Chavis Park a ghost of glory past

Southeast Raleigh's sore over the state of its onetime jewel

RALEIGH -- In its prime, Chavis Park boasted an Olympic-size pool that drew jazzman Cab Calloway in a pair of red trunks.

Forty years ago, the Southeast Raleigh park offered train rides and a World War II-era aircraft. The show "Teenage Frolic," Raleigh's answer to "American Bandstand," was often filmed there.

But today, a visitor is hard-pressed to find a drinking fountain or a public restroom. No train. No plane. No Olympic pool. No money like Pullen Park, its older neighbor 2 miles west.

Neighbors in Southeast Raleigh resent how their park has fallen from a regional jewel to an afterthought. Chavis, they say, shows how Raleigh's central black neighborhoods lose out to an increasingly ritzy downtown and a border that keeps pushing north.

Cab Calloway couldn't swim a lap in the modern Chavis pool without bumping his chest on the shallow end. But Raleigh has no plans to expand it for the next 23 to 25 years.

Meanwhile, the city is spending $8 million on an aquatics center in northeast Raleigh -- a 13-acre complex with 50-meter competition pool and a 6,800-square-foot outdoor leisure pool with swimming lanes.

Northeast Raleigh has no pool at all and therefore the greatest need, the city explains. Those residents have the farthest to drive to find public swimming, said park planner David Shouse.

But Southeast Raleigh has been howling about Chavis Park since 1969, when the train didn't work and kids hurt their feet on broken glass on the pool bottom.

"Black people who came anywhere in North Carolina came to Chavis Park," said Lonnette Williams, community activist. "Now people don't come because there's not much out there."

The comparison with Pullen on Western Boulevard stings residents. Built in the 1880s, Raleigh's oldest park, Pullen still draws a huge regional crowd, especially schoolchildren in big yellow buses.

Compare the money either approved or planned for each park out of Raleigh's last two park bonds in 2003 and 2007: $9.5 million for Pullen and $1.4 million for Chavis.

A review of budgets going back to 2000 shows that Pullen regularly gets more than $1 million a year, much of it for the palatial aquatic center, while Chavis hovers closer to $100,000.

Chavis Park neighbors long for a larger pool to compare with the old Olympic-size model that was filled in decades ago. And they want one that swimmers can use year-round.

But the city's plan calls only for more water features and a renovated bathhouse in the next seven years -- a $3.2 million project that represents about one-eighth the cost of the new northeast aquatic center and one-fourth of another planned for the Umstead area in Raleigh's northwest.

"We used to have an Olympic pool," says Lemuel Delany, 87, whose father filmed Calloway swimming there. "Now we have a baby pool."

Built in Jim Crow days

Built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, Chavis was the only park blacks could use in then-segregated Raleigh. Jim Crow may have picked the spot, but Wake County blacks flocked to it for picnics, swimming and summer fun. Calloway swung through on a show at Raleigh's Memorial Auditorium, and he stayed with Delany -- his lawyer's nephew -- because Raleigh lacked hotels where black performers could stay.

The park still has its historic carousel with hand-carved animals, built early in the 20th century and added about 15 years after Pullen's merry-go-round. But in its first decades, Chavis also featured a train like Pullen's. The Chavis train chugged to a halt in the early 1970s, around the time that World War II airplane was deemed a hazard. By 1974, the city also tore down the Chavis stadium where John Baker Jr. played high school football. Baker, later an NFL lineman and North Carolina's first black sheriff since Reconstruction, would note that some of his finest football moments took place at Chavis.

"It was so important to us," said Councilman James West, who represents Southeast Raleigh. "Just a sense of place. Just a sense of community. Just a sense of pride."

Crime rose in the neighborhood by the 1980s, and the park's image and use suffered.

The city still tells residents that Pullen draws more people and thus needs more money, Williams said. But use of Chavis would rise, she said, if Raleigh paid the park more attention.

Water's dried up, too

There is no drinking fountain at the playground at Chavis, nor a restroom. To use a toilet, a park visitor would have to pay for pool access -- provided the pool were open. Barring that, the closest restroom is a healthy walk uphill to the community center -- too far for a toddler.

Pullen, by contrast, has a drinking fountain in the center of the playground and another at the tennis courts.

Its carousel has a concession stand, and a paddle boat rental, and a kiddie boat ride. The famous train still chugs around the park.

The difference, Shouse, the park planner, said, is that Chavis was a segregated park when it drew a regional crowd. As society changed and Raleigh's blacks could attend any park, resources got spread around the city.

West, who voted to spend $8 million on the northeast pool, said he needs more facts and figures on Chavis before mapping a future.

But he still believes it has been left behind.

Pullen Park has its statue of Sheriff Andy Taylor and Opie, fishing poles in hand. Southeast Raleigh activist Octavia Rainey has a suggestion for Chavis Park: Why not a statue of Cab Calloway?