Pope Park Restoration Key

November 17, 2005

HARTFORD -- Work has begun on a new entrance to Pope Park at Park Street and Park Terrace. It's the latest step in what is becoming a serious revival of Hartford's Frog Hollow neighborhood.

As with any successful urban revival, this one has involved several projects over several years. The curtain-raiser was the restoration of Mortson Street and Putnam Heights, where historic "perfect six" apartment buildings were replaced or converted into "perfect twos," two-unit, owner-occupied homes that have brought dozens of middle-class people to the city.

Then came renovation of perfect sixes along the park on Park Terrace and the streetscape improvement program along Park Street, the neighborhood's main commercial corridor. The state just approved a $3.6 million loan to rehabilitate 13 empty "sixes" on Zion Street. On the west side of the park, a new interior design showroom, DesignSourceCT LLC, has opened in a former factory building at 1429 Park St.

Hartford neighborhoods have had spot improvements before; the challenge is connecting them to create the critical mass necessary to defeat urban blight. The restoration of the park should help.

Though Pope Park was often ignored in the mid-20th century, it remains a diamond in the rough, an Olmsted Brothers-designed beauty. In the past half-dozen years, the Pope Hartford Designated Fund and other supporters have joined forces to restore the park.

The plan, by landscape architect Carol R. Johnson Associates of Boston, calls for restoring the original pathway system, removing a road from the middle of the park, improving connections to surrounding neighborhoods, establishing more recreational opportunities, and recapturing abandoned or unused areas.

In cities throughout the world, favored real estate is next to parks. There's no reason that can't apply to Frog Hollow.