Photo by Erin FredrichsTribune

Tribune

Beatris Moreno, 3, tumbles down a hill as her cousin Rosario Becerra, 2, tries to tumble up the grassy slope at Roosevelt Park. "The parks on the West Side get so packed they (the children) can hardly do anything," said Beatris' mom, Carmen Becerra, who lives on the West Side. "Before, we didn't come here because of all the nasty people. Now it's so clean, and, with all the shade and hills, they can just run."

Norm Bersgma/Tribune file

State Police in riot gear stand guard over two suspects near Roosevelt Park. Rioters had regrouped there after a night of looting and burning Downtown and in areas of the Southeast Heights in June 1971. The fracas started earlier at the park off Coal Avenue Southeast and ended with several hundred arrests and dozens of injuries.

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For too long, Roosevelt Park was the place of drug deals and down-and-outs, a needle park we gave away to those who never deserved such lovely real estate.

Now, though, we get another chance. The park, near Coal Avenue Southeast and I-25, reopened June 18 after nearly three years of a $2.5 million refurbishment and far too many years of thoughtless degradation.

It has been returned to us, our personal Central Park - greener, cleaner, safer (maybe), complete with drinking fountains for dogs, a playground for kids and 13 sloping acres to do park things, which often means doing nothing at all.

Slowly, we are coming back: the father and son setting up a badminton court in a lush valley; the young girls, their dark hair pulled up in high summer swirls, sipping orange drink from a jug and tossing an oversized pink ball; the oversized man in taut gym shorts puffing around the perimeter with a chubby Pekingese chugging behind him; the young boys on the chase for a butterfly, or moth, or something.

It is nice here now. Again.

But there is a tentativeness, a whisper of concern. People's eyes narrow as you approach, worried, perhaps, that the park's makeover may not have scuttled every thug from its boundaries.

It will take time to trust that Roosevelt Park is Roosevelt Park, the one we used to love.

• • • • • • • • •

Some of us can remember the good days, the picnics of cold chicken and warm Shasta under the leafy eclipse of Siberian elms. Dionne Warwick played on a transistor radio, drowning out the incessant whirring of cicadas overhead. Mothers unfurled checkered tablecloths, pulled out the WashÕn Dris. Kids spun like meteors down the grassy slopes, endlessly and, somehow, without nausea.

But slowly, and perhaps predictably, a darker element seeped in. Old Tribune news articles recall a time in 1965, when one neighbor appeared before the City Council to request lighting and a curfew for the park, citing the "general terrorism" there at night.

"I feel safer on any street in Juarez than there," University of New Mexico professor Patrick Lynch told council members.

By 1971, two people had been slain at the park, including a teenager who was shot and killed in a gang clash.

Park patrons complained, albeit politically incorrectly, that Roosevelt was at various times either overrun by hippies, blacks or Hispanics. In 1978, it was Moonies, they groaned, who cluttered the park and nearby neighborhood with guitar cases, sleeping bags and perhaps too many choruses of "Kumbaya."

"The singing," one woman said of them, "can drive you nuts."

Park-goers also had to contend with the herbal haze that wafted through the park every April 20 when hundreds of marijuana users lighted up in defiance of the law.

At least that crowd was too mellow to cause much trouble.

Not so the gathering one sticky afternoon in June 1971 when booze and the pent-up rage of the age exploded into two days of rioting, the likes of which Albuquerque had never seen before or since.

It had been a time of turbulence across the nation. Protests against the Vietnam War, racial strife and police brutality simmered in the streets.

But Albuquerque's riots were sparked by something that seemed, at least on first blush, less political: Someone in the crowd tossed something - a Frisbee, a beer bottle, not everyone agrees - that hit, accidentally or not, an Albuquerque police squad car.

News accounts at the time say the crowd, there for a Sunday afternoon rock concert on June 13, grew agitated after police reacted - some argued overreacted - to the incident and attempted to make arrests.

"Let's get the pigs," someone shouted, and the fight was on.

For two days, Albuquerque burned. When it was over, 38 were hospitalized, 283 were arrested, five squad cars were overturned or burned, and 36 fires were put out. Damage from the riot, most of it occurring in the Downtown area where the rioters had shattered windows and looted stores, was estimated at $3 million.

• • • • • • • • •

Perhaps we love Roosevelt Park, despite it all, because it is just so green here in a city that doesn't do green.

It's hard to imagine that this swath of urban green - replete with acres of fescue and Kentucky bluegrass and about 2,250 elms, umbrella catalpas and bushes - was once just another tumbleweed-strewn arroyo.

Creating the park out of dust became a New Deal project, a monthly $39 paycheck for 275 laborers during the Great Depression.

The work began in winter 1933 and finished in summer 1934. They called it Terrace Park, but renamed it at Gov. Clyde Tingley's behest for his friend and the park's benefactor, President Franklin Roosevelt.

Today, the verdant acreage is maintained with the switch of a button that remotely controls about 3,000 newly installed sprinkler heads to irrigate the park with nonpotable water, city Parks and Recreation Director Jay Hart said.

The process, completed zone by zone, begins each evening and ends by early morning, he said.

"It used to take us days to water the park," he said. "Now, we do it in one day. It's a much more water-conservation-friendly way to do things."

Eventually, Hart says, the newly grown grass will be weaned off so much water.

He says the amount of water and manpower used at Roosevelt has not detracted from the maintenance at any of the other 320 parks across the city.

"This was a very high priority for Mayor Martin Chavez to get done," Hart said. "It's very exciting."

The park reopened, refurbished and regrown is, for now, reclaimed.

Let's keep it that way. This time. Please.