Carly Wanna Photo
Jill Marks and Mary Brown at the banner event.
Mary Brown has lived across the street from Goffe Street Park for 60 years. She has watched the plot of land, currently including a baseball field, basketball court and playground, morph into “not being kept up like when I was a kid.
She and her neighbors resolved to changed that. She walked through the park with neighborhood Alder Jill Marks and remarked that children came to eat lunch in the area everyday but sat on the ground. Marks said they should, at least, have a table.
More than a year later, the newly formed FOGSP –– Friends of Goffe Street Park –– and other community members met formally on Friday night to create a banner boasting the park’s name, kicking off the summer season and the furthering of the group’s ongoing initiative to clean, rehabilitate and bring awareness to the neighborhood’s stomping grounds.
“That’s what we’re trying to bring back: unity in the park, not only for this community, but for all of the communities, so that when you come here, you will feel safe. We need to bring that safe haven back,” said Brown.
Following opening statements from Marks, attendees took sheets of paper, each imprinted with a question, such as “What does the park mean to you?” More than 30 members from the community responded to the prompt and brainstormed what they desired to plaster on the banner before painting “GOFFE ST PARK” on the sign itself.
FOGSP formally began in June of 2017 with an operation dubbed “Goffe Street Park and Neighborhood Clean-up Day” and has since held meetings as frequently as once a week to set goals for upcoming projects including an intended public event in the coming weeks to hang the banner with elected officials in attendance.
“We want people to catch the vision that something is happening,” said Marks. She added that the banner acts as “an eye opener for people in the community.”
Mary Brown.
For Brown, the park, which includes DeGale Field, represents an opportunity for the next generation. Adult attendees like Rebecca Corbeth, a member of FOGSP who lives about a block away from the park, expressed similar sentiments. “I’d like to see more activity here, said Corbett.“I don’t see kids running around the way I used to when I was young.”
To many of the younger children painting the sign, the park serves as a place to play. Even 8‑year-old Michael Acosta recognized that his playground could be cleaner.
For more than a year, three teenage boys from the surrounding area –– 16 year-old Aveion, 15 year-old Javione and 17 year-old Shawn –– have traversed the park daily, not to play basketball or baseball, but to sing.
They perform as part of “Ice the Beef,” the anti-violence program headquartered in a building near the corner of Goffe and Sherman, and dedicate their doo-wop style to spreading positivity throughout the community in efforts to create peace in the neighborhood.
The Ice The Beef trio.
“We want the park to upgrade basically,” said Aveion. “Eventually, a stage, because the stage is like a sanctuary.”