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HomeMy Public PortalAbout17-08-07 Public Comments Received from July 25 thru August 6August 7, 2017 Members of the ad hoc Committee on Victory Field Phase 2: Attached are all the emails that I received since our last meeting on July 25 through August 6 from the public, or that were forwarded to me from other members of the Committee, and are for our consideration as we develop our recommendations. Please note that I did receive several emails that were entirely for or against artificial turf, and I have chosen not to include those because they are outside the mandate of this committee. Thanks Vincent Piccirilli Chair Page 1 of 15 Date: Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 6:51 PM From: Chris Lowry, Marshall St. To: Elodia Thomas, vincent.piccirilli@gmail.com Cc: Wilson Lowry, Marshall St Subject: These lights are crazy)1111 MUSCO lighting brochure for Victory Field Phase 2 Dear Elodia and Vinnie — I will not be able to attend tonight's meeting after all. If possible, could you forward Wilson and my thoughts to the committee regarding lights and parking? Thank you, Chris Parking: As a Victory Field neighbors who live on Marshall Street, we are opposed to adding parking and driveways in Phase II. We often have cars parking in front of our house for Victory Field events. We expect to have people parking in front of our house: it is a public street with easy access to the fields. We were well aware when we decided to live in the neighborhood that we would be sharing our street in this way. Given the age of Victory Field, we suspect there are very few neighbors whose choice to live nearby predates the fields! There will never be enough parking for events at the fields, and therefore neighboring streets will always serve as overflow. Open space and natural green park areas are so much more important than a little extra convenience at the fields. Athletes are capable of walking and carrying equipment a little further if the buses cannot drop off in the ideal spot. If necessary, we are sure we could work out a simple permitting system to prioritize spaces for elderly to have access to walking the track. Lights: We absolutely oppose adding to light pollution by making the track oval daylight -bright at night. It is totally unnecessary. Further, as a near neighbor, the lights will be more than a nuisance. If it is possible to add lighting to bring the field to a late winter afternoon light level with lights that only light the field instead of the entire area and Whitney Hill, we could support such an addition to extend the playing hours through 8 or 9 pm. Page 2 of 15 Letter received: July 26, 2017 From: Dick O'Connor, Channing Rd To: Elodia Thomas Victory Field Phase Two: Victory Field Should Continue to Serve the Entire Community The renovation of Victory's Field's track area is up again for discussion. The Town Council has appointed an ad hoc committee to study proposed plans and make recommendations in September. These plans, basically identical to those put forward three years ago, would rob the area of much of its grass surface while introducing several intrusive and heavy-handed innovations which would go far toward destroying the open feeling which has made it so inviting and attractive a playground for generations of Watertown residents. Among the changes proposed are a parking lot, additional lighting for night games, rubber hardening of the eastern part of the 'oval' to concentrate track and field events, and a concrete pad just outside for the two equipment storage containers owned by the schools. A bocce court and long rows of black metal poles and netting at both ends of the field have not been approved by the committee. Conversion of the area to artificial turf, though central to the original plan, has been withdrawn by the Town Council from discussion but continues to have many outspoken advocates among school officials, coaches, and recreation personnel. Most of the proposals were drawn up by paid professionals to serve their own interests, which are paid school, recreation department, and youth sports programs which yearly generate considerable revenue for school and recreation revolving funds, an unfortunate necessity of modern community athletics. While the majority of people using the field - for informal sports, practice, exercise, and a myriad of casual recreational activities - who pay taxes but no additional program or permit fees - were neither consulted nor included in the initial planning. 365 days a year the area is used by the people of Watertown for casual and informal recreation. In Fall and Spring often up to 350 persons per day come to throw or kick a ball around, get up games, go one on one with friends. Families play on the field, fly kites, or get together for picnics. Students rendezvous after classes to hang out or lounge on the grass and talk. Runners, joggers, and walkers circle the track, and the tennis and basketball courts are always popular. Groups of adult women arrive for Pilates and other exercises on the lawn or to socialize. Older residents relax on the bench under the shady tree and just enjoy the show. In one part of the oval, a high-spirited game of tag continues while in another a stately Tai Chi class is in progress, and not far away a father coaches his enthusiastic daughter in some of the finer points of field hockey. In a parked car a young woman peruses her tablet while two cars away lovers meet. Nearby, inside the fence, a lone birdwatcher scans the trees. During the coldest, snowiest times of winter there might be only 20 or 30 visitors a day but skis and sleds are brought in, parts of the track cleared for hockey, and always walkers. From counts made at all times of the day for almost a year I would estimate almost 60,000 visits per year for casual and informal recreation. The popularity of these six acres comprising the eastern portion of Victory Field is not hard to understand. Thick with grass, luscious with white clover, and dotted with trees in proximity to the wooded hillside and all under a dome of sky, they constitute one of our most beautiful natural areas, Page 3 of 15 and their openness and greenness have lent themselves to a wide variety of sports and play for almost 90 years. Yet some are keen to alter and even destroy this great resource for the sake of heavier scheduling of local as well as outside teams and organizations to increase revenues from program and permit fees. Six years ago artificial turf was installed in the historic football and baseball areas of Victory Field and, though we hope it has been successful and enjoyed by the athletes who play there, it has become, even when open to the public, rather a vast wasteland as far as the casual and informal recreation of our citizens is concerned. Why? Because artificial turf has very limited and specific, mostly athletic uses while a grass field, like the one at the track, may be used by everyone. Our schools, town recreation programs, and youth sports vendors have every right and good reason to use the track field as they always have. But when their use encroaches upon, abridges, denies, or discourages the traditional rights of the town at large, then the people of Watertown must firmly stand in opposition. Dick O'Connor 81 Channing Road Page 4 of 15 Date: July 27, 2017 at 5:55:49 From: Ronna Johnson, Marion Rd To: Elodia Thomas Subject: tweaked letter Dear All, I'm out of town for the summer as I am every year, and though I cannot attend town meetings, thanks to Elodia Thomas's emails I have been kept in the loop about threats to the community -based identity of Victory Field (VF), where I live less than 2 blocks away on Marion Road. I have been reading with trepidation about the continued assault on our neighborhood by VF sports boosters who don't live in our neighborhood and who somehow think that dinky little Watertown public school sports matter to the extent of overriding interests or uses of everyone else who are stakeholders — adult neighbors and users — of VF. Or those who think making VF a viable sports complex that can be rented to outside users is a smart way to spend our tax money and dwindling open spaces resources. These proposed arena -level sports lights depicted in the MUSCO pamphlet and plan are appalling, just on the level of size, mass and fire-power. (These lights in the brochure remind me of Jimi Hendrix's legendary performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock in 1969 when he made his guitar riffs sound like exploding rockets in battle — a very scary and serious evocation of war.) The "brochure" is filled with computer generated or doctored images of "brilliant" playing fields ablaze with the company's lights and a lot of undocumented rhetoric pumping up the product the company is trying to sell without alarming those who have to live with it. Those glaring lights will be no bother to neighbors; no disruption of the night sky. Really??? Do those folks and proponents of these lights think we nave never been to a lighted -up local field, never mind Gillette Stadium? Or Fenway Park? I didn't buy my house thinking I was going to be living in close proximity to a blazing sports "complex." I'm disgusted by the continued efforts of Watertown councilors and their sports -obsessed allies, including the local press (I'm thinking of the barely disguised advocacy for expanding VF in the Watertown Tab, which I have noted to Dana Forsythe is the epitome of unbalanced reporting) to foist on us expensive sports facilities for reasons I find suspect: Their vaunted interest in kids playing sports is just a smarmy cover to the barely concealed greed to rent our new rebuilt, community -unfriendly field to out-of-town users. Where would that earned money go, I wonder? Or else the advocates for bigger VS wish to express some boosterism for the town that is very unflattering to those who promote it. I've written emails to Peter Centola in response to his periodic summary of news in Watertown -- retailing mostly uncontrolled development in the West end and Arsenal street area. He has never answered me. In fact he has stopped including me on his list of Watertown residents who receive his self-important — and self-aggrandizing — missives about the progress of what seems to me to be the virtually unchecked development and over -development in Watertown. For anyone who has lived in Watertown for any length of time, building developments, on Arsenal for instance, are an eyesore and cause traffic problems. And who are these developments primarily serving? Developers. I'm not sure I see other or Watertown beneficiaries for them. Do all their users and employees live in Watertown? Page 5 of 15 When I was a child during the Cold War living in Watertown I was afraid the "Russians" would bomb the Watertown Arsenal and we'd all die; I used to pack up my dolls every night to make a quick exit in case of attack. I wish that was all we had to fear now about the decommissioned Watertown Arsenal. Now we have to fear aggressive and unreflective development, and that is reflected and repeated in the continued battle over VF to preserve it for us, the neighborhood and the town's residents, including those who don't have kids — mostly boys — in our school sports. Kids who don't pay taxes, while we adults do. Kids who need to have their schools improved by increased investment in teachers, classrooms, textbooks, even school lunches. Kids who need serious investments in their actual futures of work and living, not in the opiates of promised sports augmentations. This is what the proposed bulking -up of VF looks like to me, and I'm only writing half of what I see. I know this is no Churchillian, measured or even diplomatic argument to preserve our park. We may be past the niceties of diplomacy, since all the proposed changes to VF are permanent and they will have permanent impact on our neighborhood abutting it and on our town. What needs to be permanent, invested in now, is our youth's education in our schools — not in sports education but the kind of pedagogy that gives many more young people growing up in Watertown a viable cultural and economic future. I am steamed with every attack by town councilors who propose to develop VF on our peaceful and relatively quiet neighborhood. I've said it before and I'll say it again: those opposed to the town's greedy and expensive plans to mangle VF ought to form an association and hire legal counsel to represent and argue for our interests. On the most base level of concern, the proposed amping-up of VF will lower the value of my property on Marion Road. Be advised that I will retain counsel to protect my investment when it comes time for me to retire and sell. I will keep a very careful eye on what happens to my property's beauty and desirability if those glaring lights (already bad enough, even from my block) and astro turf (a Carcinogen, haven't we established that?) and more fields more parking more more more are implemented at the expense and reduction of what was beautiful about VF, and consequently desirable about my neighborhood located near it. I know I am speaking to the choir here, but feel free to send my words on to those who are less conscientious about our town; send them to Centola! I am one irate, tax -paying nearly -abutting resident of the VF area neighborhood and I vigorously oppose the proposed changes to Victory Field. Ronna Johnson 43 Marion Rd, since 2007 137 Langdon Ave, 1986-2007 39-41 Evans St, 1952-1963 Page 6 of 15 Date: Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 4:04 AM From: Stephen Kennedy, Marion Rd To: vincent.piccirilli@gmail.com Subject: The July 25 Ad Hoc Committee Meeting Dear Vinnie, I wanted to say how much I appreciate the time and effort that you and the other committee members spent considering ways to ameliorate the noise associated with the basketball court abutting my property. The discussion convinced me that a modest relocation would have material drawbacks and not be very helpful to me. At the same time, I very much appreciate the committee's decision to maintain the current buffer zone and not move the basketball net any closer to my property. I think that the idea of attaching a wooden fence to the chain link fence that abuts Marion Road properties is interesting and could be very helpful. I'm sure that there are details to work out, and I suppose that it might not be wanted by all the abutters. For example, thinking about my case, I would need to address two issues. First, I would always need some sort of opening so that I can shoo away late night basketball players. (The signs about closing times have helped but are not completely effective.) Second, I have recently planted three viburnum bushes that will, I believe, grow to provide considerable screening over the next several years. I would want to be sure that they would still have enough light to thrive if a wooden fence were added. But I think the idea is well worth pursuing. Again, my thanks to you all — not only for the time and effort you devoted to my specific problem, but for the patience and care that I think you have taken through all these meetings to consider the needs of the many different users of the Victory Field park. Page 7 of 15 Date: Fri, Aug 4, 2017 at 10:15 AM From: Tom Wittenhagen, WHS Track Coach To: vincent.piccirilli@gmail.com Cc: michael.lahiff@watertown.k12.ma.us Subject: Victory Field Action Items I have several items for the phase 2 victory field project. I have spoken to coach Sullivan, several athletes, neighbors, and m -f athletic company. We have determined several items: 1. Keep the set up of the inside oval the same except for adding the pole vault 2. Scratch the outside locker located near the midpoint of the the track. The athletes and coaches would prefer a kiosk set up like Arsenal park w/ several picnic tables w/ a roofed structure above them. 3. Have one storage shed located behind the football stands on the other side of the street. 4. Cover the pole vault pads w/ a movable aluminum shed. The shed would be 13'6" x 26' and would covered the pads each night. This shed would be locked and the pads would be safe from vandalism and the elements. Also the pads would be unavailable for the public to jump on and possible injure themselves. 5. A representative of m -f athletic company will be meeting w/ me sometime at the end of August to go over our plans and he/she might have some input as to improve them Please consider the above items in order the make the track project a success. Page 8 of 15 Letter received: August 4, 2017 From: Dick O'Connor, Channing Rd To: Elodia Thomas Victory Field Phase Two: When Is a Field Not a Field? In light of the current discussion over the future of Victory Field it might be informative to examine its past. The area now comprising the DPW lot and the fields was part of the Israel Whitney farm purchased by the town in 1825 to use as an almshouse and poor farm. Recognizing the growing interest in outdoor sports and recreation Watertown's selectmen in 1893 had a portion of the farm graded for a football field and within a few years added a baseball diamond and bleachers for spectators, followed by a play area for children. In 1901 a pipe was laid from the water main on Orchard Street to flow an acre or so for winter skating. When a subsequent board of selectmen determined that the "Town Field", as it had become known, should be sold and developed to increase tax revenue the people of Watertown came to its rescue at a special Town Meeting on the 4th of November 1910 by turning it over to the town's Park Department "to be used as a public playground". A major upgrade a decade later included construction of a concrete grandstand/field house/storage area and on Memorial Day 1922 the field was ceremoniously dedicated as "Victory Field" to the men of the town who had fought in the recent world war. The adjacent six acres between Marion Road and Orchard Street, formerly a town gravel pit and dump, were similarly conveyed to the Park Department at a June 1927 Town Meeting to become part of Victory Field. Here a sixth mile track and town tennis courts were completed in 1930 and a playing area for soccer and field hockey graded and seeded. In the years following the next world war the football field was relocated and a brand new field house and new bleachers with press box added. While at the track field a diamond for Little League Baseball was built in 1953 and in 1967 an outdoor basketball court. The original cinder track was superseded by one of rubberized surface in 1971 and the current quarter mile configuration dates from 1991. Although school teams have always used both fields as have the town's summer playgrounds from 1912 and from the mid 1950s Recreation Department and youth sports programs, Victory Field has always been a town facility, a public park, its care vested with the Park Department which in 1968 became a branch of Watertown's Department of Public Works. Superintendent of Schools Francis Kelley in the 1940s initiated a crusade to have it turned over to the School Department which ultimately came to nothing and a later effort to achieve the same end was defeated at Town Meeting on April 10, 1969. But for the most part the informal recreation of citizens and town school and youth sports activities have peacefully and happily coexisted. In 2011 the fashions and exigencies of modern athletics overtook Victory Field when artificial turf was installed on the football and baseball fields, essentially terminating use by the public. If the proposed Phase Two renovations are carried out the track area will suffer the same fate, becoming primarily a venue for marketing school and town sports programs and leasing to outside organizations. Though presumably the track, tennis and basketball courts, and the tot lot, will still be open to the community, the field, after 90 years, will be gone and thousands of Watertown children and adults will be forced to go elsewhere for casual sports and recreation or become 'couch potatoes'. Page 9 of 15 What old Israel Whitney would make of all this we don't know. But as the town year after year elected him Field Driver he knew a field when he saw one. And he knew a field is alive and green and growing and that upon its successful long term cultivation our health and well-being depends. For a "field" in artificial turf, regardless of how many sports are played upon it or the income it may generate, is really not a field at all. Let's keep what remains to us of Victory Field alive and green and growing. Dick O'Connor 81 Channing Road, Watertown Page 10 of 15 Date: Sat, Aug 5, 2017 at 6:36 PM From: Ashok Modak, Standish Rd. To: Elodia Thomas, vincent.piccirilli@gmail.com, councilorpalomba@gmail.com Subject: Whispering Leaves of the Hiroshima Ginkgo Trees - Victory Field Phase 2 Aug 7, 7pm meeting Dear Elodia, Thank you for all the hard data and your hard work! Thank you Dick O'Connor and Ronna Johnson for expressing our community's sentiments so precisely. You may have already read today's NYT Dorfman article, but here it is if you haven't. It has some relevance to our efforts at Victory Field. Regards Ashok Modak Standish Rd The Opinion Pages OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR The Whispering Leaves of the Hiroshima Ginkgo Trees By ARIEL DORFMAN AUG. 4, 2017 DURHAM, N.C. — On Aug. 6, 1945, a 14 -year -old schoolboy named Akihiro Takahashi was knocked unconscious by a deafening roar and a flash of blinding light. When he awoke, he found that he had been thrown many yards by the detonation of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He had survived because his school was about a mile from the epicenter of the blast. Dazed and burned, Akihiro headed to the river to cool himself. Along the way, he witnessed a scene of apocalypse: corpses strewn like rocks, a baby crying in the arms of its charred mother, scalded men peppered with shards of glass, their clothes melted, wandering like ghosts through the wasteland, the unbreathable darkened air, the raging conflagrations. In an instant, some 80,000 men, women and children had perished. In the days and months that followed, tens of thousands more succumbed to their injuries and the effects of radiation. Page 11 of 15 I met Mr. Takahashi in 1984, when he was the director of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. By then middle-aged, his body was a testament to that war crime and its aftermath. One ear was flat and mangled, his hands were gnarled, and from a finger on each grew a black fingernail. "You must see the hibakujumoku, the survivor trees," he said to me, almost as an order, at the end of a long conversation in his office. "You must see the ginkgos." It was the first time I had ever heard of this tree. With one of his twisted hands, he gestured toward the city beyond the museum. They were a sign of wonder, the three trees that I visited, in the Hosen-ji and Myojoin-ji temples and at the Shukkeien gardens, spreading and magnificent and resilient. The ginkgo, I learned, was an expert in survival, a species found in fossils 270 million years old. These specific trees had endured because their roots underground had been spared the nuclear annihilation. Within days of the explosion they had sprouted new greenery — surrounded by Hiroshima's horrors of carbonized bodies and black rain and wailing survivors. The ginkgos, Mr. Takahashi said, expressed better than anything he could say through an interpreter the endurance of hope, the need for peace and reconciliation. And so, decades later, when the majestic old oak trees in front of our home in the United States were rotting and had to be cut down, it seemed natural to us to replace them with ginkgo trees. We purchased two specimens and paid to have them planted along the street we live on, and we persuaded the city forestry department to plant a third nearby. The choice was not simply a challenge to death — though these trees would live far beyond the limits of the oaks and would be here when we were long gone — but also an aesthetic decision. The ginkgos are elegant and supple; their leaves are delicate lobes of green shaped like tiny fans. I watered these miraculous trees every day and greeted them each morning. On occasion, I even spoke and sang to them. I thought of Akihiro Takahashi again the other day. Early one morning, my wife and I woke to discover a crew of workers excavating huge holes right next to the roots of our ginkgo trees to make room for thick coils of snaking yellow tubes of fiber-optic cables. As soon as I saw what was happening, I sprang into action. It helped that I could speak Spanish to the workers. I argued vehemently — and got them to dig their trenches farther from the ginkgos' roots. I checked to see that other trees in the street were unharmed and then went home to fire off emails to the city authorities to ensure that inspectors oversaw future encroachments of this sort. Page 12 of 15 Though our particular trees are safe, I am haunted by deeper, more ominous thoughts about how this great survivor now seems threatened by the depredations of modernity. This is a conflict between nature in its most pristine, slow and sublime form and the demands of a high-speed society that, armed with an astonishing technological prowess, wants to expand everywhere, burrow through any obstacle in its way, communicate instantly with infinite efficiency. The battle is one the earth is losing as this sixth extinction, a man-made extinction, wreaks its havoc on land, water and air, on our plants and creatures. I am far from being a Luddite. In this isolationist, chauvinistic era, I welcome the human connections that our global communications networks enable. They at least offer a glimmer of what we might achieve, the peace and understanding between different cultures and nations that Mr. Takahashi dreamed of all those years ago in Hiroshima. Yet, as we heedlessly rush into the future with our arrogant machinery, will we ever stop to ponder the consequences? How many species are threatened today by our insatiable desires, our incessant overdevelopment, our inability to measure joy and happiness by anything other than the latest gadget? The Hiroshima ginkgos, the tenacious older siblings of the tender green trees in front of our North Carolina house, were able to resist the most devastating outcome of science and technology, the splitting of the atom, a destructive power that could turn the whole planet into rubble. Those trees' survival was a message of hope in the midst of the black rain of despair: that we could nurture life and conserve it, that we must be wary of the forces we unleash. How paradoxical, how sad, how stupid, it would be if, more than seven decades after Hiroshima opened the door to the possible suicide of humanity, we did not understand that warning from the past, that call to the future, what the gentle leaves of the ginkgo trees are still trying to tell us. Ariel Dorfman, an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University, is the author of the forthcoming book of essays "Homeland Security Ate My Homework" and the novel "Darwin's Ghosts." A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 5, 2017, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Tree That Survived Hiroshima. © 2017 The New York Times Company Page 13 of 15 Date: Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 8:30 AM From: Marilynne Roach, Marshall St To: Elodia Thomas Subject: another Victory Field comment for anyone to see To the Ad Hoc Victory Field Committee, The planners would do well to remember that Victory Field is in a valley between two hills that act like an amphitheater to reflect noise. Although I try to avoid the place, many of the disadvantages the Field produces make house calls. Loudspeakers, the near constant battering of basketballs —these sounds jump the fence and penetrate solid walls. It's loudest and worst for the immediate abutters but noise also travels uphill blocks away from the boundary. The criticism made during the July 25th public meeting that some kind of noise abatement wall for the Marion Road abutters was "special treatment" to benefit "only a few" doesn't hold water. Such a structure (assuming it would actually work) would be no more "special treatment" than the presence of the chain link fence to keep the basketballs out of the backyards. (And unless there's ice on the court, basketball continues all year with no off- season.) And as to why we neighbors choose to live near an athletic field if we don't like the effects, let me enlarge on what someone else said at the same meeting. Most of us moved in before the latest round of added bells and whistles, and some of us well before the batch before that. Games as well as practices used to take place afternoons and weekends. No one had huge ranks of glaring lights aimed at their windows late into the night. There was noise but not as much and not as often. The taunt implies we shouldn't continue to live where we had already settled, that we should endure all the disadvantages dumped on the neighborhood or be forced from our homes by the escalating problems with the Field. Such critics tend to live elsewhere and, once they finish playing, resume their lives away from the noise and glare. And to sum up the situation with the current lights: they are too bright, too tall, too many, and are kept burning too late and too often. Marilynne Roach Marshall St. Page 14 of 15 Date: Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 9:37 AM From: Angela Robinson, Bemis St To: Elodia Thomas Subject: Re: another Victory Field comment for anyone to see Hi Elodia, I am so appreciating the emails you are forwarding about Victory and agree with all the criticisms about the next round of "improvements." I am sorry I haven't been able to make it to any of the meetings to support the abutters. I live next door to Moxley Park on Bemis St. and the taunt Marilynne refers to sounds like classic Pete Centola to me! It's his way or the highway, and if you have anything critical to say, he'll find a way to turn it around and make it your fault. He and the town Athletics director installed a stair trainer in our park right beside a playground used by very young children. The stair trainer is dangerous for young children; I've had to call an ambulance for an injured child. I pushed back, even trying to get Mark Sideris involved, but to no avail. Long story but in any event, I'm buoyed to hear that more and more neighbors are turning up to support your cause. I hope to make it to at least one meeting this "season"! All the best to you, Angela Bemis St. Page 15 of 15