction Dr. K passed by on her way back from the university to check on its progress.

I was pleased by what I saw when I visited late last week.  In a space comprising two city lots there were covered picnic tables and covered benches, slides, a basketball court, several new trees and a fairly-spacious grassy area for kids to play.

Basketball court

My hope is that the city can maintain the pocket park as a gathering place for neighborhood residents, and keep it free from the graffiti that plagues nearly every park in this great land of ours.  Sadly, though, I recognize the futility of such hopes.  Nevertheless, it was nice to visit the park and see how human beings can often make the best of a bad situation.

Bike rider sculpture