SNA Admin

There are a few toys remaining in the Summit Avenue playground.

The plastic toys in the Summit Avenue “tot lot” ­­– as well as the Gladys Potter and Morris Street parks – were culled by the city Parks Department for safety reasons, according to Superintendent Wendy Nilsson.

In a statement about the toys to SNA, she said, “We look at them in the context of national Playground and Safety Standards for public parks. Many of the toys have sharp edges, small parts that are choking hazards, or are damaged in such a way that they could trap little fingers.”

In addition, Nilsson said, “We don’t have the staff to repeatedly visit each park to check toys for hazards, and the reality is that, even if we did, very few of them would meet safety standards. As a compromise, our staff are instructed to periodically remove toys if there are safety issues or their numbers overtake the park. We have been thinning the toys this way for years.”

However, she pointed out, “my own children grew up playing with the tot lot plastic toys, so their removal is not something I take lightly. No one wants to disappoint a 3-year-old!”

In that context, Nilsson said the Parks Department “would welcome more neighbor involvement in our local parks more generally.”

“We would be happy to meet with representatives of local parks to discuss the future of plastic toys at the tot lots. This might start a valuable relationship between park neighbors and the Parks Department. There is an entire organization, the Partnership for Providence Parks, www.providenceparks.org, that works with us to establish and support Friends Groups so that we can have partners for all of our parks,” her statement said.

Nilsson added that “At Summit, we work with the Summit Neighborhood Association, but would love for many of you to get involved as we will soon be adding some additional play features and making some much needed repairs to the existing structures.”

Her statement further said, “We are also trying to create more fun things for the children to do in the parks so they might not miss all the plastic toys. Instead of adding plastic play equipment, we are working to create parks that connect children to nature and open and free play.  At many of our parks we are building berms, log retaining walls, rain gardens, and adding rocks for children to play on and explore.”

Plenty of parking is available at the Highlands.

The Summit Neighborhood Association’s annual meeting this year will feature a forum led by Marc J. Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.

The presentation, one in a series sponsored by SNA, will focus on the consequences for public policy of an epochal shift in the structure of American life.

The gathering will begin at 7 pm Monday, May 1, at The Highlands on the East Side, 101 Highland Ave., – which has ample parking available – and open with a social time sharing pizza, beer, wine and soft drinks. There will be a review of SNA’s activities over the past year presented by President Dean Weinberg, followed by voting on a prepared slate of candidates for a new board of directors. Nominations also will be accepted from the floor.

Then the main event will begin.

Dunkelman, a Taubman Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, will present the findings of his research on how the evolving American community has affected government, the economy and the resilience of the social safety net.

During more than a dozen years in Washington, D.C., Dunkelman was on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the vice president for strategy and communications at the Democratic Leadership Council. He was also a senior fellow at the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a visiting fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., Dunkelman is a magna cum laude graduate of Columbia University, where he worked to found the Columbia Political Union.

In 2014, he published his book, in which he shows that routines that once put doctors and lawyers in touch with grocers and plumbers—interactions that encouraged debate and cultivated compromise—have changed dramatically since the postwar era. He says that both technology and the new routines of life connect tight-knit circles and expand the breadth of our social landscapes, but they’ve sapped the commonplace, incidental interactions that for centuries have built local communities and fostered healthy debate.

Dunkelman asserts that the disappearance of these once-central relationships—between people who are familiar but not close, or friendly but not intimate—lies at the root of America’s economic woes and political gridlock.

However, his book argues persuasively that to win the future we need to adapt yesterday’s institutions to the realities of the 21st-century American community.

After his presentation, Dunkelman will answer questions from the floor and sign copies of his book.

The Hope Street block party on May 21 last year.

The Hope Street Merchants Association is going to hold its annual spring block party on Saturday, May 20, and is seeking applications from vendors. The street will be closed from Rochambeau to Fourth and there are to be food trucks, activities and performances as well as room for about 50 juried street vendors.

If you’re interested in a spot, there is an on-line application at: http://www.rhodycraft.com/bull-hsma-vendor-application.html

There is also an information sheet on the Rhody Craft website www.rhodycraft.com next to the application which should answer all of your questions.

SNA President Dean Weinberg, right center, presides at the voting to approve the garden board and bylaws.

The long-awaited plots in the community garden in the Summit Avenue city park finally have real people dedicated to bringing them to fruition.

At a public meeting Monday, Jan. 10 at Summit Commons, 99 Hillside Ave., bylaws were adopted, a governing board was elected and people who wanted plots received their allocations. There were a total of 25 households that wanted space and there were 25 locations available in the current design of the garden, so a proposed lottery for plots did not have to be held. If more space is deemed available in the future, more gardeners could be recruited.

The next step is for the group to plan the actual construction of the raised beds, so details of that process are being worked out. A meeting of the governing council will probably be held in late January or early February. The slate of officers elected at the initial meeting include Nancy Buron as chair, Read Porter as vice chair with Doug Itkin and Annie Voss-Altman to be secretary and treasurer.

The organization will continue to be a legal subsidiary of the Summit Neighborhood Association until it can stand alone. It is now developing its own web site and is contacting the gardeners so they may sign a gardening contract, get a copy of the newly minted bylaws and pay the membership fee.

The garden development is one phase of the city Parks Department’s proposed refurbishment of the surrounding “tot lot” playground and SNA will also continue to support that plan.

Vehicles coming down Hillside and turning into North Main are particularly vulnerable.

The State Traffic Commission has approved “the installation of a traffic signal on North Main Street at Hillside Avenue.”

Acting Dec. 7 on a request by Rep. Aaron Regunberg, the commission said in a letter to him that “based on the traffic volumes collected July 19, 2016” plus “crash data for the last three years,” the necessary requirements set out by the Federal Highway Administration were satisfied that “a traffic signal is warranted at this location.”

It stated that there were 15 crashes at the intersection and 10 of these were angle crashes with a majority “pertaining to vehicles attempting to turn out of Hillside Avenue onto North Main Street.”

The letter to Regunberg continued, saying that the improvements “have been added to an ongoing STC design contract, with the intent on being constructed within the next few years, pending available funding.”

It points out that there is already a traffic signal at North Main and Ann Mary Street but which is under the jurisdiction of “the City of Pawtucket.” The letter states that the Rhode Island Department of Transportation will coordinate with the city “to determine the most efficient design between these two intersections.”