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Linda Reilly’s apartment sits on the second floor, with windows overlooking the temporary park at 125 Charlotte St.
On a Saturday morning, residents from nearby buildings and customers from the coffee shop Ugly Duck can be seen enjoying the space, sitting on the benches or playing in the grass installed in the last three years.
“It has a gravitational pull on this neighborhood,” Reilly observes.
But this temporary park, known to residents as the East End Green, is once again up for development and at risk of being lost.
When the city issued a request for proposals in September, some members of the original East End Green committee came together to organize a new petition, calling for recognition of the space as a permanent park. The petition has 490 signatures so far.
“Our ultimate goal is (to) preserve it as the park as it exists now. We would like maybe more trees, a few more amenities,” explains Reilly, who is a petition organizer and member of the original committee that started a petition to have the lot converted into green space after it sat unused in 2022.
“An ugly construction fence and construction debris were what the site had. Mud, rock, construction debris, and an ugly fence,” says Richard Rosen, former president of the nearby Grove Place Neighborhood Association and member of the East End Green committee, describing the lot before its renovation in 2022.
CSD Housing planned to build a day care facility at the site before COVID-19, and afterward, the lot sat neglected with no clear plans. The petition in 2022 that called for it to be turned into a green space collected about 350 signatures in a week before it was presented to the mayor’s office.
In the last three years, since the lot became a temporary green space, community members have gotten together to clean up the park, and it has been used to host informal music jams and birthday parties.
Some public comments from the latest petition emphasize the green space’s social and environmental benefits; others raise concerns about zoning laws and adherence to the city’s 2034 Comprehensive Plan, which calls for increased green space and parks, especially in the city.
“All these buildings were approved with there being no open space, no place for people to socialize, enjoy greenery or for children to play,” says Rosen.
In a letter to Dana Miller, commissioner of neighborhoods and business development, and other city officials, the committee’s objections refer to the city’s ongoing Zoning Alignment Project proposal to introduce common open space.
“We have the city’s comprehensive plan. We want (a) standard of 500 square feet per dwelling unit as the minimum common open space for any development, and we want it improved as actually usable park space,” Rosen explains.
“There’s no zoning city legislation that implements the comprehensive plan,” he adds, “and that’s what we’re referring to here as so conspicuously absent.”
Some, like Rosen, ask for more transparency, noting the lack of input from the community on potential development. After being notified, Rosen submitted FOIL requests seeking information on the types of proposed developments.
“We didn’t ask for the names of the developers. We just wanted to see what the site plans were, to see what we, what we got proposed,” he says.
The RFP period closed in late October. Miller replied to concerns raised by the committee in December. (The city did not respond to the Beacon’s request for comment.)
“It is now our task to consider the regulatory and social concerns that you have raised and balance them with the financial and developmental concerns,” he wrote. “We continue to be focused on developing other green space alternatives including reclaiming the lost 1/2 of Schiller Park, and creating an athletic field and green space for World of Inquiry School.”
According to the proposed schedule in the RFP, the final sale is set to be negotiated this month before being sent to City Council for approval.
Emmely Eli Texcucano is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and member of the Oasis Project’s second cohort.
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