STARTING AGAIN
Cindy Parker wasn't going to let it get her down. The fact that the turnout Saturday for a volunteer cleanup of Father Marinaro Park was sparse didn't ruffle her. The fact vandals had again sprayed graffiti over the skate park concession stand just days after two of her sons had repainted the building didn't dismay her either.
“I'm a little disappointed,” said the Lyndora woman as she and her sons, Chris and Andrew, prepared to sweep up trash and debris in the skate park.
“But that makes me more motivated to get more people involved. I think this park has been written off by people, which is unfair,” she said.
“People deserve to have a clean, safe fun environment,” she said, which is the long-term goal of her South Side Park Group as stated on its Facebook page.
Parker has long had ties with the skate park in Father Marinaro Park.
“We were among the initial people that built it back in 2002,” said Parker.
“When my kids were young, there was a meeting in the Dunbar Community Center, and they needed a lead parent in the group to look it over,” she said.
She volunteered and after the skate park was designed, it was built between March and September 2002.
“I remember spending the day down here, me and all my friends,” said Andrew Parker, 31, as he assessed the damage to the paint job he and his brother Chris, 27, had applied to the concession stand the prior weekend.
“I was a skate park user,” said Chris Parker. “I was 8 when we started building this.”
“I'm a little discouraged. It's disappointing,” Andrew Parker said as he took in the spray-painted symbols and words.
It took the brothers, both professional painters, nearly five hours to paint the building before, a task that they will have to do again.“We will wipe the chalk off and repaint,” said Chris Parker.“We're going to paint it all over again,” said his brother Andrew.Cindy Parker said she hoped arrests had been made Friday in the recent vandalism.“That might lead to nipping the whole vandalism thing in the bud,” she said. “Hopefully as word gets out, this will put a stop to it, making an example.”Setting a bad example is the city's maintenance of the park, according to Ralph Pincek, whose house on Lincoln Avenue makes him a neighbor of the park.“The city should do more for this park,” said Pincek. “They came out last week for the first time this summer to trim around the fences and they didn't do that right.”“There's a long-term goal to this,” said Cindy Parker before she and her son Chris started sweeping up trash around the concession stand. “That's the complete overhaul of the park.”“My goal is to do this once a month, even in the winter. There's always going to be trash,” she said of her Saturday cleanup efforts.“We're about ready to kick off fundraising. We're working with some individuals,” she said. “We want to get new playground equipment, and I've got two tree companies willing to donate a day to removing branches from the trees.”“We want to have a strong community group not just for this park but for all the parks in the city,” Cindy Parker said.
