Bond Hill Playground: An Introduction & A Call to Action

by Keloni Parks

Keloni Parks is the inaugural guest columnist for The Bond Hill Journal. Keloni is a librarian interested in exploring the past to inform the future. She takes a special interest in the history of our city and Bond Hill. I am grateful she chose to share this series about the history, challenges and potential of Bond Hill Playground, a place full of potential but currently underutilized and neglected. For a community of 6,000 Bond Hill has scant public greenspace and it is time to understand, appreciate and reactivate the spaces in our community. I hope this series sparks thinking, dialogue and progress towards better days for this park. – Alexis Liu, Editor

From Washington Park in Over the Rhine to Central Park in Forest Park, activities are taking place at parks throughout Hamilton County, but some parks in the county aren’t as lucky. One of those unlucky parks is Bond Hill Playground, a rather large, but somewhat hidden park in the Cincinnati neighborhood of Bond Hill. However, this park wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to remain this way.

Although it’s  close to Reading Road, access to the park is blocked by buildings on Reading Road, making it only accessible from Yarmouth Avenue, Franklin Avenue, and the Church of the Resurrection’s parking lot coming from California or Carolina Avenue.

A Cincinnati Recreation Commission Park, it has two baseball fields, a basketball court, a swimming pool, four tennis courts, and park equipment with two swing sets, and other amusements. It also has some barbeque grills, water fountains, and a parking lot with an entrance that is unfortunately roped off to presumably deter crime.

Much of the parks’ amenities are visibly worn or missing. There are only two tennis nets out of four, two bucket swings out of four, and two sling swings out of four. Weeds have grown through the sand on both of the baseball fields. The asphalt path from the tennis courts to Franklin Avenue has nearly disappeared, and the tennis courts don’t look like they’ve been painted in years. However, there have been recent improvements. The basketball court has been repaved, with a new fence placed around it, but much work is needed to make the park a comfortable retreat for the Bond Hill community.

Dedicated  in 1935, the playground was created through a partnership between the Cincinnati Recreation Commision, the Bond Hill Welfare Association, City Council, and the Hamilton County Welfare Department. The park was originally called Berling Field for either Gerhard Harry Berling, a local dairyman and philanthropist, or the Berling family who donated the land for the playground. In 1995, the playground was named Shane C. Curry Memorial Fields to honor Shane Curry, a local football star from Bond Hill who was killed in 1992.

Over the years, the playground has hosted numerous enriching events such as tennis lessons, baseball games, mobile art and history programs, and the Cincinnati Neighborhood Games, but there have been tragedies too, such as the shooting death of eighteen year old Leron Lovett in 2016.

Like many parks in the county, it has so much potential and all we have to do is look at its past to prove it. The articles in this series will discuss just that, and explore ideas for its future. ✢