Reflections of Foster Park

A Public Park That Welcomes Any and All!

As I took my daily power walk around Foster Park this morning, a rush of memories of all the moments, hours, and days I've spent there came flowing back to me. If it possible to love a public park as though it were a person, then I am madly in-love with Foster Park.


Foster Park is one of Fort Wayne's oldest and prettiest parks. It was donated to the city in 1912 by brothers David and Colonel Foster. It encompasses over 218 acres of land and runs along four miles of riverbank. People come from miles around to experience Foster's large pavillions, immense golf course, playgrounds, bridal glens, breathtakingly beautiful gardens and floral displays, and even the dog park called "Pawster Park."


As a child, Foster Park was a magical place, a place of beauty and fun and joy. It was a place where, at least for a while, I could escape the harsh realities of life in the projects when those realities became too much to bear. Getting there was often the greatest part of the adventure. We had no car as I was growing up, so our two primary modes of transportation were city buses and our feet. Sometimes we'd catch a ride with neighbors who had managed to scrape together a few dollars to put into their gas tanks, but more often than not we would walk. Though it was nearly two miles away, we would make the trek from Millbrook apartments to Foster Park on a blazing hot summer morning and sometimes not return until the the big red-orange fireball setting in the west told us it was time to go.


One of my most memorable Foster Park moments came during a summer when my mother and her best friend, Emma, had gone on a health kick and decided they would walk around Foster Park everyday for two weeks straight. As they set off to the park one evening, arms pumping, heads held high, and me skipping along behind them, they asked each other if they had gone to the bathroom before they left home. Neither of them had and both of them insisted they'd be fine. But by the time we made it to the park and had walked halfway around the path, my Aunt Emma looked as if she were about to burst. "Shoot!" she whispered to my mother. "Girl, I gotta pee!" "Me too!" my mama giggled. Even thogh there are bathrooms in the park, we were no where, and I mean no where, near one. So, with golfers golfing, joggers jogging, bikers biking, and walkers walking, my mother and Aunt Emma found a tree (to this day I chuckle every time I pass that tree), yanked down their sweats, and took turns taking a tinkle as I stood guard, laughing hysterically the entire time.


Almost as beautiful as the park itself is the beauty I see in the mix of humanity that passes through its grounds. On any given day, you'll find folks of all stripes, young, old, black, white, Latino/a, Asian, male, female, and literally everything in between. As a young black girl growing up dirt poor in a conservative, predominantly white city like Fort Wayne, I learned both early and quick where my presence was welcomed and accepted and where it was not. Though some things have changed for the better in terms of the city's embrace of diversity and multiculturalism, Foster Park was and will always be one of the places I can truly claim as my own.
Recently, during another round of the House debate over health care reform, Republican congressman Steve King referred to himself proudly, boldly, and with no intended irony as a "Private sector person." Every time I hear politicians shamelessly touting the virtues of the free market system while railing against publicly funded institutions - public schools, public libraries, public hospitals, and even public parks like my beloved Foster Park - I shake my head in anger and frustration. What Representative King and so many others seem to lack is a very crucial understanding that public funding equals, at least in theory, access for all. I don't know if the Foster brothers intended for their land to be used by such an eclectic ethnic and socio-economic mix of people, but that's certainly what has evolved, and I, for one, am glad.