North-end neighborhood group: ‘We need this to be an official park’

The Cathedral Historic District and neighboring Pettigrew Heights neighborhood are historic, centrally located and packed to the gills with people.

That’s just one fact point collected over the past year by a group of community organizers who hope to see a simple, specific amenity spring up at Ninth Street and Grange Avenue: a park. 

They’d add it to a block of green space with more than a hundred years of history as a public space, one that currently plays host to a community garden, grass and not much else.

They’d call it Lincoln Park, ideally, as a hat tip to the now-defunct Lincoln Elementary, which occupied the block for decades.

The need is great, they say. Initially, that message came in May 2022 as a call to press pause on potential housing development on the property, still owned by the Sioux Falls School District. Now, neighbors to the could-be Lincoln Park are armed with facts and ready to bring the question back to the table. 

“On my way home from that May 2022 meeting, where more than a hundred neighbors said to the city and the school district, ‘We want this to remain a park,’ I drove past three little girls playing in a dirt boulevard in front of their apartment complex,” Lura Roti said. “I was like, ‘We need this to be an official park.’”

Despite being one of Sioux Falls’ two most densely populated neighborhoods, the Cathedral District has hundreds of homes and rentals more than a half-mile from a park.

That’s farther than the city wants anyone to be, per official planning department policy, though the city has not publicly identified this particular site as a potential park.

Cathedral isn’t the only area where the city’s park promise misses the mark, but its population density is a meaningful distinction for Sioux Falls City Councilor Greg Neitzert.

Most other homes more than a half-mile from a park are on the edge of town, recently built and have backyards large enough for flag football or a run through a sprinkler.

“Over there, you have the yards with the Rainbow Play Systems,” said Neitzert, who represented the Cathedral area until redistricting. “Here, you’ve got duplexes and fourplexes. The backyards are smaller than we even allow people to build these days.”

Party for a park

The Lincoln Park organizers invited Neitzert to a steamy Monday gathering, where a few dozen neighbors huddled beneath the block’s few trees to shelter from 95-degree heat as children chucked water balloons and ran through sprinklers near the lush late-summer community garden plots.

Their hope is to restart the conversation that bubbled up to fizzle away in May 2022.

Housing is important, they say, but a park would add more. 

“You don’t improve on an already-dense neighborhood by making it denser,” said Bob Trzynka, who moved to the area three years ago to care for his mother, who, like him, appreciated the character of the century-old homes.

Since last year, the Cathedral Historic District neighbors have held regular meetings to share their research and build their case. That’s how they learned that it had been a community space for so long and that about half the residents are renters in multifamily housing. They learned that the school district had twice pitched a plan to build a park, but both plans petered out. They asked the city for a map to show precisely how many homes were a half-mile or more from a park.

“We knew we needed green space, but we knew we couldn’t just come in and say ‘we need green space,’” Roti said.  

Like Neitzert and more than half the adults in attendance Monday, Roti and Trzynka wore grass-green “Save Lincoln Park” T-shirts and had much to say about the area they call home, things picked up from those regular meetings and observations as neighbors.

Take the community garden. The district is a “food desert,” defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an area in a city where at least one-third of its residents live a mile or more from a grocery store. That’s a piece of research. 

And then there’s the observation. Trzynka already had an appreciation for the garden for the color it adds and the opportunities it offers for neighbors to meet neighbors. The food desert factoid puts a finer point on its value, he said.

Were a viable park plan to emerge, he said, “it’s very important for us to keep the community garden.” 

“A lot of these folks are growing here because they need to,” he said.

Designing a park

Evan Caldwell is a new gardener and a five-year resident of the neighborhood. He wanders through the flowers and vegetables for ideas on what to do in his own backyard. Caldwell is an architectural engineer. As such, he has used area and topography data to construct animated layouts for a potential park. There’s a surprisingly wide array of options, with room for the garden, a dog park, picnic shelter, a playground and basketball courts.

“And there would be plenty of walkways all around,” Caldwell said.

The house Caldwell, his wife, son and daughter call home “ticked a lot of the boxes” for the family, he said. It was a first home –more affordable — an older home — more character — and it had a dining room and a decent yard.

No park, but they’ve met a lot of friends anyway. Caldwell and his kids play on the grass plenty, as do others in the neighborhood. 

Sarah Hansen sees her share of neighborhood kids too. Her backyard hosts them from the apartments across the street all summer long, with her home serving as a de facto green space in a park’s absence. 

Her yard isn’t a proper park, but it’s not nothing.

“Yesterday, my husband put in a bike ramp,” Hansen said. “We had a constant parade of kids ramping up onto our yard from our driveway.”

Like Caldwell and the others in the dozen-or-so Cathedral volunteers in the pro-park group, Hansen’s affection for the area is tied at least in part to its friendliness and familiarity. 

“It’s very different from our old neighborhood,” Hansen said. “We know our neighbors here. We actually interact with our neighbors.”

The group wants to see the school district and city come to an agreement on a path forward for a park, and they want to see a promise that it will stay a park for at least another hundred years.

The school district has not made a determination for any future use for the site, community relations coordinator DeeAnn Konrad said.

The city also doesn’t have funds dedicated to acquiring the site in its proposed five-year capital improvement plan, said Don Kearney, director of parks and recreation.

“We regularly partner with the Sioux Falls School District and will collaborate with them and the neighborhood when the time is right and a plan is ready to move forward,” he said in a statement.

Neitzert didn’t need convincing. He sees the spot as the perfect place for a park: centrally located, surrounded by families on all sides, more than a mile from the nearest grocery store and already showing signs of community development. 

Just across the street from the green block is an old brick building, once home to a tiny grocery store where kids could grab a treat on the way home from school. 

Soon, it’ll be a bistro and coffee house called The Perch.

If the school district were to release the land, Neitzert said, “I would love for us to enter discussions.”

“They could donate it to us, we could do a land swap, or we could purchase it,” he said. “So they could just give it to us if they wanted to. That’d be wonderful. But I think we can figure that out and find a win-win.”