One Brick Short

In an effort to provide its citizenry with more active recreation and eliminate the passive recreation that is creating a society full of old folks and fat people, the Charlottesville City Council is proposing changing its showcase McIntire Park from a mixed passive-active facility to an all-out athletic complex.

McIntire Park will lose picnic shelters, greenspace, softball fields and parking areas, but it will gain a multi-million dollar swimming facility to rival ACAC, new hiking trails and better connection with the adjacent Charlottesville High School. The remaking of McIntire Park in the current city council’s image will no doubt stick in the craw of softballers, picnickers, loungers and dogwooders but that’s their problem.

Who needs softball fields, anyway? Sure, the city rec league packs the lighted fields on spring, summer and fall evenings as groups of old men, young men and women of both ages compete in the laid-back, age-friendly, time-honored, former national past-time of diamond ball. Sure fields at Darden Towe Park are packed. Sure, there are few available fields anywhere else in the community, but that’s OK. The city plans on putting lights at the existing CHS softball field, which should help half of the night games currently played at McIntire.

Besides, those folks don’t really need a venue for the pathetic athletic efforts. They just need to take up a real sport like soccer or lacrosse, which will be provided for in the new McIntire Park on space where the softball diamonds used to be.

And people don’t need to picnic in the park, which is good because the need for more parking at the built-up swim center will pretty much eliminate that. Picnicking just makes people fat by promoting barbecue chicken dinners, pancake breakfasts and a host of unhealthy eating habits. People don’t need picnic shelters, they need exercise and they can get that by joining—for a fee, I’m sure—the YMCA or joining a soccer league.

If they’re hungry they can get an energy bar and sports drink out of the vending machines that will no doubt be in the swim center lobby.

And people interested in going to the Dogwood Festival can walk from their downtown parking space to the proposed new placement of Dogwood rides on the expanded McIntire parking lot. For the out-of-shape, they can take a CTS trolley, because downtown will be the closest place to park, being as the rides would occupy most of the parking not used by the swim center. Then everyone can cram onto the multi-use field to watch the fireworks.

Some people will bemoan the changes as too drastic, too much and too soon and not thought out well enough, but that’s just sour grapes. It’s good for the city to look at issues, make some suggestions and approve something without decades of study.

Now if they could just make up their minds about the Meadowcreek Parkway as quickly, or maybe they already have.