Shades Creek Park (public park)

This article is about the former public park in Homewood. For other uses, see Shades Creek Park.

Shades Creek Park was Homewood's first major city park. It covered an area extending from what are now the sites of Brookwood Village and the Homewood Armory.

History

Homewood bought 16 acres of land along Shades Creek, across Shades Creek Parkway from the Hollywood Country Club, in March 1931 with the intention of creating Homewood's main public park. It was to be part of a "parkway system" along the southern side of Edgewood Lake. The original landscaping and a baseball diamond were handled in part by federal-relief works in 1933.

The park was dedicated on June 23, 1934. The park's facilities included the baseball field, two tennis courts, a recreation shed, drinking fountains, benches, and six barbecue pits. A privately owned rifle range also operated in or adjacent to the park for a time.

Unfortunately, the Shades Creek Park site had some problems. One of these was that the park was not centrally located in the city. The creek also occasionally overflowed into the park, causing mosquito problems and during the 1940s, people began surreptitiously dumping their trash in the park. In 1946 the city decided to develop a new main park, which is now Homewood Central Park. In 1966, the city finally relented to developers, rezoning the park area for the construction of Brookwood Village and Brookwood Medical Center.

References

• Summe, Sheryl Spradling. (2001). Homewood: The Life of a City. Homewood, AL: Friends of the Homewood Public Library.