Tower Grove Park Breaks Ground on Basketball Courts

The park has been without hoops since the 1980s

By Monica Obradovic

Jun 13, 2023 at 11:43 am

click to enlarge

Courtesy Tower Grove Park

A rendering of the basketball courts to be built near the intersection of Arsenal Street and Bent Avenue.

Basketball courts at Tower Grove Park are now underway.

Local and state officials broke ground on basketball courts that will be near Arsenal Street and Bent Avenue in the southern end of the park today. The courts are expected to be completed by fall.

Basketball courts at Tower Grove Park were a long time coming. Plans for their installation were first announced in 2021. Park users had called for the addition of courts in Tower Grove almost as loudly as they did for new bathrooms when the park’s master plan was developed around 2017.

The city’s second-largest park has been without hoops for 30 years. Previous courts were removed in the 1980s as maintenance costs exceeded available funding.

Advocates for basketball courts have said the relative lack of hoops throughout the city is rooted in racial prejudice. The city has far more tennis courts than those for basketball, and only a quarter of the city’s 108 parks have hoops, according to St. Louis Public Radio. Only one of those parks is south of Tower Grove Park.

Board of Aldermen President Megan Green, State Representative Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis) and Mayor Tishaura Jones heralded the upcoming courts as a step in the right direction at today’s groundbreaking.

“Many communities have been taking out basketball courts over the years,” said Green, who represented Tower Grove South for eight years before becoming Board of Aldermen president. “I’m very proud that Tower Grove Park is saying, ‘No, we’re going to put them in.’”

“Imagine what kind of powerful signals this sends to kids like mine across our city that you are welcome in Tower Grove Park,” Jones said.

Meanwhile, the city’s largest park, Forest Park, has never had basketball courts in its 147-year history. City parks and recreation officials and Forest Park Forever hope to change that soon.

Design concepts for new basketball courts were released in January, and a Forest Park Forever spokesperson previously told the RFT the project may break ground by the end of the year.