ST. LOUIS CITY TALK
At his website St. Louis City Talk, Mark Groth praised the Fultz Field bench shelters as his favorite in the city. The Parks Department has now removed them.
Fultz Field was named for beloved Kiwanis Club coach Paul Fultz, a legend who died 10 years ago and had the honor of being the first coach elected to the St. Louis Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame. Located inside River Des Peres Park in the city's Boulevard Heights neighborhood, it was unusually nice for a diamond in a city park, with covered dugout-style benches for the players, a backstop and bleachers.
But in recent days, neighbors say, all of those amenities were dismantled by workers with the city's Parks Department.
The city confirms it does not plan to replace them.
"After several years without consistent field use, Parks Department staff are considering possible upgrades to the field and facilities as soon as next year to make it more appealing and usable for area residents," Nick Dunne, a spokesman for Mayor Tishaura Jones, writes in an email. Asked why the city didn't wait until it had a plan for upgrades, Dunne says some features of the field had fallen into disrepair, and the city decided to tackle the parts it could handle in-house.
"When finished they'll likely just plant grass, giving them a blank slate for future projects that the community will actually want to use throughout the year," Dunne says.
In an email to a constituent, Alderman Tom Oldenburg suggested the baseball field might become a soccer field. "There is a shortage of those and we run out quickly," he wrote. "We actually get more requests for soccer than we do for baseball even on that field. This will still remain community/public/recreation space."
In some ways, the shift represents Americans' changing leisure pursuits. Baseball has become passe in many quarters; soccer (and pickleball) are where the energy is.
But not everyone approves of the change. Marla Hare Griffin has lived in the neighborhood for nine years. She's upset that the field was taken down — and faults the city for not getting more neighborhood input.
In recent years, she acknowledges, the field has been under-utilized, but she says that's because the city hasn't properly maintained it since the onset of the pandemic. "We used to have Little League teams," she says. "But you'd still see families practicing. People would come and sit in the shade or play fetch with their dog. It's fun to watch the kids swing at a baseball."
All that's gone, and she can't understand why. She's also disturbed by how easily Paul Fultz's namesake field was razed, as she wrote in an email to Oldenburg.
"Someone jumped the gun on tearing down one man's legacy," she wrote, "and a beautiful neighborhood baseball field that just needed a little sprucing up and some regular care."
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