Cars parked on the corner of 43rd Street and 13th Avenue South meant bad news less than a year ago: drug dealers and fights that quickly turned to violence, even murder.
Cars parked here today bear good tidings of a community transformed by a swimming pool.
The pool sits on land that had been scraggly grass and muddy ditches, an unsupervised place where kids could run wild and get into trouble. The pool’s back yard reveals the same ragged landscape, dotted with park benches, trees and a basketball court where fighting hasn’t completely stopped. There is still time and space for kids to get into trouble here, but they say they would rather go swimming.
Cordtz says that a few years ago, before the pool opened, he and his friends got into their share of trouble, “getting high” and stealing bikes. “Nothing big,” Cordtz says, “just petty theft.”
Now they meet nightly at the pool instead.
“If you’re not in the pool, you’re outside of the pool,” Cordtz says. “It’s like a hangout.”
Parents are also glad to have a safe place for children to be outside and stay cool through the summer.
“There was a lot of fighting going on up here at the park,” says Eva Relford, 36, as she watches her son, Patrick Wiggins II, who just turned 8, play in the wading pool. “I didn’t want to bring my son up here before the pool.”
Patrick is also taking swimming lessons at the Childs Park pool. Relford herself doesn’t swim -- she nearly drowned when she was 12, leaving her too afraid of water -- but she thinks it’s critical for Patrick to have that skill.
“I didn’t want my son to be in that same predicament and not know how to save himself,” says Relford. “Us living in Florida, we should know how to swim.”
Davis, the assistant supervisor, says he was worried about opening a pool in a neighborhood where few children knew how to swim.
“At first I was skeptical about the amount of drownings we were going to have,” Davis says. “Not a lot of the south neighborhood kids know how to swim, compared to the suburban areas.”
Peggy Peterman, a 42-year resident of St. Petersburg and an activist in the African-American community, says Childs Park’s time had come.
“Something should have been done for that community long ago,” she says. “That community should have had a pool a long time ago.”
Peterman says the stereotype that African-American children were somehow physically less able to learn to swim has been dead for decades, thanks to pools such as Jennie Hall at Wildwood Park and McLin at Campbell Park, both in predominantly African-American communities.
The Childs Park pool is breaking not a racial barrier to swimming, Peterman says, but an economic one. She says the children of Childs Park don’t know how to swim because they have never had a place of their own to swim before. The closest pool was two to three miles away, too far for small children to walk if no one could take them in the middle of the day.
“If the city had provided buses” for the children of Childs Park, “they would have been swimming a long time ago,” Peterman says. “If you build it, they will come.”
