Winds Howling

Clinton Township has officially greenlit a new park, called Unity Park, which has its origins in local controversy over Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day. The Board of Trustees unanimously approved the plans at their meeting on Monday.

“The point of this park was to say, enough of the divisiveness. We’re all immigrants. We’re all Americans,” said the developer behind it, Dominic F. Moceri. “We need to unite and be one, and this park is really here to celebrate that.”

The idea for the park goes back to 2022, when the township replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day on its own calendar. Its board meetings were relatively rowdy for a couple weeks, with lots of public comment from self-declared Italian Americans, until eventually they restored Columbus Day and moved Indigenous Peoples Day up a couple of months. Shortly before that vote, a big local developer, Dominic J. Moceri, uncle of the one mentioned above, announced this park for the first time. For more about all the drama, read my previous post.

On one level, it’s hard to argue with the plan, which consists of some brick pathways and a sculpture. (The base has seven sides, representing the seven continents; the protruding circle is sort of a telescope through which you’re seeing a sail; the five blue orbs are the five oceans). The site is currently a grass field that was otherwise approved to hold townhomes. A park is a park.

But if you honestly wanted to bridge the two sides of this particular “division,” as the developers have repeatedly said, I’m skeptical that a park that’s really only about “exploration” and “discovery” is a thoughtful way of doing so.

We’ve been told the park will offer historical information about explorers, but hardly anything has been said about how it will present what is presumably the “other side” of the culture war implied by the name “Unity Park.” What about Native Americans? Back in 2022 the elder Moceri mentioned Native American iconography being part of the park’s logo, at least, but that logo hasn’t been shown at any meeting this year, and in the first place its design was, hilariously, one of Columbus’ ships, the Santa Maria, at sea. When a board member asked him if the park would mention anything about slavery, he ambiguously responded, “If they’re Americans, they’ll be included. If they’re guests, they’ll be included,” and then launched into a history lesson about how Africans did slavery, too. The park is practically in the front yard of the Italian American Cultural Society, and it was originally presented with the alternate name of “Parco Unita.” So I remain unconvinced that it’s much more than a venting of grievances dressed up as a grand community gesture, for which the Moceris have already received multiple rounds of obsequious public gratitude from township officials.

There’s something defensive and insecure to me about this park, as it’s been proposed. What “division” actually exists here? Why does this short-lived, slightly myopic controversy need to be implicitly dredged up with a name like “Unity Park” in the first place? It’s already four years old and getting older all the time. Even Township Supervisor Paul Gieleghem seemed to want to move on: “We don’t need to revisit that,” he said as the younger Moceri started to dive into the backstory before the vote on Monday.