During the pandemic, more and more people set up their tents on this space, where they were unlikely to be hassled. Meditate on what it means to put your home directly next to a highway, which is loud at best and at times, dangerous, with debris flung from and out of speeding cars.

One day the machinery arrived, parking mere feet away from the tents set up in Pope Park, on the land created when the Park River was entombed. There were no signs affixed to fences announcing public hearings for the work. There was nothing to describe what was even being done. I think of how there is a sign on the Flatbush Avenue bridge over the Park River announcing a public hearing in May (Wetlands & Watercourses). I think of how people were fully notified before the current project in Bushnell Park. What is the loophole that allows for people to be relocated without so much as posted signs?

Area below highway where homeless were cleared

It’s a head scratcher.

The area below the highway — between Parkville Market and its overflow parking lot — used by only one or two people, had become an objectively unhealthy mess. A commonsense response would be to send out a team to clean it and to add a few trash barrels, as there currently are none in the area.

Instead, what happened was a partial cleaning and the erection of an enormous fence — because apparently it’s easier to keep people out than to address the social problems that put them there in the first place.

As for the field, it’s hard to know how it would be legal to erect a fence that blocks people from using public land. Technically, the land is attached to the highway department, but I would argue against this sham, the one that allowed a highway to be constructed through Pope Park in the first place. How do you stake claim to the banks of a river, even a buried one? How is that ever anything but public land? If the State owns it, then it remains public land, yes? Even if they want to pretend it can be for only limited use, only for people who can afford cars, it belongs to all of us. Maybe not legally, but morally, and that’s all that counts.

There is nothing obvious that announces the property boundary. Sure, there has been some fencing, but we know that the Park River was partially fenced off (again, how was this permitted?!) and there is no reason to believe it exists for reasons beyond keeping kids from plunking themselves into the river.

Regardless of who is in possession of this parcel, the whole exercise leaves a rotten taste.