Park BBQ Feeds and Reveals Needs
Hundreds of kids, teeny to teens, flocked to Church St. Park last Thursday for barbeque, basketball, bouncy house, music, dancing and games spread across the park’s three levels. Lourriston Potter organized the event to bring community life to a park he felt was too often the hangout of unattended youth, sometimes quarrelsome.
Anne Horsham, who played games with children on the park’s upper level, recalled Potter’s insistence that the event be at Church St. Park, not Riverside Park.
“He wanted the barbeque in the middle of the community,” she said. “He was so pleased when a woman living across the street came over when she heard the music.”
Horsham and her accomplices created “old fashioned games that left no mess,”she said, wanting to leave the park unmarred. But those games engaged children, she said. A nine-year-old boy used a fishing line with a magnet to catch 20 paper fish with metal clips. Then he used the stickers he got for each fish to adorn his bike, she said. Nearby, others played a horseshoe game or had Port Jervis police fingerprint them, or they piled into a police jeep to get a closer look at it. Meanwhile, down the hill on the tennis courts, a disc jockey kept people dancing, line dancing breaking out at one point among adult women along with small girls.
Down the hill from the dancers, the basketball courts were busy with mostly boys who leapt up and made baskets with casual grace. Among them was Greg Decker, whose mother, Melony, sat on a bench nearby.
Asked about the park’s safety, she said, “I’d walk through this park in the middle of the night.”
“There were fights in the past, usually over basketball,” said Greg. “Adults try not to let it happen. There’s trouble when strangers come from somewhere else. If you come here enough, people don’t fight. We know that if we don’t fight, there’s more events. If we fight, they close it down.”
“The kids who get picked on are the ones who have no friends,” said Elijah Mullins, 17. “I try to bring them into basketball games.”
Elsewhere on the basketball courts, Demetrios Villanueva, 15, said, “There’s nothing to do here. That’s why so many people are here today.”
Shatisha Potter, Lourriston’s wife, agreed. “That’s why people are glad we’re doing this,” she said.
Many kids spend their afternoons at home playing video games, said Cory Puopolo, a Port Jervis physical education teacher.
Asked what the highlight of the day was for him, Lourriston said, “It was feeding the kids. I knew they didn’t have enough at home. I would serve the same family five times.”
As for the outcome of the event, he said, “It was growth. People came from different cultures, different parts of town.”