Monroe Park, located in the middle of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Monroe Park Campus, was established in 1851 at its current address of 620 W. Main St. Since then, not much has been updated or renovated in the park, if anything at all.
Richmond City Councilman Charles Samuels oversees the city’s 2nd District, which happens to include Monroe Park, and became involved with the project when he was elected to Richmond City Council in 2008 and took office in 2009.
“There have been plans throughout the years, I mean decades, to improve, fix up and renovate Monroe Park,” Samuels said. “The most recent one occurred about nine years ago.”
The Monroe Park Advisory Council was appointed by the members of City Council and has been in charge of developing the renovation plans for the park. The group developed the Monroe Park Master Plan.
“The original objective was… they were looking at paving a significant portion of the park and turning it into a parking lot,” Samuels explained. “There was a question about whether or not that was the best use for the park and whether or not there should be something else done instead of that.”
“They decided to look at what the role of the park should be… in the community and what would make good sense to do with the park.”
The full Monroe Park Master Plan is 130 pages long and includes objectives like replacing all the utilities, removing vegetation and introducing entertainment elements such as sculptures, a farmer’s market, a stage, a carousel, a café and an ice cream cart.
“[The project] has an opportunity to make both the pathways and the restrooms [Environmental Protection Agency] compliant and handicap accessible, which could be a really big deal,” Samuels said.
“A lot of the community is on board with [the project],” Samuels said. He said the plans are drawn up and now “it’s a matter of putting it out to bid, getting a request for proposals, and getting that kind of stuff taken care of so that we can begin.”
However, some Richmonders see more problems with the Monroe Park Master Plan than with the park’s current condition.
Peggy Sterling is an advocate with the Monroe Park Campaign, a group dedicated to keeping the park open during the renovations. Sterling has been with the group since attending a meeting in November that was hosted by Councilman Samuels.
“Councilman Samuels organized a meeting for those of us who had concerns about the park closing,” Sterling said. “Basically the meeting was, in his words, to discuss what would happen when the park closed.”
“At the meeting…there was no consensus that we wanted the park to close,” explained Sterling, adding, “At the end of the meeting, Councilman Samuels got up and said the meeting was a success and that we would all go to the Conrad Center when the park closed.”
Sterling said newspapers reported this conclusion from the meeting, but that it was inaccurate. “I’m not saying Councilman Samuels is a liar, but he was not being entirely truthful about the results of that meeting.”
The Conrad Center, located at 1400 Oliver Hill Way, provides a regular program where a hot breakfast and dinner are served five days a week to over 300 people in need.
But Sterling says the Conrad Center is an inadequate replacement for Monroe Park.
“Some people are not going to be able to get services,” she said. “Certainly the Conrad Center provides services, but the Conrad Center is not very accessible to someone who does not have the ability to obtain transportation. The walk up that hill is almost impossible for someone who is handicapped and so to get to the Conrad Center for anything is extremely difficult.”
However, free transportation is being set up in the form of a shuttle for people who are unable to transport themselves to the Conrad Center.
Melba Gibbs, executive director for Freedom House, the association that runs the Conrad Center program, said, “This shuttle is a pilot program that we are conducting for a 6 month period.”
The shuttle will be used to transport people to and from the Conrad Center to medical and social service appointments first, then for the meals program. “We will not start the shuttle until March 15th so I have no way of knowing what the results will be,” Gibbs said.
But Sterling said it’s not just the meals that are the issues. “Food Not Bombs brings in … potatoes, tomatoes, basically groceries, and taxes them out and people take them home as groceries for the week. I don’t believe that the Conrad Center does any such thing,” said Sterling, although she admitted that there are churches in the area that offer similar services.
Food Not Bombs, a group that serves a meal in Monroe Park every Sunday at 4 p.m., is an organization that has been vocal in their opposition to the closing of the park.
A representative from Food Not Bombs who said his name was Donnie (and that he “doesn’t use a last name”) explained that the organization has an issue with more than just the closing of the park.
“Food Not Bombs isn’t really a charity organization, and what we do is very much political, and any attack on people within a society is an attack on everybody in that society,” he said.
Samuels is aware of the concerns of this and other organizations. “I try to take into account everyone’s feelings and positions on this. The feeding services are, fortunately, services that can occur almost anywhere,” he said.
“While I feel for them that there is potential that they won’t be able to feed where they have been doing it in the past, [the plan] doesn’t prohibit them from continuing to do so. Just for a series of time they’ll have to do it somewhere else.”
But Donnie explained, “It’s not an issue of services. It’s an issue of this is an attack on the poor and it’s part of the continued process of gentrification that VCU and the city have been involved in in that neighborhood for years and years and years.”
The organization’s frustrations go beyond on their feelings on the gentrification issue.
Donnie claims that the Monroe Park Advisory Council removed the Master Plan from their website after Food Not Bombs came to one of their meetings and “were pointing out things from the plan that were questionably legal, but definitely oppressive and terrible.”
He said the council also removed most of the contact information for its members after that meeting and now claim that they don’t exist.
Food Not Bombs is also frustrated because the city is not being forthcoming with information. “There have been [Freedom of Information Act] requests from people involved in the [Monroe Park Campaign] that have gone nowhere, that have been completely ignored, or we’ve been told that the documents we’re requesting don’t exist,” Donnie said.
Food Not Bombs has made a list of how its organization wants the park to be handled, including keeping at least 25 percent of the park open at all times during renovations (the list can be viewed online at(http://fanofthefan.com/2010/10/more-on-the-monroe-park-renovation/).
But Samuels doesn’t see how planners can meet the demands of the organization. “They made a list of demands and that’s certainly within their purview to make them, but when people make non-negotiable demands it’s very difficult to find common ground to compromise,” he said.
And non-negotiable is right: in a statement posted on The Wingnut Anarchist Collective, a blog group closely affiliated with Food Not Bombs, and other publications, Mo Karn released a statement that begins with, “Food Not Bombs will resist all attempts to shut the entire park down for any amount of time” (http://wingnutrva.org/2010/11/01/article-on-monroe-park-in-todays-richmond-times-dispatch/).
However, Samuel states that all underground utilities will be dug up for the renovation and the park must be entirely closed for public safety reasons.
“If I tell you, you absolutely positively have to do something and it’s not something that you feel you can reasonably do, how do you negotiate with me if I don’t bend? If I’m not willing to work with you to find the solution, how do you resolve that?”
But Donnie explained that the members of Food Not Bombs are not interested in compromising on this issue.
“Under no circumstances will the park be closed.”
Food Not Bombs and activists like Sterling have other concerns and issues with the proposed plans for the park.
Donnie said that the renovation plan is a “massive waste of funds” and the proposed maintenance budget for Monroe Park is well over any other park in the city. He also said a private non-profit organization would be put in charge of managing the park, with the director receiving “a whopping salary, well over $100,000.”
Another concern is where the homeless people who currently frequent the park go. Sterling argues that if the homeless were to move into parks in The Fan area of the city, the police would remove them “because those parks are used by Fan area residents, have swings in them for children and people would get upset”.
She worries that the homeless will be forced to move somewhere in the city where they would be arrested. “So where can someone just sit for a few moments and rest? If you’re homeless and walking the streets, where do you go?”
Donnie explained that the Monroe Park Master Plan included a section that addressed the homeless situation in the park. “It specifically states in there that [the plan] wants to acquire a show of 75 non-homeless appearing people to one homeless appearing person because women are afraid of homeless people.”
Food Not Bombs also has a problem with the plan to bring in a private security force. “Anytime you start privatizing security, that’s when peoples’ rights start getting violated left and right,” Donnie said, adding, “It seems sort of like an attempt to drive out people that VCU and the affluent white folks in the Fan don’t like being in that park.”
But Samuels defends his intentions. “My goal is to make sure that I represent everybody in the 2nd District and not any one group; not landowners over renters, not rich people over poor people, not poor people over rich people, anything like that.” He added, “My goal is to really look out for what’s in the best interest of the district as a whole.”
Samuels also defends the intentions of others involved with this project. “Our goal is to make sure that everybody feels welcome there regardless of socio economic condition, regardless of race, regardless of anything. We want to make sure that this is a park that’s open for everyone.”
The full Monroe Park Master Plan can be viewed on-line at http://www.richmondgov.com/planninganddevelopmentreview/PlansAndDocuments.aspx.
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