State of the Lawn Address

Good evening Mayor Mickens, Members of City Council, Mr. Canada and Mr. Dawson:

I am here tonight as a representative of the Historic Poplar Lawn Association, of which I am on the Board of Governors. Last week, the Historic Poplar Lawn Association had its first meeting of 2007. We were pleased and honored to have in attendance one of our Historic District’s City Council Representatives, Mr. Brian Moore; our City Manager, Mr. David Canada; the Assistant Director of Public Works, Mr. Ronald Reekes; a representative from our Sheriff’s Department, Sergeant Gray; and several representatives from our police department, including Captain Seidel, Corporal Hall and Corporal Richardson, who is training our neighborhood in the Neighborhood Watch program. I wish to publicly thank them for their involvement in helping us to improve our community.

Over the past year, we have had some setbacks and difficulties in our neighborhood, most recently, of course, we had the tragedy of the fire on Harrison Street. We also had an armed robbery in one of our neighbors’ homes, break-ins, muggings, issues with prostitution and drugs. I do not need to rehash the details of these problems right now, because our neighborhood has constant interaction with the police, our city representatives, the city manager and city employees. Our neighborhood is undoubtedly persistent, and tonight I would like to acknowledge the results.

In the past year, we have had significant improvements in Central Park. The city, at times working with some of our neighbors alongside them, has made our park safer though significant brush and debris removal, uncovering areas where unsavory acts had been taking place.

After nearly three years following its falling, the destroyed bandstand was finally removed from Central Park this year. That rubble pile was more than an eyesore, it was a place for people to hide, sleep and conduct illegal business, and we are grateful for its removal.

After six years of HPLA board members’ work pestering the city, we had the old, useless and unattractive remnants of trashcans in our park removed and new trashcans installed. These are temporary trashcans as we work with the city’s budget constraints to gradually have these receptacles replaced with historically appropriate trashcans.

With Council’s actions, our historic district expanded this year, and our neighborhood has been reaching out to our neighbors in our newly expanded district. We have been having new faces in our meetings and our plans and initiatives are growing beyond the area around the park to locations such as Harrison Street, where, frankly, it is desperately needed.

With the help of the Public Works department, HPLA has repainted the fire hydrants in our district. This initiative is more than aesthetic. It has made our active presence known in the neighborhood. We have found that this small action has allowed for us to detect and monitor locations that have apparent problems, so we were better able to report problem locations to our city council representative and the police. The program has also created dialogue between neighbors, particularly in our district’s newest areas.

With the help of the police department, we have revitalized our Neighborhood Watch program.

This year, our neighborhood initiated Nuts for Petersburg, a peanut butter drive that we did in partnership with Central Virginia Foodbank, the food bank that supplies many programs in Petersburg. Our goal was 3509 jars of peanut butter, one jar to represent each child in Petersburg who lives below the poverty line. Many local businesses and organizations participated in Nuts for Petersburg, and we created new, strong bonds with organizations like Beta Sigma Phi sorority and Petersburg Vibe. In the end, we not only collected more than 1500 jars of peanut butter, we also, according to Central Virginia Foodbank, got the word out about hunger in our city. Central Virginia Foodbank has had several companies in Petersburg register for food drives that had never done so before.

Yes, there is a lot to do, and these successes may seem small, but they should be celebrated and those who have made them happen should be thanked:

Mr. Moore, I thank you for always taking our calls, listening to us, helping us along the way, and always showing up at our functions with your beautiful family. You are a part of our neighborhood.

Council, I thank you for voting to expand our historic neighborhood boundaries.

Mr. Canada, I thank you for the meetings, for listening to us complain, for giving us city resources to make things happen, and the promise to continue to do so.

Mr. Reekes, our thanks are probably not enough: we call you so frequently I do not think we need to look up your number anymore to make those calls. Mr. Reekes is extremely patient, gets us results and explains things to us, for which we are immensely appreciative.

I am also thankful for the help we receive regularly from the city’s Preservation Planner, Ms. Victoria Hauser. She guides our plans, fields questions, and is always available to us.

I also thank the HPLA president, Mr. Philip Cheney, Jr., who spends a lot of time doing hands-on work and research and is very passionate about the city.

We have had progress, yes, but we are just getting started, and we consider the bar to now be raised. We ask the city to continue its support of our initiatives.

We are working toward installing the approved traffic circle on Marshall and Adams Streets, improvements in lighting throughout the neighborhood, repaving of Harrison Street, repairs to sink holes and damaged infrastructure on Fillmore Street, crackdown on drug and prostitution activity, addressing abandoned and poorly maintained houses, continued replacement of street signs, gradual replacement of trashcans, and a full restoration of Central Park.

Please know that the neighbors of Poplar Lawn will be working right there beside you and reminding the city of its promises.

In closing, I would like to leave you with a parable. This story is repeated in many cultures throughout the world, and each telling is a little different, but here is my version:

There was a young man deeply involved in spirituality and looking for life’s answers. One day while meditating on the afterlife he prayed to be shown both heaven and hell. Deep in meditation, he was shown the way to two doors. He opened the first and saw a beautiful paradise with all the finest of everything he could imagine, but the people sitting around this utopia were starving, babies howled and the people fought and complained.

The people suffered and were taunted by the bounty before them because they had large tubes over their arms, which prevented them from doing anything. They could not feed themselves, comfort their own children, even scratch that nagging itch. It was horrible, this vision of hell, and the man quickly ran from it to the other door, which he thought must be heaven.

When the man opened the second door, he was shocked by what he saw. There was the same scene with the people with the tubes on their arms. But heaven, you see, was different. In heaven, the people had learned to feed each other, comfort each other, and work together.

~Mady