Efforts are growing to rename a Pittsfield park after influential community leaders.Pitt Park sits on the West Side of Pittsfield and is home to numerous summer programs and events throughout the year. Now an effort to rename the area after Rev. Willard Durant and his wife Rosemary is making its way through city government. Eddie Taylor, an active member of the community’s youth programming initiatives, is leading the charge. Taylor says the Durants influenced generations of city kids.”
“My mother, as a single mother working two jobs, would be able to drop me and my sister off at the Christian Center knowing that we would be fed, taken care of, taken to the lake to go swimming, or to Riverside Park or whatever the case may be and know that her children were safe and in good hands in their surrogate community parents,” Taylor said.
The Durants directed the Christian Center for 25 years. Willard was a reverend at the neighboring Price Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church and served as a chaplain at the Solider On veterans housing area. Rosemary died in 2010. Willard died in 2013. Taylor says renaming Pitt Park in honor of the Durants is a tribute to the West Side’s past.
“It started off as an Italian American neighborhood, migrated into a Polish and Irish American neighborhood, migrated into an African American neighborhood and a Jewish community,” Taylor described. “You name it, everybody lived there on the West Side. I think that it is something that should be celebrated. And in doing so I wanted to reestablish that intrinsic value and who better to do represent the universality of our community than the matriarch and patriarch of our community, which was the Durants.”
Pitt Park is named after William Pitt. The British politician is also the namesake for the city itself, according to Mayor Dan Bianchi.
“He never stepped foot in Pittsfield, he never stepped foot in the New World, but he was very supportive of the colonies being independent from Great Britain,” said Bianchi.
That said, Bianchi is in support of renaming the park after the Durants.
“The Durants were just absolutely wonderful people,” Bianchi said. “Reverend Durant was great. His wife was tremendous. She was just a wonderful human being and a great part of our community. And the Durants lived right next door to Pitt Park.”
The Pittsfield City Council unanimously supported the name change in referring the matter to the Parks Commission. Majority support from the commission is needed for a name change. The commission meets Tuesday.
The West Side was the scene of a deadly shooting on July 4th and has struggled with poverty rates higher than the city average. Taylor is hopeful renaming the park to celebrate the Durants and what they stood for will foster change for those in the neighborhood now and in the future.
“It’s about reminding these kids that are coming up right now that ‘You come from something worthy,’” Taylor said. “Meaning that you, yourself are worthy. Meaning that this community which has been completely stagnant and depressed due to economic depressions from the dilapidation of GE to the drug era of the 80s, this is still a community that is coming out of suffering. People keep looking to us as a community to be progressive and take all these steps forward, but you can’t take a step forward until you have a foundation to stand on to begin with. So this I’m hoping is symbolic as well as a physical place for us to galvanize this concept of it takes a village to raise these children.”
Click here to learn more about the effort to rename Pitt Park in honor of the Durants.
