Keeping the urban ills at bay
SURROUNDED BY some of the communities suffering the most from violence, Franklin Park remains a precious sanctuary within the heart of Boston. The 527-acre park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1885 as a mental and physical refuge for the urban dweller, and still has enormous relevance today.
Undergoing a renaissance over the last five years, Franklin Park has become the summer home for four free youth programs involving more than 1,000 children and adolescents. Fifty teens have summer jobs working in the park. A drop-in sports program three nights a week attracts as many as 70 children each evening. The Elma Lewis Playhouse in the Park twice-weekly concert series attracts audiences of between 400 and 600 people. Participants in newly formed walking groups are beginning to familiarize themselves with the 65-acre "Franklin Park Wilderness," the only mature forest within the city's boundaries.
As city residents and the Parks Department work to attract users to Franklin Park, however, there is a danger that the gun violence and criminal acts besieging parts of the surrounding communities of Mattapan, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain could spill into the park.
Franklin Park plays a vital role in enhancing the health of its surrounding communities. The health statistics of Mattapan, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain reveal extremely vulnerable populations. The neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of violent crime, resulting in injury to victims and perpetrators.
Violence, itself a major cause of lost adolescent and young adult lives, has many more insidious health consequences. Neighborhoods experiencing violence develop a culture of fear with far-reaching health outcomes. Studies show that parents in violent neighborhoods are more likely to keep their children indoors, increasing risks of obesity. Exposure to violence leads to increased risk-taking in teens and feelings of alienation, hopelessness, and impotence in many residents.
Health statistics in the neighborhoods surrounding Franklin Park reflect this culture of fear. The Boston Public Health Commission reported in 2005 that 70 percent of Mattapan residents are overweight, 64 percent are overweight in Dorchester, and 57 percent in Roxbury.
The commission found that 81 percent of Mattapan residents get inadequate exercise, 72 percent of residents in Roxbury, and about 65 percent of residents in Dorchester. Diabetes, a direct result of overweight and inactivity, causes markedly elevated mortality in Mattapan and Roxbury and has been labeled a "quiet epidemic" especially targeting minorities. These communities also suffer from disproportionate substance abuse deaths.
Franklin Park is part of the solution to this poor health and violence. There is evidence that community parks improve health by increasing frequency of exercise, improving air quality, and decreasing stress and mental fatigue.
Franklin Park is becoming what it should be: A beautiful backyard for the communities of Mattapan, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Dorchester and a resource with which to fight the growing health disparities in Boston. However, without a public safety presence, there is a risk that children who participate in the camps and youth crews will not be allowed by their families to return.
Statistically one of the safest places in the city, neighbors nonetheless perceive that Franklin Park is not safe. Preliminary survey work one of us conducted along with neighborhood youth working for the Franklin Park Coalition this summer found that 42 percent of 170 respondents from park neighborhoods cite safety as something that needs to be improved in the park, or as a factor that keeps them away from the park.
Recently, the city installed three security phones, but this is not enough. To keep Franklin Park safe we need the regular presence of a dedicated park ranger who patrols from early afternoon until nightfall. Franklin Park users need the visible reassurance that the park is monitored and kept safe. Before the Municipal Police Department was disbanded last year an officer on bicycle regularly patrolled the park in the afternoons.
Describing his philosophy of urban parks in an 1870 essay, Olmsted wrote, "We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day's work is done, and where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them."
The neighborhoods surrounding Franklin Park stagger under the burdens of violence, obesity, diabetes, and substance abuse. The park should be one of the antidotes to this ill health and stress in the manner Olmsted envisioned.
Dr. Martha Karchere is president of the Franklin Park Coalition. Rebecca Rogers is a second-year Harvard Medical School student. 
