An athletic field and bleachers followed. In 1924, the city purchased about 15 acres on Mayberry Street for $15,000 (about $200,000 in today’s dollars) to build a park for the Black children who couldn’t play in the city’s whites-only parks. Of course, the name - and the park - are a balm, of sorts a way to help a community heal from a painful history.įor decades, the land where Unity Park now sits served as a buffer between the predominantly whites-only downtown area and neighborhoods like Southernside. Today, it goes by a different name: Unity Park. And the third and final park would be situated along the Reedy River, which Kelsey had called, “Hudson Athletic Fields.” The second park would become Falls Park nearly 100 years later. The first park would become Cleveland Park about 20 years after the release of his report. In his report, Kelsey outlined a series of potential parks in Greenville. ![]() In addition to laying out the blueprint for Greenville’s three major parks, he helped establish the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, worked to preserve the Everglades in Florida and the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and was vital in the early years of Yellowstone National Park. Largely forgotten today, Kelsey was a landscape architect, urban planner and horticulturalist. Kelsey’s 1907 report, “Beautifying and Improving Greenville, South Carolina,” is likely an unfamiliar document to most Greenville residents of today, but it has served as perhaps the most vital blueprint for what the city has become. To do so, the league commissioned landscape architect Harlan Kelsey to recommend public parks that would define the city. It was a city of “merchant and manufactures,” according to one report from 1904, a city of “handsome homes and public buildings” to house the “wonderful growth.”Īs the city blossomed with Victorian homes and rang out with the bells of street trolleys from McBee Avenue to Main Street, the municipal league decided some of the city’s namesake “green” needed to be preserved as public parks for the growing number of residents. Horses clopped down new roads while children filed into the local schoolhouses. Street-rail construction began connecting different parts of the city, as now-historic neighborhoods began to form: Hampton-Pinckney, Alta Vista, Earle Street. Massive new textile mills ushered in more than 8,000 workers and their families. At the start of the 20th century, Greenville was a city of rapid change.
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