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Village voices
Obscured by the plan to redevelop Tampa's Central Park Village housing project are the dreams - and the fears - of the people who call it home.
By RODNEY THRASH
Published January 3, 2006
TAMPA - An ambitious redevelopment plan approved by the city would create a 60-acre, master-planned community between downtown and Ybor City: a mix of million-dollar condos, townhomes, inexpensive apartments, cafes and parks.
The community would replace Central Park Village, a decaying, 28-acre public housing project overrun with roaches and rats, drug peddlers and prostitutes. Its residents would move into the new housing or to places nearby.
We talked to Central Park Village residents about the change. For some, the demolition can't come soon enough. But for one young man, losing Central Park means losing home.
- - -
Jamal Gordon does not - and maybe cannot - see what others see. The neglect. The poverty. The ghetto.
He sees a home, his home. He sees the place where he learned the importance of family and friends. He sees the place where he picked up a football for the first time.
He sees himself, the A-B Robinson High School sophomore who loves math, listens to hip-hop music and dreams of studying computer technology at the University of South Florida.
It's hard for Gordon, 15, to imagine anyplace else because he has not lived anywhere else.
He says he could do without the police harassment, but other than that, Central Park Village is "just like a regular neighborhood" with "people who just try to live their life the best way they can."
People like his mom, a cook at Tampa General Hospital.
He's skeptical of plans to redevelop it into something else, something that it is not.
He says the developers, the Central Park Group, are "just doing that to make more money."
He wonders where he and his family will go. There will be space for fewer than 200 of the 1,300 Central Park Village residents in the new development. Those remaining will be given vouchers to move elsewhere, maybe somewhere fancier.
For Gordon, elsewhere isn't home. Home is Central Park Village. And it, he says, is nice enough.
- - -
"What's it like living here in Central Park?"
The Rev. Franklin R. Williams leans back in a maple pew. His brown eyes are penetrating, his expression serious.
"It's devastating, like a cesspool," he says. "Everything goes on over here. Drugs. Prostituting."
He knows what he says sounds harsh. Central Park Village is where his church, Paradise Missionary Baptist, is located. For 25 years, it was also his home. It was where he raised his six children, a Harvard graduate among them.
Young men today don't have dreams, says Williams, 67. "You don't find kids coming out of Central Park going to college. You might find one or two, but the majority of them are just drifting, letting time go by."
He tries to help out as much as he can. He opens the doors to his church, though these days, few people come through them. At one time, he bought groceries for some of neighborhood's neediest. He stopped when one of the residents told him food was being bartered for drugs.
He had to install burglar bars on the church. People have broken in too many times to count.
He prays that Central Park Village is torn down and rebuilt, even if that means his church has to go.
"They need . . . new vision, people that want to progress, want to see things better, want to be able to raise their children in a better environment. If you get people of a mixed mentality, then they can influence the people and make them want to do better."
As he sees it, "you're not living in Central Park. You're just existing."
- - -
Ruth Dewberry fell on her knees.
"Why me, Lord?" she cried. "Why am I here?"
Dewberry didn't understand how she, at 53, could have fallen so far. This was lower than low, unfair almost.
She used to be afraid of Central Park Village. Just driving past the place on the way to her nursing job gave her the creeps. Suddenly, she was living there.
"You call it the ghetto," Dewberry, now 56, says. "I call it poverty. Central Park is poverty."
She has lived better. She used to work as a certified nursing assistant. She used to live in an apartment in Temple Terrace. She used to have peace and quiet.
She fell down a flight of stairs 31/2 years ago and it was as if everything around her came tumbling down, too. She couldn't work anymore. And the monthly disability she received hardly covered rent.
She had never lived in public housing, but it was about all she could afford. She applied for Section 8.
She cried, she says, for months.
"No one should have to live in conditions that I've seen and lived in," she says. "Mold and mildew, the roaches, the rats, the drugs. I didn't even know people lived like this."
She couldn't understand why they weren't demanding more, why they didn't want anything out of life.
"No get up and go," she says of the residents. "Generation after generation after generation."
If they were not going to speak up for themselves, Dewberry decided she was going to do it for them. She's vice president of the Central Park Village Residents Council.
"The Lord had me here on a mission: to help (the residents) achieve a better quality of life," she says.
Now that redevelopment plans have been unveiled, she says her mission is complete.
"I know (the Lord) has something better in store for me," she says, "and I'm ready to accept."
- - -
"If you dream," Mary Williams, 63, says, "your dream is to get out. You dream of the day when you're saying goodbye."
Lately, that has been Williams' fantasy. For herself and the two teenage granddaughters she raises.
"I had such a hard time with my 16-year-old who wanted to do what everybody else was doing," she says. "So many of her friends have had babies. It's an environment that they no longer need."
She didn't want them to live in a place like this. She used to stay with her daughter in a Port Tampa apartment, but lost the place when her daughter was transferred to Atlanta. Williams bounced from one homeless shelter to another before landing at Central Park.
"Public housing, I think, is the sorriest place you could live," she says. "It's a handicap. There are persons here with no goals, no dreams, no ambition, no self-esteem, nowhere else to go."
She looks at the Oaks at Riverview in Seminole Heights and other blighted areas that have been made over and wonders whether Central Park Village will look like that when the first units open in 2008.
"I was so surprised at how it looked," she says. "So brand new, so beautiful. Trees, pools, community centers. It was like you went out of town and you saw another city."
Williams, who is president of the residents council, says she probably won't be around to see it. Once demolition begins, she says she plans to return to her native California to be closer to family.
She has lived in Central Park Village for six years and that, she says, is too long.
- - -
She warns a reporter that her English is broken.
But Misna Vazquez's language is fluid when she talks about Central Park Village.
"I need to get out," she says.
A year ago, Vazquez moved into her three-bedroom apartment on N Nebraska Avenue.
"When you don't have nothing," she says, "when you don't have a home, when you don't have a family, take it, shut up and that's it. I needed a place for my kids."
Central Park Village doesn't feel like much of a home, she says.
Somedays, she awakens to find strangers sleeping on her porch. And that's just the start. "Problems with drugs. Problems with police. Problems with my neighbors. Problems with the office because they don't like people who are Spanish."
This isn't the life Vazquez wanted for herself and her two children. She came to Tampa from Puerto Rico in 1999.
"For opportunity," she says.
When Vazquez was a little girl, she dreamed that she'd have a nice house, a nice car and a good job. She wanted to be a translator.
At 25, she hasn't fulfilled any of those dreams and she's not sure she ever will. But she is sure of one thing.
"I don't want to be on Nebraska anymore," she says.
Not even after Central Park Village is rebuilt. Nicer buildings mean nothing, she says, if the same people move back in.
"Same things," Vazquez says, "same problems."
Rodney Thrash can be reached at 727 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com
[Last modified January 2, 2006, 16:03:01]
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Jamal Gordon has lived in Central Park Village north of downtown Tampa all of his 15 years. He wonders where he and his family will go. The planned development will have space for fewer than 200 of the 1,300 current residents. At top, Central Park Village is a 28-acre public housing project overrun by crime and decay.
