Welcome to America circa 2008, where a kid’s dream of a wiffle ball field mirrored on Fenway Park runs up against NIMBY-ism run amok:
Vincent Provenzano, 16 years old, experienced his Kevin Costner moment one Sunday afternoon in May after a thrilling day of Wiffle ball in a friend’s backyard. He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: “If we build it, they will come.”
After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.
But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.
(…)
[E]ven before they were finished, things began to get complicated. They were told the neighbors had complained, the field was on town-owned land, they needed a permit to put up their field and it would probably have to come down.
This being Greenwich, they decided not to go quietly. They and/or parents alerted the local newspaper and politicians up to Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele of nearby Stamford. Soon they had everyone in town talking about it, with most of them seemingly put off by the notion that even a Wiffle ball field needs to enlist the armies of adult supervision and legalistic oversight.
“BACK before we lost our collective minds and began shrieking with horror at the thought of kids having fun on their own (as in not part of an official league or otherwise organized activity), they used to do things like find a vacant field, turn it into a makeshift diamond and spend glorious hours in the summer sun,” the local newspaper, Greenwich Time, wrote in an editorial in support of the youths on Wednesday.
Of course, that was back in the days before Yuppies migrating from Manhatten moved into the neighborhood, I guess.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Heck, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner’s character in “Field of Dreams”) wouldn’t be able to build his baseball field in his cornfield today. There’d be problems with relation to decreasing the amount of acreage available to plant corn for ethanol and just think of what the carbon footprint of the field itself would be given the removal of vegetation, the emissions from construction equipment, not to mention the power generated for the lights so they can play at night.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:28 am
[...] up, there’s the NYTimes story on Greenwich, CT that Below The Beltway had [...]