I just arrived home from a community meeting in the neighborhood next to mine. It wasn’t at all what I expected, and I am thrilled by my wrongness. Wrongety wrong wrong.

My expectations were for a contentious, loud, and pretty darn unpleasant couple of hours. Still, I felt it was important to be there to support Amy, someone I had never met, who gave a pile of money to the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy to build a environmental learning space in memory of her children. I also happen to love the park, have kids who love the park, and wish we all spent more time there. And I got married in one of the Conservancy’s projects that I consider a triumph.

So about the meeting. In a nutshell, there is a proposal, still in its infancy, to build a treehouse near the edge of Frick Park in Regent Square. And there are neighbors who have a variety of concerns, not the least of which is the main street through the neighborhood being utterly over-burdened with traffic and only getting worse.

In fact, that’s the absolute bottom line. Traffic. A bunch of cars. Way too many cars in an area that was never intended to carry them. There are some people opposed to “memorials in the park” but bottom line? Solve the traffic problem and nearly all of the opposition gets on board with the Treehouse.

That bottom line isn’t something I heard raised before the meeting. And that? It’s a beautiful thing. Never mind that traffic isn’t something the Conservancy can solve. The meeting got to the heart of the problem in a way that wasn’t possible any other way.

We all listened to a short presentation from the Parks Conservancy about how this project fits into a larger context of master plan updates, and how we got to this place. Then the floor was opened. It started off slowly but once things started rolling they REALLY started rolling. Everyone who wanted to got to take the mic and say what was on their mind. Some had prepared remarks and others were moved to speak and worked through their arguments on the fly.

In the end, it appeared there was a lot more common ground amongst the attendees. Aside from one disparaging allusion to “those blogs” I thought the comments were generally civil and thoughtful. People proposed alternative locations for the Treehouse, and at least one of them sounded worth exploring, in my humble opinion. It was a conversation, and that’s all Amy wanted. I’m so glad I live in a place with great parks, people who care about them, and people who can talk about their differences of opinion publicly and civilly. I’m just sorry I didn’t have time to dig up a green shirt.