May 10, 2006
By Lucille Davie
THE children's pond in the Yeoville park will disappear in the coming months – but Yeoville residents will get much more in return.
Seipati More, the development manager with the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA), says the revamp of the park is under way, and is expected to be completed by 20 July. There are several reasons why the pond will go, she adds.
Firstly, it is risky for children, who might not always be supervised. Secondly, local taxi drivers dip buckets into the water for washing their vehicles and, most importantly, it is hoped that children will instead use the nearby Yeoville swimming pool, where, pending funding, they can be formally taught to swim.
The Yeoville park will get new paving and new lighting
The park, bordered by Fortesque, Raleigh and Kenmere roads and Yeo Street, was laid out as Yeoville's open space when the suburb was created in 1890. It was originally named after Thomas Yeo Sherwell, who gave the suburb his middle name, according to Anna Smith in Johannesburg Street Names. The streets were named after his family and friends, or places Sherwell knew.
This cosmopolitan suburb, with residents from Congo, Nigeria, Kenya and Pakistan living alongside South Africans, has a colourful, Bohemian history –struggle stalwarts like Joe Slovo and Albie Sachs have lived here and Slovo was recently acknowledged when the busy Harrow Road was renamed Joe Slovo Drive.
The park was originally much larger, with the swimming pool positioned in the north-eastern corner and tennis courts in the south-eastern corner. In recent years, however, the city has built a pre-school and a community hall offering sewing, information technology and cooking classes, around the pool.
More says plans include creating a new identity for the park as Yeoville's civic precinct, with the police station, at present in a house on Kenmere Road, moving to the park's southern edge, to a building that is still to be built.
Eventually, the old police station will be turned into a community centre, with an HIV office, a counselling centre, a clinic and an information technology office. The library, two blocks further east, will be moved to Raleigh Road, opposite the swimming pool, and in the north-western corner tiered seating will be constructed for an events arena. The old library building will be used as a craft centre.
The children's play area will be revamped and new paving and lighting will give the park a much-needed lift. The tennis courts will be converted into multi-use courts.
In 2004 a Yeoville resident, Gabrielle Ozynski, revamped the swimming pool entrance with attractive mosaic. Now she hopes to get involved in the park revamp, brightening the play area with mosaic.
Work on revamping the park has been given to a local company that will use local workers first, before recruiting labour from elsewhere, a condition of the tender.
But, says More, the changes run deeper. With an eye on a future City Improvement District (CID), it is hoped that businesses will be drawn into the broader revamp of Yeoville. The largely residential suburb, with its busy Raleigh Road-Rockey Street lined with restaurants and small businesses, is badly in need of an upgrade.
More says the plan is to diversify the businesses further, bringing in Asian business people and creating a suburb with an African theme.
"Getting CID status is not easy but we hope to have businesses running the area by the end of June," she says. This means having uniformed guards on the streets and getting owners to take better care of their buildings, including checking the desirability of their tenants.
Business owners, however, have not always responded positively to the CID concept, saying that they already pay rates and taxes and should not have to make another investment in their suburb. More counters this by saying that the City cannot do it all on its own. "The City needs help."
The project, involving the Inner City Task Team, will involve all arms of the City's maintenance and law enforcement agencies, from Metro Police down to Pikitup. More says phase two will involve installing CCTV cameras, once funding is available, monitored from the police station in the park.
The revamp, overseen by the JDA, is expected to cost R4-million.
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