Submitted by David Wold, Byram
We all know how protective the RTM committees are of our parkland and you might find this quote from the Greenwich oral history project interview with former First Selectwoman Ruth Sims in 1984 interesting:
“I dedicated parkland so that it would be open space forever at the Havemeyer Field between the new Town Hall and the Board of Education building because people were always getting ideas of what would be nice to have there. Some people wanted to buy it for commercial development. So we dedicated that and the land around the Byram School as parkland. There was great fear that once the school building is no longer used as a school that the land would be commercially developed. So I worked with the community and got most of the site dedicated as parkland so it would remain green, which I think is very important. That area is heavily built up and needs open space.”
This made me think about the proposed new rink.
The greenspace/open space is from the Post Road (wooded area) all the way down to the 1.8 acres that locate the Dorothy Hamill Skating Rink – it is 12.5 acres (so smaller but same idea as Tod’s Point, Mianus River, Pomerance, etc.)
This is something Ruth Sims did via RTM, P&Z, Board of Selectman, and 15 years after the Rink Users got their property next to it.
Splitting the open space creates two parklands because this new 40,000 sq ft building would clearly cut the dedicated by Ruth Sims parkland in two.
Just because the rink is old, does not mean it needs a new property.(McKinney Terrace is older – maybe the Greenwich Housing Authority would like to move that to a park and ‘reclaim’ it as parkland.)
We are going down a very slippery slop here if we agree on DPW ‘flip’ of 1.8 acres with minimum 5 acres in the middle of open parkland.
I hope I have given you something to think about.