The first phase of the Skiddy Park Project is currently underway as Syracuse University students work with local residents to redesign the Near Westside Park’s aging field house.

The goal of the ParkStudio project — a collaboration among SU students, Near Westside residents and city officials — is to renovate the field house so it can benefit the Near Westside neighborhood. Currently, the field house is nearing the end of its life and is no longer in use. Students in the School of Architecture and L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science began meeting this semester with local residents to discuss the best way to renovate the field house.

“We want to go into the community and talk to different groups and find out what they want to see there,” said Brian Luce, the engagement fellow at UPSTATE: Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate, who is helping organize the project. “It’s not about what we want to see the field house as, it’s about what they want to see.”

The project started taking shape this summer when UPSTATE reached out to the School of Architecture about the idea, after a class of architecture students made an outdoor classroom in the spring for a school in the Near Westside.

The tentative timeframe of the project, Luce said, is for students to have finalized designs of the field house at the end of this semester. Currently, there are 32 SU students involved in the project.

To fund the renovation, UPSTATE is contributing $35,000, which will be matched by the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs to make a total of $70,000. He added that the budget will cover different components of the project, including students’ design plans and objects that will be built or placed in the park.

The Near Westside Initiative has recently gotten involved in the project, with the hopes that the organization can help be a liaison between students and Near Westside residents, said Stacey Lindbloom, the engagement scholar for the Near Westside Initiative.

Right now, there are four meetings set up between the student designers and the community, she said. The meetings will allow students to gain a sense of what the role of the field house should be at the park, Lindbloom said.

The next meeting will be held on Thursday, said Cesi Kohen, a fourth-year architecture student who is involved in ParkStudio. The project started with 14 designs but has been narrowed down to three designs. At the meeting, the students will display the three designs and receive feedback. The meeting is open to the public.

The three designs range from minimal intervention to a total overhaul of the field house, Kohen said.

“We want them to see different options,” Kohen said. “We’re not expecting them to like one, but we hope they will like portions of the three and we can hopefully merge them.”

But one of the biggest challenges ParkStudio will face, Lindbloom said, is how to get the community actively involved.

“It’s really important that we get all of their input. But it’s not easy because a lot of the people in the neighborhood — from our past experiences of trying to engage with the community — have been indifferent to what we’re doing,” she said. “The revitalization of the community is not their first priority. First they have to think about their day to day needs.”

Safety is the biggest concern for Near Westside resident Carole Horan, who lives across the street from Skiddy Park. Horan, 69, was one of the few residents to attend the project’s first community meeting.

“I just want to make sure that there are no nooks or crannies, where people can hide and do things that they wouldn’t do out in the open,” she said. “It just needs to be safe.”

Horan said she hopes students visit different community agencies such as La Casita and the Huntington Family Center to share their ideas and receive input.

This input is important because Skiddy Park is in the center of the neighborhood, said Glen Lewis, director of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs. To the east, there is public housing and to the west are neighboring schools.

Because of this, the city has made an effort to renovate the park in recent years, Lewis said. In the last two years, the playground equipment and the basketball courts received updates. He added that the city has been very supportive of the project, and will implement students’ finalized designs.

The construction of the field house will be based around SU’s academic year, but it is tentatively scheduled to be finished next fall, Lewis said. He added that ParkStudio will hopefully develop a system to revitalize field houses throughout the city.

Published on February 11, 2014 at 1:25 am

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