It took a broken leg to get Lola Lucas moving on her
book A Home in the Park: Loving a Neighborhood
Back to Life, a collection of columns
originally published in the Banner, the newsletter of the Enos Park Neighborhood Improvement
Association. “It was a lucky break,” Lucas quips. Holing up at her mother’s house for two weeks
gave Lucas the time to sift through and organize more than 150 columns
she’s written during the past 13 years. In late August, Lucas’
favorites were published by iUniverse, a print-on-demand publisher. Lucas says she moved to Enos Park because it was
cheap: She and her husband, Kevin Brown, bought their home on Fourth Street
for $38,000 in the early 1990s. “It was an incredibly beautiful house
for an incredibly great price,” Lucas says. “It was in
wonderful condition, so we thought, ‘We can live with this.’
”
Lucas’ love for old homes and sense of community
stretches back to her childhood in the Central West End of St. Louis and
later purchase of one of the oldest homes in the St. Louis suburb of
University City. “I like the idea of a wide variety of people living
together in a community, helping each other, being there for each other
— that, to me, is the ideal way to live,” she says. Lucas and Brown remained in Enos Park for three years,
then traded in their Fourth Street digs for a larger home near Washington
Park, on the west side of town. Although she moved away 11 years ago, Lucas
has continued writing for the Banner. She addresses her continuing contribution to the newsletter
in a chapter of the book titled “Selling the Wee Blue Hoose”
(Lucas’ affectionate nickname for her home in Enos Park). The collection, which reads like a love letter to the
community, features familiar activists such as Marilyn Piland, executive
director of EPNIA, whom Lucas credits with much of the neighborhood’s
success, and unfamiliar names, including Fiona and Finnegan, Lucas and
Brown’s standard poodles. The collection of essays isn’t
confined to the Springfield city limits; Lucas relates excursions as far
off as London to her experiences on the north end of Springfield. While living in Enos Park, Lucas and Brown got
involved with the neighborhood association; these days, they sell tickets
for neighborhood tours and contribute baked goods to fundraising sales. She
calls community building a “very happy form of contagion. “It’s the broken window in reverse,”
Lucas says. “You drive down the street and see that a house has been
redone, then you think, ‘That one next door, that’s cheap
— I could buy it and redo it.’ Different thoughts come into
your mind when you see that people are doing something active.”
As for her next book, Lucas is optimistic: “I
made a list a few years ago of 25 book titles. There are lots more
coming.”
Completing the next one, she adds, won’t require
breaking her other leg.
Lola Lucas signs copies of A Home in the Park: Loving a Neighborhood Back to Life from 5-9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11, at the Springfield Art
Association, 700 N. Fourth St., before and immediately after the monthly
meeting of the Enos Park Neighborhood Improvement Association.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2005.
