Before Northmont Park Was Beautified, the Space (and Drainage) Went South

On a cool weekday morning, Kelly Samuels and Reece Proppe were taking their two dogs for a walk through Northmont Park on Severin Drive.

The forecast was for hotter weather later in the day, so an early stroll among the park’s many shady spots gave Otis and Sweetpea a chance to get their canine carousing in without too much panting. Reece, 9, could also work off a little energy on the playground.

For Samuels, the park has been part of her life for as long as she can remember.

She lives in a house near the park that once was owned by her grandmother, so she’s been coming here “years before he was even born,” she says, motioning to Reece.

“Probably 30 years,” she says. “Since I was about 4, I guess. It’s much nicer now.”

She takes regular walks through the park with her dogs, and her older children also use it, too. She has one son, 15, who likes to spend time sitting on the grass and playing his guitar.

The park has evolved in a good way, though, from her youth.

“There used to be a reservoir here. … And some shady characters,” she says.

For the most part, those characters are gone now, and Northmont is a quiet, out-of-the-way neighborhood spot that would be easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it.

It’s just over five acres of land, much of it a grassy field in a hollow below an elevated, uphill playground with a walking path around the perimeter. The northeast La Mesa park is just behind the Central Park apartment complex on Amaya Drive.

A wet spot

Actually, there was no reservoir at Northmont. Officially, that is. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any water.

In the years between 1967—when the city bought the land for a park —and 1988, when work on the current park was completed, the site often held a small pond of standing water in a park that had a different configuration.

Yvonne Garrett, La Mesa’s assistant city manager and director of community services, said that when the adjacent housing complex was being developed in 1983 it was decided to add a drainage system to the site.

“There was apparently standing water there, but no actual reservoir,”  Garrett says. “There was a low point and water gathered in the area.”

Today, Samuels says there’s still a problem during the wet season, with some of the low areas of the park getting “squishy.”

The park configuration changed from a longer, narrower layout—covering areas where the housing complex now exists—to a more squarish design. In addition, work was done to raise the level of the park—even its lowlands are higher than they were before 1983.

Unless you’d seen it as Samuels did years ago, however, there’s no evidence that Northmont ever looked anything but the way it does now.

The park features a big, open grassy area, with lots of trees around the perimeter, a parking lot and play area on higher ground, picnic tables with grills, restrooms, a walking path and some exercise boards.

Below the parking lot is a group of seven palm trees; pines take up other spots.

And nearby is a plaque at the base of a small tree called “The Freedom Tree,” dedicated to Navy Cmdr. Harley Hall—a former Blue Angels leader and the last MIA pilot of the Vietnam war—who was shot down over North Vietnam in 1973. “For CDR Harley Hall and all prisoners of war,” the plaque reads.

The park now is mostly quiet, and rarely busy, except for weekends, holidays, camps or at certain points in the afternoon when students from the nearby Mount Helix Academy use it for outings and physical education.

“It’s more a park for the neighbors and surrounding area,” Garrett says.

Improvements coming

The park took its current form in 1988 but is scheduled for a face-lift in the next year or two, Garrett says.

There are plans to “spruce up” the park with a shade area—at a spot still to be determined—and to redo the playground with new equipment (covered by a shade structure).

Garrett says improvements will be funded through private money raised through the La Mesa Park and Recreation Foundation, similar to how funds were raised to improve the playground at Jackson Park. Grossmont Center is sponsoring the work.

It will be one more step forward for the park that Samuels remembers as pretty raw in her younger days, something that had a playground and the small pond, but wasn’t as well-groomed as it is today.

As she spoke, in fact, a group of workers clad in orange vests was busy combing the park, picking up trash and cleaning the restrooms.

Samuels remembers being warned to be careful about visiting the park when she was young. Now she says she mostly sees people walking their dogs, relaxing on the grass, playing soccer or Frisbee and flying kites.

At Easter, Reece says, the park “is packed” with egg hunters, and sometimes there are bands.

Says Samuels: “It’s much nicer now.”