Field of Screams

From his office on the second floor of Belmont University’s Freeman Hall, Robert Fisher peers out the window, past the building’s classic columns, and points to a park pavilion sitting atop a hill of browning grass. From here, a mass of spindly trees obscures what rests just below that hill—a nearly 25-acre park that isn’t much to look at. With no bathrooms, no landscaping, rusty chain-link fences, cracked concrete stadium seating and unkempt outfields, the conditions at Edgehill’s E.S. Rose Park are poor at best.

Yet when Fisher, Belmont’s president, looked at that same patch of grass atop that very hill nearly one year ago, he saw the perfect solution to the university’s limited athletic facilities: a seemingly underused community park that could house a multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art sportsplex.

In his office, Fisher holds oversized renderings of Belmont’s dreamy sports park above his shoulders and smiles. Complete with fountain-laden walking paths, pristine landscaping and brick-lined stadiums worthy of NCAA Division I play, the picture-book renderings show a glisteningly flawless Rose Park.

He wants Belmont to invest $6.8 million to upgrade the park’s existing baseball and softball fields and to construct a new soccer field, track, rest rooms, locker rooms and concessions. In return, he has asked the Metropolitan Board of Parks and Recreation to allow Belmont’s sports teams to use the park’s facilities. In January 2006, the board agreed to explore the partnership with Belmont and in February asked Belmont to develop a contract for usage. “I’ve believed from the beginning this is a win-win deal,” Fisher says.

But not so fast. Many Edgehill residents would rather see the park rust and rot away than share it with Fisher and his Belmont crew. While they’ve raised concerns about everything from increased traffic and parking difficulties to noise, it’s the fear of a complete Belmont takeover of the park—and the community—that’s got residents riled. Given the neighborhood’s historic struggles with big universities (with even bigger plans to buy up homes and build on top of them), the neighborhood’s anxiety is not entirely unfounded.

Still, the overwhelming—and at times, vehemently emotional—opposition has caught Belmont officials off guard. A bit dumbfounded and admittedly reeling in his own naïveté, Fisher says he’s surprised that he hasn’t been able to convey his grand vision for the park more effectively. “I’m not sure why it’s bad for the community,” he says. But as he stands smiling in front of the technicolor park renderings, now poised in a pile against the wall, he returns to talk about artificial turf, stadium seating and such. And you sense he has no idea that many of his Edgehill neighbors think the perfect park is one without him in it.

Edgehill is a predominantly black neighborhood where more than one-third of residents are living in poverty, according to one neighborhood association. Over the years, the neighborhood has endured white flight, an ever-encroaching Music Row and Belmont University’s buyout and demolition of Edgehill homes for its expansion in the ’50s. The burns inflicted by gentrification and urban renewal are still exposed and oozing. To many, any word that Belmont could be moving into the neighborhood park is just another strike of the match.

In the densely populated neighborhood, a smattering of homes, along with Rose Park Magnet Middle School and Carter-Lawrence Elementary Magnet, couch the community park so closely on all sides that you could stand on the park’s perimeter and hit them with a rock, or for that matter, a wayward foul ball. Residents such as Arlene Lane, who has worked with the Organized Neighbors of Edgehill (ONE) since 1969, describe the park as one of the neighborhood’s few amenities.

Lane is frail and has the demeanor of a patient schoolteacher. But when she talks about her fight to keep Belmont out of Rose Park, she’s flustered to the point of shrill. “Can you imagine being in the position where every single thing that you have—no matter what it is—you have to fight for…whether it’s grocery stores, whether it’s parks, whether it’s schools,” she says, her cheeks and neck flushing. “Every single day is a fight, and it’s a fight for the people who have the least amount of resources to be able to fight against it and win.” She exhales, drops her shoulders and sighs. “It’s frustrating.”

For almost a year, Lane has toted around a hefty tupperware box filled with various documents, ONE letters addressed to Metro parks officials and folders bearing homemade stickers that read “Edgehill Community OPPOSES Belmont Proposal to Revamp Rose Park.”

In the park’s potholed parking lot, she climbs into the backseat of her beat-up car, pulls out a few papers from among the tupperware trappings regarding ONE’s latest fight, and starts in with a well-rehearsed list of problems with Belmont’s plan. “It’s just another example of how more and more things are being taken away from the indigenous population of Edgehill,” she says. “There are many, many parks across the system—many much bigger parks than Rose Park. Belmont University doesn’t have to come to Rose Park.”