Waverly Park

(The following post is an article I wrote about a group of schoolchildren, led by a determined twelve-year-old girl, and their parents who decided to turn a vacant, undevelopable lot behind my house into a park.  A version of this article appeared in the print edition of the Caldwell (N.J.) Progress.)

WEST CALDWELL, NJ- The vacant lot at Forest Avenue and Waverly Place, bisected by a narrow brook, had long been an unusable piece of land that seemed ideal for a park, but it took a determined twelve-year-old girl to make it a reality.

Lia Byrne of Forest Avenue wrote to the West Caldwell Health Department, which owns the property at 140 Forest Avenue, asking if she could remove the garbage and dead branches and limbs from the land and plant flowers in an effort to beautify it.

"I wanted to do something nice for Earth Day," Lia said, "and clean it up."

The response was slow in coming, so Lia wrote the Health Department again, and she and her father Kevin finally got a response on May 13, 2013, less than a month after her initial letter. So on Saturday morning, May 18, Lia, her friends, and several adults got to the work of turning the property into a park – Waverly Park, which they named after the adjacent side street.

"We planned what we were going to do, because we were going to sell root beer floats and lemonade to get money, buy flowers and bags for the garbage, and we needed a lot of helpers, so I asked a lot of my friends and they said they were going to do it," Lia said.

  (Children work on a flower bed in the vacant lot in West Caldwell, New Jersey now known as Waverly Park, on the corner of Forest Avenue and Waverly Place.) 

The children and their parents planted several flowers around rocks and trees and cleared out a great deal of garbage and debris, but there's more to come. Forest Avenue resident Peter Stille and his family donated a bench, which was installed on May 22, and Lia hopes to build a path through the property. Her father's efforts to get someone to remove the stumps from the trees felled by Superstorm Sandy, however, were unsuccessful. But Lia shrugged off the disappointment.

"I don’t think it's too bad with the stumps," she said.

The property now being called Waverly Park has long been a favorite place to play for neighborhood children for decades. One child even built a dam across the brook, which formed a pond that was filled with aquarium fish, but the dam was taken out by the town.

Kevin Byrne said that various people had come by to donate their time and effort. The kids had gotten so much into the project that they were still planting and raking well into the afternoon, even though they planned to be there for a couple of hours in the morning.

(Lia Byrne, right, poses with her friend Ashley Mooney during the planting of flowers in what is now called Waverly Park.)

The property has long been a source of controversy in the neighborhood. Other residents have tried to have a park established there, and a professionally built dam to form a small pond had been suggested, but the Township of West Caldwell did not respond. Residents on Forest Avenue and Hillside Avenue have complained about the failure of the town to clear the dying trees on both sides of the brook. The eastern side of the property has accumulated a good deal of overgrowth and has many fallen trees and tree limbs, which in times of dry weather presents a fire hazard. This is likely to remain a problem, since the trees on the property’s eastern side have been allowed to grow to dangerous heights. With the new attention being given to the area thanks to Lia Byrne and her friends, however, the land being called Waverly Park suddenly has a brighter future.