The pandemic helped make FDR Park better. Now it has to survive the aftermath – WHYY

If you live in South Philly, its not your imagination: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park is having a moment.

As COVID-19 restrictions pushed more residents outdoors, many urban parks saw attendance surge and city officials say FDR hit unprecedented levels of use. They estimate that park trash collection, one rough measure of usage, increased by 50% since last year in a park that already saw hundreds of thousands of annual visitors by some estimates. More than 900 on-site parking spaces are now regularly maxed out on weekends, and new park volunteers have arrived by the dozens.

But volunteer Carolina Torres Toledo, a volunteer park ambassador, said the surge is also the fruit of a battery of deliberate and often community-driven improvements aimed at making the park more user-friendly. Most visibly, park staff and volunteers transformed a defunct 146-acre golf course into an informal network of public trails, effectively doubling the publicly accessible grounds at FDR, reigniting interest in the park along the way.

In the last year theres been way more volunteers, Toledo said. Especially since some of the new trails have been openedIts appealing because many people have never been there before.

Changes at the park like this and numerous smaller improvements arent coincidental. They emerged from an experiment that could revolutionize how Philadelphia manages its showpiece parks. But they also come just as the citys looming fiscal crisis threatens those same improvements and economic strains from the pandemic stall philanthropic donations Philadelphia increasingly depends on for major public works projects.

An ambitious $250 million 10-year master plan for FDR that was unveiled last year as a joint project of Parks & Recreation, the nonprofit Fairmount Park Conservancy and the William Penn Foundation has already had its lengthy timeline upended.

Were always afraid, said Andy Toy, a board member at the Friends of FDR Park, a neighborhood-driven nonprofit support organization, of funding cuts. And I honestly dont know what [philanthropic groups] will support right now. The master plan might have to get broken into more, smaller pieces.

The sprawling tract near the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, was originally known as League Island Park and was pieced together in phases during the early to mid-20th century. Initially designed by the same Olmsted Brothers, whose fathers firm also planned Central Park, the green respite was envisioned by city leaders as a means of managing the collision between South Phillys cramped, unplanned rowhouse blocks and what was essentially estuarial bogland at the time. The solution was a landscaped park, which would be further developed during the citys ill-fated 1926 Sesquicentennial Exhibition with a planned golf course added later, reportedly at the urging of officers at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

At 348 acres, FDR is larger than both the Packer Park neighborhood it borders across Pattison Avenue to the north and the sprawling Sports Complex to the east that houses the citys pro teams. In addition to open space, the park is also home to institutions like the American Swedish Historical Museum, ancient structures like the colonial-era Samuel Preston House, Audubon Society-designated bird-watching areas, a skate park and numerous athletic areas.

This current master plan came after a lengthy community engagement process that identified assets and big challenges in the largest green space in South Philadelphia, a dense neighborhood that is changing as new immigrants and young families flock to affordable rowhouses. Many residents both praised the park and identified it as severely neglected.

People pointed to athletic areas that felt neglected. They noted the potholes and pockmarks on the central loop road the result of subsidence and deferred maintenance. More than half the park was still dedicated to the 1940s-era golf course, which closed in 2019 due to a lack of use and chronic flooding. Although the park is known for its Olmsted-designed boathouse and gazebo around a central lake, an entire secondary swimming pond known as Meadow Lake and two adjacent bathhouses sit largely disused and nearly invisible from some of the primary park trails due to overgrowth.

In neglect came some opportunities. Liminal space underneath Interstate 95 to the south has long been used as a DIY skatepark an internationally-recognized and ever-changing graffiti-covered course of concrete halfpipes, hips, and bowls that are largely maintained by the skaters that use it. South Phillys Southeast Asian and Latin American communities regularly transform other parts of the park into informal food markets on weekends.

But it was clear there had been little central guidance or support. As many opportunities as the park had captured, it had missed.

For example, Toledo, who aided in the community outreach process, said they also help coordinate games with a popular local Latin American soccer league but the park wasnt designed with a formal soccer area in mind. The growing league has, for years, squeezed into a patchy section of unused lawn adopted by hundreds of South Philly footballers who couldnt find better facilities.

Its crazy that just across the street are multi-million dollar stadiums, they said.

I think FDR was forgotten about. And whats happened is people themselves have had to make up for the lack of care from the city, Toledo said. Its a really multicultural place. But its also a place that a lot of people dont knowtheres a need to be more user friendly. It needs more bilingual support.

The month the pandemic struck in earnest, the city took one of its first steps toward reimagining the park, installing Justin DiBerardinis as a full-time executive director at FDR, a first-of-its-kind position that would oversee operations, programming and the eventual implementation of the master plan. This move brought FDR more in line with intensive park management strategies employed in places like Brooklyns Prospect Park, where a municipal park administrator is paired with dedicated staff and a robust friends group to help keep up with day-to-day needs at the park.

Prior to the launch of the master plan, FDR was unstaffed, mostly passive parkland, said Parks & Rec spokesperson Maita Soukup.

Soukup said the city had also made other real investments: Hiring two more support staffers in the interim and pouring money into tangible renovation projects. $750,000 went to repaving the pockmarked loop road and parking lots, striping a new bike lane in the process. The department poured a million dollars into a new roof for the historic FDR Park Welcome Center, a former stables for police mounted units. Eventually, the building is envisioned as an environmental center and offices for staffers.

A $250,000 state planning grant, that will be matched by the Fairmount Park Conservancy, will begin the process of designing a new playground area. New trails and remediation for 40 acres of mostly inaccessible wetland near the back nine of the golf course are slated to begin, with investment from the Philadelphia International Airport, possibly as soon as next fall.

Other investments have come from the parks growing community of superfans. In 2020, nearly a year after the golf course closed for good, park staff teamed up with volunteers to reopen the former grounds as a hiking and recreation meadow. Handpainted signs inform visitors the area is now dubbed The South Philly Meadows and the space has been key to handling the surge in visitors during the COVID era, Toy said.

I personally didnt even know about the golf course. Id never used it, he explained. I didnt realize how large it was.

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The pandemic helped make FDR Park better. Now it has to survive the aftermath - WHYY