Allan Appel Photo
East Shore Gardens park with its new additions, plaque and clock tower.
“The first person to litter on this garden will be struck dead by lightning, and you know who will send the bolt.”
That warning from beyond the grave was delivered by Dick Pastore, youngest son of Margaret Pastore, the first female city parks commissioner, who died in 2008 at age 99.
Dick Pastore delivers warning from beyond.
Pastore’s larger-than-life character and contributions to the city’s system of parks were marked by a memorial plaque and clock tower dedicated in her honor Saturday afternoon at East Shore Gardens in Morris Cove.
For ten years it’s been a corner park at Townsend Avenue and Lighthouse Road not far from where Pastore and her husband Superior Court Judge Phillip Pastore lived.
Now it also sports a memorial plaque on an enduring granite stone and a 15-foot, green, old-fashioned public clock tower, both dedicated to Margaret Pastore.
Pastore became a parks commissioner in 1972. She served as president from 1980 to 1998 and as president emeritus until her death in 2008.
According to current commission President David Belowsky, after Pastore’s death more than $20,000 was sent to the parks department in a fund earmarked for a project in her honor.
In attendance on a bright, beautiful-day-for-gardening Saturday were 30 people including members of the Pastore family, officials, and many Morris Cove neighbors.
Mayor John DeStefano, who grew up nearby, recalled his boyhood fears if a ball he threw landed in Pastore’s much-loved and protected garden near her Townsend Avenue home.
Marlene Pastore in foreground beneath her mother’s clock tower.
Pastore’s daughter Marlene recalled that her mom was such a powerful gardener, “she could make fence posts grow.”
She said her mother as a citizen and then later as a commissioner was particularly dedicated to the maintenance of the Pardee Seawall Park.
Pastore’s nephew, Tom Cretella, recalled how his aunt used to haul her dishwater every day across from her home to a garden plot on Concord Street where she grew flowers and vegetables. “So it wouldn’t be wasted,” she’d say.
Cretella’s wife Denise characterized Margaret Pastore as an original conservationist and environmentalist, before those terms became fashionable.
Belowsky remembered Pastore as a woman whose “passion for life and civic duty will be hard to replace.”
State Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, who lives in Morris Cove, said, “She is the kind of person who makes the community work. Parks were like an additional child for her.”
According to Tina Doyle of the East Shore Neighborhood Preservation Association, the site had been a defunct gas station a decade ago, when the city asked the Association to take over the regular maintenance if the city turned the spot into a park and garden and provided the juniper ground covering and other plantings.
It’s been a successful arrangement. Belowsky said the parks department has a dedicated fund to maintain the clock in perpetuity in honor of Margaret Pastore.
Doyle called the clock an appropriate and “stately addition” to the neighborhood.