Neighbors work to restore natural beauty to Hunting Park

A weekend morning in Hunting Park used be the time for Leroy Fisher and Catalina Hunter to assess the damage to their beloved neighborhood green, the flotsam of needles, condoms, and trash that had washed in from the previous night's revelries. But the only serious trash on this broiling Saturday was neatly tucked under the tables where an Amish farmer was stacking blushing peaches, fresh sweet corn, a cooler of homemade lemonade, and bricks of goat's-milk soap.

Yes, a farmers' market has come to the so-called badlands of Philadelphia.

The social theorist Richard Florida claims the arrival of a Starbucks outlet is a bellwether of urban change, but a farmers' market may be the next-best thing - and healthier. Can an organic community garden and a dog run be far behind?

Actually, they're in the works.

After years of grasping at small ways to help their long-suffering North Philadelphia neighborhood, which takes its name from the historic, 87-acre park, Fisher and Hunter are finally able to boast some concrete results.

Soon after the Saturday market started operating in June near Old York Road, bulldozers were dispatched to reconstruct the baseball field - thanks, in part, to a donation from the Phillies' Ryan Howard. Flowering borders, which now stand as colorful sentries at the entrances to Hunting Park's winding drives, were planted by residents during a neighborhood service day. The 80 raised beds in the community garden should be ready in time to put in a fall crop. Meanwhile, the new playground on the park's Ninth Street side is getting heavy use.

"It's been there a year, and no vandalism," Fisher marveled as he showed off the improvements.

That might be a small accomplishment for some Philadelphia neighborhoods, but it is a big deal in Hunting Park, the section just east of Broad Street and south of Roosevelt Boulevard. Once a solid, working-class enclave that supplied the brawn for the Budd Co. railcar plant, its tight blocks of rowhouses were literally torn apart first by the factory's gradual downsizing, then by the crack invasion of the 1980s.

The park, laid out in 1858 as a day resort for nature-deprived Philadelphians - with a carousel, band shell, and small lake - was a casualty of those upheavals. Prostitution, drug use, and shootings became regular occurrences. It didn't help that the city, which wiped out much of the park's historic charm in a brutal 1970s renovation, provided only minimal maintenance for years. The overgrown landscape offered plenty of cover for bad behavior.

But Fisher, who grew up in the neighborhood and is perhaps best known as a cofounder of the Aztecs, winners of a national Pop Warner League football championship in 2004, said he had never stopped thinking of Hunting Park as beautiful.

It has some of the oldest, biggest trees in the city, including one that may have been planted as early as 1800, when the land was part of a farm owned by descendants of James Logan, William Penn's secretary. "Its beauty just had to be highlighted again," he said.

The effort to restore the pleasure garden took off in 2009, when the Fairmount Park Conservancy selected Hunting Park for a test project. It wanted to see whether it was possible to use landscape improvements to fight the physical ills of poverty, from obesity to violence.

The conservancy, a nonprofit that supports Fairmount Park, used its muscle to raise $3.3 million from such donors as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is interested in hot-button nutrition issues, like urban food deserts. With the nearest supermarket more than a half-mile away, Hunting Park qualifies.

The conservancy, Hunter said, helped neighborhood activists come together under an umbrella group, Hunting Park United. They organized dozens of community meetings to articulate their goals, and the conservancy brought in a local design firm, Wells Appel, to fashion a plan to realize them.

The landscape design isn't just about planting trees, although that is being done, too. The city has yanked out 178 dead and dying specimens and begun installing a new generation of 300 trees. The master plan takes a big-picture view of the way that parks, community gardens, and playing fields can work together to keep neighborhoods healthy, both physically and economically.

It's not enough to get people in neighborhoods like Hunting Park to eat better food, conservancy director Kathryn Ott Lovell said. They need to be more physically active. But as long as the park was a scary place, many were afraid to venture for an evening stroll on its tree-lined paths.

In the last few months, the city has sought to make Hunting Park more inviting. Enough brush has been cleared so you can see to the center of the park, where the band shell, which John Philip Sousa once used, survives. New, decorative streetlamps, like the kind in Center City, are next. After the baseball field is restored, the football field and tennis courts will be renovated.

Still, in an 87-acre park, that's just a beginning. Many of the paths need rebuilding. So does the rec center. And grass is badly tattered in places, particularly because of the searing heat.

But Hunting Park already feels busier, Fisher said, pointing to people setting up for a cookout in the picnic pavilion and a group of Little League coaches preparing for a trophy ceremony. In fact, he said, excusing himself, "I'm supposed to be helping them."