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HomeMy Public PortalAboutAdditional Public Comments ReceivedDate: 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 7 of 14 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 8 of 14 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 9 of 14 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 10 of 14 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 11 of 14 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 12 of 14 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 13 of 14 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 14 of 14