MacGregor Park was one of the last places my father wanted to visit before he died in 2020.
He worked far too much to ever take time to enjoy the park, but it was the center of my childhood summers when my brother and I learned to play tennis. We watched the “big kids,” like Zina Garrison and Lori McNeil, dominate the court long before they went on to become national champions and play at Wimbledon.
Neighborhood kids like us carried our heavy wooden racquets to the park each morning to play all day. Then we returned home, sweaty and a bit more boastful about our tennis skills.
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MacGregor Park holds such memories that anchor the surrounding Black communities and those across the city. I hope the $54 million renovation plan for MacGregor Park, led by a $27 million gift from the Kinder Foundation, will keep those memories and the park’s robust history a part of the vision for the 65-acre urban green space. The project is expected to start in 2025 and be completed in about five years.
Park renovations of this scale can be bittersweet for a community that is often neglected when it comes to green space.
Teddy McDavid, Board Chair of Friends of MacGregor Park, speaks about the five-year renovations to park during a press conference on Thursday, Dec. 28, 2023 in Houston.
Craig Pirrong, top and Timothy Russell (aka Guila) hit the ball around at the Homer Ford Tennis Center courts at MacGregor Park on Monday, Dec. 11, 2023 in Houston.
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Yes, it’s an incredible gift that MacGregor Park will have such a monumental renovation since the park has needed major upgrades for decades, and the city has not had sufficient funding to provide needed maintenance. But for those who have used the park for a generation, the question often is, “Why does gentrification need to be in motion for our park facilities and green spaces to get better?”
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Look at the growth around MacGregor Park. In 2022, the University of Houston opened its $90 million Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine nearby, and townhome developments have popped up along the park’s edge.
Social equity through parks is not a new concept. The idea is that underserved communities have as much equal right to access quality parks and green spaces as more advantaged populations.
Just because there isn’t a locked gate around a park or a public green space does not mean that it is accessible. The establishment of new parks and park developments in historically underserved neighborhoods can lead to increases in housing prices and the displacement of low-income people of color, according to a joint report report by the University of Utah and the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
The report encourages solutions such as implementing anti-displacement strategies at the early stages of park planning, forming collaborations with housing advocates and combining affordable housing efforts with initiatives to create better-paying jobs for area residents.
Research also shows that park improvements and gentrification are often conjoined. Although MacGregor Park is situated between lower-income and higher-income historically Black communities, the park still has been sorely overlooked in the city's green space development. An upgraded MacGregor Park should be where longtime residents feel welcomed and know that the park is as much for them as it is for those moving into the area.
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For decades, the park has been where mostly Black families held picnics and celebrated high-school graduations, where community organizations hosted events and friends gathered to play dominoes. It’s also been the center of sports activities. The covered basketball court was where members of the University of Houston’s famed Phi Slama Jamma team played in the 1980s, and the baseball diamonds are still used by Texas Southern University. The aquatics center is where many children learn to swim or enjoy pool time on hot summer days.
Native Houstonian and Wimbledon champion Zina Garrison speaks about playing and using the MacGregor Park facility when she was young, as well as providing facility and programs to children, during a press conference for the five-year renovations to the park on Thursday, Dec. 28, 2023 in Houston.
Then there is the tennis center, which was renamed the Homer Ford Tennis Center in 1983 in memory of the 19-year Houston city councilman who was an avid tennis player. Ford helped secure federal funds to revamp the tennis center and died of a heart attack in 1983 at age 61.
“MacGregor Park was the center of people coming together,” said Garrison, who now serves as the youth program sports manager for the Houston Parks and Recreation Department. “I learned a lot of life lessons at the tennis center.”
As a child, Garrison watched her brother’s baseball practices for the Texas Southern University at the park’s ball field. She was about 10 when she met coach John Wilkerson, who headed the park’s tennis program and wanted to expose more Black children to the sport. He had an eye for noticing talent like Garrison.
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Garrison said she was picked out of 100 kids to participate in a tennis clinic with Arthur Ashe, the only Black man to win the singles title at Wimbledon, and was immediately hooked to the sport. She regularly rode a city bus from her Sunnyside Gardens neighborhood to the park to play under Wilkerson’s tutelage.
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There was no walking/jogging trail then, but Wilkerson insisted his students do laps around the park and the bayou for conditioning and discipline.
“I was always questioning why we had to do something and had something to say, so I had to run the park and the bayou a lot,” Garrison said.
The tennis center will be relocated just east of its current location, according to a recent Chronicle story. Garrison is fighting to keep the ZGA Community Garden, which was planted and painted by 50 Houston children.
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“I’m so excited about the plans for MacGregor Park, but I was one of those constantly reminding people that we can’t take away the history of this park and what it means for our community,” Garrison said.
After many years away from the sport, I’m back playing tennis at MacGregor Park, and my kids are taking lessons there. We’ve walked the trail and dipped into the swimming pool.
As the landscape around the park continues to change, the feeling of community is still there.
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