Chester Has Parks Too

Spring has made an early appearance with a string of gorgeous 60 degree days and I’m still riding around with snow shovels in my car prepared for the next blizzard to hit the area.
The forecast calls for a sunny and warm weekend, only fitting for the first day of Spring, and I’m looking forward to washing the remnants of winter brine off the car and finally replace the shovels with a basketball, baseball glove, and biking gear.

I bet Philly’s Fairmount Park will be mobbed this weekend with folks sunning and funning on the banks of the Schuylkill River. I bet my all time favorite city park, New York’s Prospect Park, is going to be overrun with city slickers escaping into that 600-acre urban oasis in the heart of Brooklyn with walkers, joggers, bikers, roller bladders, horse riders, paddle boaters, zoo goers, picnickers, kite flyers, readers, drummers, tanners, tennis, baseball, soccer, Frisbee and football players. Manhattan’s Central Park and DCs Rock Creek Park will be overwhelmed with activity, as they should.

Needless to say, I love city parks for all that they bring to a community: open space, beauty, recreation, and escape.

Chester is blessed with a lot of parks for a city of its size. Can you name them all? There’s Deshong Park, Veteran’s Memorial Park, Eyre Park, Ethel Waters Park, Barry Bridge Park, Crozer Park, Washington Park and the big daddy of them all, Chester Park.

Chester Park: A beautiful 46 acre area with rolling hills with plenty of grass and mature trees, a picturesque creek, tennis courts, hockey rink, band shell, and bar-b-que pits.
Washington Park: Tucked right along Widener’s campus, you know this park will continue to look great. A lot of playground equipment and park benches makes it the perfect place to bring small kids to burn off some energy.
Crozer Park: Formerly a 47 acre park until the upper portion was taken away for a housing development. The lower portion features a couple baseball fields where the Jackie Robinson Little League makes their home.
Barry Bridge Park: This was a plot of grass, under that Barry Bridge that featured a few park benches facing the Delaware River, a pier, and one of the only free slips to dock a boat on the entire river. This space is being altered with the new soccer stadium construction.
Eyre Park: The former neighborhood that got wiped off the map in the tragic flood of 1971 sits next to Chester High School and serves as a practice field for their football team. The Hispanic softball league and Nerf Soccer teams play there but the biggest secret in Eyre Park is the driving range. That’s right, Chester has a free driving range where you can whack golf balls to your heart’s content. However, be prepared to bring your own balls and pick them up when you’re done (which isn’t an option if someone else is whacking balls). Hopefully, the folks who started the golf project will finish it or at least let me rent a caged cart to retrieve my balls next time I go.
Ethel Waters Park: A small area on Chester creek across Rt. 291 from City Hall. It’s been the home of Chester’s Sunday summer concert series for the past few years.
Memorial Park: The only city park with a football field and swimming pool. It has the Crozer library and Martin Luther King memorial park along with tennis and basketball courts, some playground equipment, and a walking path. It also has a set of mysterious permanent barricades that prevent cars from driving through the park. I was told it was to protect the children playing in the park from speeding cars. (The kids is see play in the park, not in the street). You’d think that speed bumps like they have in Chester Park would be a better solution. The years of barricading the park has made this wonderful park virtually abandoned from regular activity. Even Alex Butcher who headed the over 60 year old softball team from Chester told me that he finally had to move the team to Upland in order to have a decent field to play on.
Deshong Park: What a waste this park has become. In fact, the only thing that makes it a park at all is its name.

Overall, I’d give the Chester park system a C-minus grade. It wouldn’t take much to get a better grade with all the park space we have but there has been hardly any year-to-year improvement in the parks which leads me to believe that parks are not very important to residents or city government.

If they could just get the barricades out of Memorial Park and cut the grass regularly in the Deshong Park, I’ll give our parks an instant B.