Roosevelt Park - Edison, NJ
N 40° 32.477 W 074° 20.515
18T E 555727 N 4488044
Roosevelt Park was a major part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration which provided jobs for the poor and unemployed during the 1930s. Today the park continues to be a beautiful example of the WPA's efforts.
Waymark Code: WM9N89
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 09/07/2010
Views: 10
Roosevelt Park is a park located in Edison, New Jersey, at Parsonage Road and U.S. Route 1, just west of Menlo Park Mall. It is owned and operated by the Middlesex County government. It contains a number of picnic groves (with tables and BBQ grills) as well as fields and courts for baseball, soccer, basketball and tennis. The park also contains a facility designed to provide sporting opportunities for people with physical and other special needs. This facility is appropriately named, "The Level Playing Fields," and it offers no impediments to the athletes for whom it was built.
Other forms of recreation (hiking, walking and jogging) are also provided for, with miles of trails and a measured paved path that encircles a man-made lake. In the summer, the county sponsors an annual outdoor theater festival called "Plays in the Park." The Lakeview School and Rehabilitation Center for children with cerebral palsy is located within Roosevelt Park.
My favorite part of this par is the WPA sculpture called "Light Dispelling Darkness" and the MIddlesex County war memorial, both employ fountains and both are beautiful. The W.P.A. commissioned an outdoor sculpture titled “Light Dispelling Darkness” by the artist Waylande Gregory. The sculpture, an optimistic piece depicting the victory of education and science over the forces of war, greed and materialism, has been restored and remains on public view in Middlesex County’s Roosevelt Park in Edison, itself a W.P.A. project named in honor of the agency’s patron. Unfortunately, when I visited, the fountain was turned off during the hottest day of the year.
I always love turning up the AGS citation for places I visit. Here is the excerpt for this park:
At 33.6 m. (R) is Roosevelt Park, a tract of 192 acres that is the first unit of the Middlesex County Park System. Men employed by the ERA and the WPA set to work on a small wilderness of marsh and underbrush and made a park, well landscaped and equipped with all facilities for picnickers. --- New Jersey, a Guide to Its Present and Past, 1939; page 424