A park is at the heart of the Moody Park neighbourhood.
Bounded by 10th and Sixth avenues and 12th and Sixth streets, the Moody Park neighbourhood is home to a mix of new and heritage homes, retail in the Uptown and 12th Street areas, Massey Theatre, New Westminster Secondary School, Lord Kelvin Elementary and Moody Park Arena. A recreational hub, the area includes the skateboard park and Mercer Stadium.
Anchoring it all is Moody Park, a 23.78 acre park that's home to fields, tennis courts, a playground, a spray park, an outdoor swimming pool - as well as the New Westminster Lawn Bowling Club, Century House and the New Westminster Youth Centre.
Moody Park, created by the city in the 1800s, was built to commemorate Colonel Richard Moody, who founded the city with the Royal Engineers.
Through its history, Moody Park has housed an eclectic range of activities, including a shooting range, one of B.C.'s first golf courses, and a cricket green.
The park has not only served the city's recreational needs but also provided a place where soldiers once lined up for inspection at military parades, students practised dances for May Day and community members gathered to enjoy visits from traveling circuses.
Dean Gibson, the city's director of parks, culture and recreation, said the park is an integral component of the Moody Park neighbourhood.
While the Moody Park neighbourhood features many single-family homes including a number of Craftsman bungalows), the adjacent Brow of the Hill neighbourhood is home to many apartments.
"The fact that there are so many of those buildings around here that were built in the 1940s, 50s and 60s that really were built with very little consideration to doing anything other than housing bodies," he said. "This park is the front yard, the back yard, the playground for everybody that lives within those particular buildings."
In addition to attracting park users from an array of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, another unique feature of the park is that it's home to the city's seniors and youth centres.
"You take that (cultural) aspect of it, and you take the fact that some of the facilities we have here in the park - Century House and the youth centre - are drawing in different generations, you kind of have this little microcosm
about all the great things about New Westminster happening right within the park itself, whereas at some of our other parks there might be a predisposition towards young families with kids but you never see an older population, or some of our parks that are more passive you might tend to only see older adults and never any kids," Gibson says.
"Well you get everything here, absolutely everything from the preschoolers playing the programs, to older adults over at the lawn bowling club to the 15-and 16-year-olds who are attempting to find their way through life, navigating over to the youth centre."
Creating intergenerational opportunities is one of the city's priorities, Gibson said.
"Moody Park is like a little petri dish for our community, where all of these neat things get to come together. I think it's a super positive place."
The community sentiment around Moody Park was never more evident than when the city announced in 2006 the outdoor pool had deteriorated and they wouldn't be repairing and reopening the facility. The city had a change of heart after the community protested - loudly.
"While I think that a lot of those same issues might have come up regardless of where that pool was, I think they were amplified because that pool was located in Moody Park itself," Gibson reflects. "One of the things that particularly an outdoor pool becomes is it is kind of a vacation destination for a segment of children and youth that are there. They are the regulars. They are there every day. It's their routine. ... I think the community recognized particularly with the outdoor pool, the value in having that there as opposed to having these kids left to their own devices to wander the streets and find their own activity, be that good or bad."
Community organizations, including Rotary and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, have taken an active role in the fundraising for amenities in the park through the years.
The Kiwanis Club developed a clubhouse in the park in 1938 that included locker rooms and showers for people using the playgrounds and sports fields.
(That building is now home to the parks, culture and recreation offices.) A few years later, the Kiwanis Club raised $45,000 and built the former Kiwanis Pool. The city's website notes that when the pool opened on June 30, 1949, more than 2,000 people attended the grand opening that featured a parade of Kiwanis Club members in old-fashioned bathing suits and a Water Follies of 1949 event that included performances by clowns, precision squads and Olympic swimmers.
In the years to come, playing fields, lawn bowling greens and baseball fields were added to the park's amenities. Baseball has been a popular spectator sport in the park through the decades, with one of the ball diamonds being renamed Justin Morneau Field in 2008, after the New Westminster native who went on to be a MVP in the American League.
Princess Margaret opened Century House in Moody Park on July 23, 1958. Although seniors centres were a novel concept at the time, the centre has become a vital asset to the community.
In September 2010, the city opened the $2.75 million New Westminster Youth Centre at the rear of Century House.
Vance McFadyen, who has lived in the neighbourhood for 27 years, is first vice president of the Century House Association. He also spearheaded a campaign that saw New Westminster win funds to help outfit the youth centre.
"It's a gorgeous setting," he said. "The two facilities being attached is a great bonus for seniors and youth. We do a lot of things together that everybody learns from."
Having completed a master plan for Queen's Park, the city is planning to embark on a similar process for Moody Park in the next couple of years.
The city will engage the community in conversation about what they want park to look like and become in the future.
