Some town-owned land in Greenwich, Conn., has been turned into a Wiffle ball field by teenagers. Neighbors are complaining. Jeff Currivan, 17, shown at bat, said, “They think we’re a cult.”
GREENWICH, Conn.
Vincent Provenzano, 16 years old, experienced his Kevin Costner moment one Sunday afternoon in May after a thrilling day of Wiffle ball in a friend’s backyard. He came home, gazed at a field of weeds, brush and poison ivy in an empty lot off Riverside Lane, turned to his friend Justin Currytto, 17, and proclaimed: “If we build it, they will come.”
After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.
But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.
“People can remember how much fun it was to go out in the woods in the summer, build a fort, do something fun and creative, so there’s something pretty cool in what these kids did, especially at a time kids grow up in such an incredibly structured and stressful environment,” said Lin Lavery, one of three Greenwich selectmen, who inherited Wifflegate while the first selectman, Greenwich’s version of mayor, is on vacation.
“But we have a situation that’s escalated,” Ms. Lavery said. “Neighbors are upset that it’s too close to their property; building has been done on town property; there are issues of traffic and drainage. We’re hoping to come up with a compromise, but there are a lot of issues to address.”
There’s plenty of local history in Wiffle ball (it was invented up the road in Fairfield) and Greenwich land-use disputes (where to start?), but Vincent and Justin say they just wanted a place to play Wiffle ball. They got materials from a friend’s basement plus two big pieces of plywood being thrown away by a Shell station on East Putnam Avenue. They fished pallets out of Dumpsters and spent perhaps $200, mostly on green paint.
But even before they were finished, things began to get complicated. They were told the neighbors had complained, the field was on town-owned land, they needed a permit to put up their field and it would probably have to come down.
This being Greenwich, they decided not to go quietly. They and/or parents alerted the local newspaper and politicians up to Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele of nearby Stamford. Soon they had everyone in town talking about it, with most of them seemingly put off by the notion that even a Wiffle ball field needs to enlist the armies of adult supervision and legalistic oversight.
“BACK before we lost our collective minds and began shrieking with horror at the thought of kids having fun on their own (as in not part of an official league or otherwise organized activity), they used to do things like find a vacant field, turn it into a makeshift diamond and spend glorious hours in the summer sun,” the local newspaper, Greenwich Time, wrote in an editorial in support of the youths on Wednesday.
The regular players, mostly high school boys but including Tara Currivan, 15 (who swings a mean bat and brings lemonade to the field), and Scott Atkinson, 13, seem a little befuddled by the whole thing. “They think we’re a cult,” said Jeff Currivan, 17. “People think we should be home playing ‘Grand Theft Auto.’ ”
And they seem to get the fact that many adults are taken with the idea of kids’ doing something that’s not structured, not organized and not oriented toward improving your SAT scores.
“It’s just old-fashioned fun,” said Vincent Provenzano. “We did it on our own. Maybe people think that’s unusual.”
We’d all like our own Field of Dreams, but it’s worth remembering that Mr. Costner’s was in an Iowa cornfield. And, with all due nostalgia for simpler childhoods in simpler times, it’s possible Greenwich’s Wiffle version — on a lot valued at $1.25 million, according to the Greenwich newspaper — was too good to be true.
The neighbors, one an ultra-endurance athlete who does charity work around the globe, another building a house to accommodate her brother, who uses a wheelchair, turn out to be not that much different from most suburbanites seeing their backyard go from their own to a quasi park full of teenagers from near and far. They say that the land floods and that the area was designated by the town as a drainage area, a function largely undone when the youths stripped away all the greenery and undergrowth. The complaining neighbors want the field closed immediately.
The field had 40 people last weekend for a Wiffle tournament, which is something no one bargained on when they bought their houses.
“I’m all for Wiffle ball and apple pie and baseball and the American flag, but there are plenty of fields in town they can use instead of building something in people’s backyard,” said Liz Pate, who is building a new house behind what’s now home plate. “If I come home at 6 at night after working all day, I want peace and quiet. I can’t have that. I have dozens of people behind my house playing Wiffle ball. If their parents think this is so great, let them play at their house.”
The liability panic is adult nuttiness except when it’s not. It’s a fairly raw issue in Greenwich, where, for instance, a doctor was awarded $6.3 million a few years back when he broke his leg in two places while sledding with his 4-year-old son.
All kids deserve a Huck Finn summer. We perhaps have lost our collective minds about our overscheduled, overstressed young. But, in the end, maybe there was a reason that Kevin Costner built that Field of Dreams in Iowa and not in Greenwich.
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