BBQ, Music and Comedy Come to Church St. Park with Purpose: Port Jervis Park Culture Needs Change, Says Organizer
Lourriston Potter’s interest in Port Jervis park life began when his 12-year-old son was beaten up in Farnum Park in 2018, soon after the family moved to Port Jervis. “Little clicks” went off in Potter’s mind, he said.
He recalled moving to Jersey City when he was eight and being confronted by schoolmates on the playground.
“They asked me, ‘Where’re you from?’ But I knew what they would do,” said Potter. “They punched me in the face, and I had to fight.”
Meanwhile, his older brother was accepted into a gang after he conquered the bully who accosted him. The need for protective groups begins young in Port Jervis too, Potter says.
“They start forming gangs in middle and high school. They have nothing to do, so they target someone,” he said. “To raise their status, they need to be tough.”
His son had been beaten up by a mix of middle and high school kids. Potter notices kids in the parks left unsupervised, sometimes hungry. In February, Cory Puopolo, a Port Jervis physical education teacher, and several local youth also reported intermittent violence in the parks amid unsupervised gatherings.
Puopolo and other city recreation committee members advocate building a supervised recreation center with a gym that could be profitable to the city, but a Common Council faction voted down a rec center plan presented by Mayor Kelly Decker last year. The opposition cited the $3.5 million cost and the plan’s aesthetics as obstacles, though Decker said that grants are available.
Potter has bought sandwiches for hungry kids in the park, but he wants to encourage more festive community mixing there instead of primitive conflict. So he has organized a barbecue for July 22, 2-7 p.m., in Church St. Park, and local youth have volunteered to perform. One was working at a gas station when Potter encountered him. A comedian in Albany noticed Potter’s doings online and offered his show.
Potter has been busy with community ventures since he came to Port Jervis to escape Long Island, where the poor are segregated from the rich, and gang violence is common, he said. He and his family left Long Island after a friend’s daughter was killed coming home from school trying to protect another girl from a gang attack.
“I couldn’t stand losing one of my children,” said Potter. “Poverty and gangs were bad there.”
He noted how the combination leads to a cycle of crime and incarceration difficult to interrupt. With little adult guidance, friends lead each other into misbehavior, and criminal records impede employment. Potter sees the violence and gangs, the lack of guidance and lack of alternatives for Port Jervis youth, as conducive to troubled adulthood.
Potter knows the predicament well. Except for his one year living with his grandmother in Jersey City, he grew up living in emergency housing, clothing himself by taking what fit from Salvation Army dumpsters, he said. To buy food for the family, he stole drugs from his dealer father to sell to friends of his crack addict mother.
When he was 11, he sold to someone sitting in a car and was soon surrounded by police who told him to lie on his stomach. He had sold to an undercover officer and spent the night in juvenile detention.
“The staff felt they had something to prove and had no problem putting their hands on you,” he said. “The inmates were territorial and gangish, but I made a family of them. I could open up with them in the nine months of programs there. I met many of those guys later in prison.”
In prison, that “family” is defense from the brutal culture there, and making a transition to relationships in the outside world when released is difficult, Potter said. So when freed, he associated with people with similar histories and ended up in a succession of prisons—Attica, Clinton and others—for his activities with drugs and gangs.
“No violence, a lot of guilt by association, larceny and burglary,” Potter said.
His failure to get an education along the way left him largely illiterate. He could read a few words here and there, but punctuation was meaningless, so incomprehensible run-on sentences were all he saw. Not only was this a problem for getting jobs but also for keeping his freedom. He signed court documents without fully understanding what they meant, but could not plead illiteracy because a well-meaning tutor had assisted him in passing the GED exam by reading aloud to him, he said.
He finally learned to read in his thirties after marrying a nurse he met at a Long Island street fair 13 years ago. Shatisha taught him to read and encouraged him to speak proper English to support his business aspirations. He was inspired by her ambition, going to school to advance her nursing skills, along with holding several jobs.
They have four children—people comment on how well behaved they are. To support them, Potter has often worked at two or three jobs at a time, as has Shatisha. But his efforts to rent space for a Port Jervis barbershop, for which he has the equipment, are likely hampered by his prison record.
He and Shatisha notice others around the city also struggling with re-entry and related issues familiar to Potter. So last year they started a nonprofit, the Capital Social Club Tree.
“The tree represents what I want to do for communities subject to what I experienced for years,” said Potter. “We want to address poverty, drugs, re-entry problems and youth education.”
The festive barbeque in the park, he said, is aimed at changing the kinds of social conditions for youth that made his adulthood so challenging. He wants to see a mix of people of all ages and origins in the park that day. Save-A-Lot is donating food as are Potter’s family and community volunteers, who will also be cooking.
Church St. Park Community BBQ with music, comedy and games, 2-7 p.m., Thursday, July 22. Free.