May 8, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Quita Horan leaves Pastorius Park post
by Jennifer Katz

After 20 years at the helm of the successful Friends of Pastorius Park, Quita Woodward Horan is stepping down to make room for a new generation of park enthusiasts.

Horan, 74, who founded the Friends group with other neighbors of the park, grew up near the park and is glad to be handing the baton to a new generation.

“I sensed that I didn’t have the energy for new projects,” she said. “I wanted to make room for new people, new ideas.”

In 1986, Horan and Norton Kent of the Chestnut Hill Community Association learned that the Pew Foundation was offering matching grant money for park improvements. Pastorious Park, originally finished in the 1930s, had been long neglected. By the 1980s, trees were overgrown with dead branches and wood littered the park. The benches were broken and carelessly strewn throughout the park. A road once used by the park police lay untouched and unused. The pond was leaking.

When Kent mentioned the Pew grant, Horan knew it was an opportunity to have an impact on the park she had always loved as a little girl.

“Growing up, I lived on the edge and always wondered why we couldn’t do more to help out,” Horan said.

With the Pew information in hand, Kent and Horan managed to secure a matching grant from the CHCA. Although the grant was awarded, it wasn’t until one of the new near neighbors, John Schmidt, made a little known plan very public on Christmas Eve the same year.

“He put flyers on all the cars saying did we know that they were going to take the cinder foot paths and make them black top macadam, and add flood lights,” she remembered.

Horan arranged a meeting with Fred Peck, the landscape architect who designed the park, Ernesta Ballard and Pete Hoskins from the Fairmount Park Commission and the near neighbors to protest the plans.

“We got nowhere with them,” she said of the meeting.

With the money sitting idly by and Fairmount Park decidedly indifferent to the neighbors’ wishes, Horan took her case to then Local editor Marie Jones.

“I’d always heard that Marie Jones was a savior of souls,” she said.

The Local covered the story of how the park was going to change and the community began holding meetings at the Water Tower Recreation Center to discuss plans for the park.

“Ernesta came to every meeting and they finally decided that if we were so anxious to have the park the way we wanted it, we could just take it over,” Horan said.

Once a group formed and officially began the Friends of Pastorius Park, lining the kitty with the funds from Pew and the CHCA, they approached landscape architect Rob Fleming who drew up a plan for improving the park.

The plan included relining the pond, removing dead trees and wood, removing the road and repairing and moving the benches to more desirable locales so that patrons could enjoy the park’s attributes.

“We took folding chairs and sat in different places to try them out as a place you’d want to sit, under trees, with a view,” Fleming recalled of the early days working with Horan.

Before long the group knocked off everything on Fleming’s list “bit-by-bit.”

These days, Horan said, the real work is with maintenance, which the group handles, and fundraising, which is done through an annual campaign.

For Horan, however, the time has come to move into a new role in her stewardship of the park. As new president Paul Bugos takes the reins (he was officially elected at the group’s monthly meeting in April), Horan and her cronies are creating an advisory council to the Friends.

“It’s for the older people in their 70s to sit on with no vote, but who remember what the park was meant for and can advise the new leadership,” she explained.

The point, Horan said, is to keep Pastorius a passive park, to maintain its bucolic look and meditative spirit.

“Lloyd Wells [former president of the CHCA] always said the idea was to have Pastorius as a passive park and the Water Tower as an athletic park so that there would be two different opportunities,” she said.