Squirrel Hill Park, the controversial gated pocket “park” at 48th and Chester, is still open after being “liberated” earlier this month and renamed “People’s Park.”

Residents have been asking for years what it would take to open the park to the public. A group started a few years back to work through the legal entanglements. They event sent out a survey. But members of the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative showed what it took: vision, temerity and a pair of bolt cutters.

The Cooperative posted a video (see below) of the opening of the park a couple of weeks ago. The video now has nearly 20,000 views and the park is still open.  Continue Reading

There may be some progress in the ongoing efforts to re-open Squirrel Hill Falls Park, the enigmatic gated pocket park at 48th and Chester that has been locked for years. The Friends of Squirrel Hill Park community group have launched a new campaign that they hope will help give the park new life. The newest effort to reopen the park, which was designed and built in 1996 by West Philly artist Danielle Rousseau Hunter, comes after Friends Rehabilitation Program Inc., the organization that owns the lot, indicated that they are interested in an agreement about the park’s reopening. All earlier efforts seem to have fallen through (read our previous story about the park here).

Community support is essential in this process, and the Friends of Squirrel Hill Park are asking all interested residents to participate in a short survey and sign a petition titled “Let’s make progress at Squirrel Hill Park!”

“As a neighbor of the long blighted former park at 48th and Chester, I would like to see something positive at this corner. The park is waiting to once again become a great amenity to our neighborhood, and we are ready to join together to make it happen. We ask Friends Rehabilitation Program to work with the Friends of Squirrel Hill Park to help us bring new life to this unused community space,” the petition reads.

The survey includes such questions as what type of programming you would like to see at the park and how much help you can offer to the Friends of the park.

For more information and to access the survey please go to the Friends of Squirrel Hill Park website. You can also find more information about the neighbors working to reopen the park on the group’s Facebook page.