On her daily walk, Cara Jette takes public steps that connect Welsh Way, near her home in Allentown, to Brosville Street in the South Side Slopes. At the end of the ascent, she crosses a footbridge to get through what used to be a lumpy, weedy, trash-strewn lot that ended with graffiti-covered jersey barriers at the sidewalk.
In the past year, Ms. Jette, 35, has been the agent of change for that lot as one of GTECH Strategies’ 10 ReClaim South ambassadors. The GTECH project each year taps 10 to 12 people to put $3,000 grants to work in a different area of the city. The 2013-14 program targeted vacant land and included training workshops in design, grant writing and other aspects of development.
Ms. Jette proposed a park and named it in honor of the Knoxville Incline, which passed alongside the site from 1890 to 1960. With city workers and volunteers from the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association, she wrestled the park into being during the spring and summer.
She is crowd-sourcing $1,575 online to pay for design, fabrication and installation of a fiberglass and steel sign that would inform visitors about the history of the site.
She said she hopes to take a design to the city’s Art Commission by late winter.
“I have been walking here for years because it’s a shortcut,” Ms. Jette said. “There was a foot-worn path, but it was a yucky place.”
She applied, won the grant, and the result is an inviting apron of flat land with two benches and a gravel path. Public works staff smoothed out the lumps, built the walkway and replaced the jersey barriers with boulders recovered from the Almono site in Hazelwood.
The footbridge now has a coat of bright yellow paint. If you stand on it and look down, you see the deep pit and stone retaining walls that encased the Knoxville Incline, which moved passengers and cargo from the top of Brosville in Allentown to 11th Street in the South Side Slopes.
A small mural on the back of the Daily Mart at Brosville and East Warrington Avenue identifies the site as the incline’s upper station. The name of the incline might owe to its passage through the property of the old Knoxville Land & Improvement Co. Knoxville is adjacent to Allentown.
The incline’s path is the boundary between Allentown and the South Side Slopes. “I saw this park as a way to bring the two neighborhoods together,” said Ms. Jette, a self-employed computer programmer and Web design consultant.
Judy Hackell, vice president of the Allentown Community Development Corp., said the park is “a great project because it connects” the two neighborhoods. “But being an old-timer up here, what’s exciting to me is that there are young people interested in the neighborhood. That’s been a challenge. I hope there’s a new generation of people excited about moving Allentown forward.”
First Published: October 20, 2014, 4:00 a.m.