Renovated basketball court signals new life for Old Fort Four Park

In Kingsbridge Heights, the recent overhaul of Old Fort Four Park’s basketball court, long plagued by torn nets and crumbling asphalt, marked a milestone in efforts to revive a space many residents felt was left behind.

The park itself has undergone cycles of transformation over generations. The land once held a Revolutionary War fort built under George Washington in 1777 and a racetrack nearly a century later, before becoming part of the city’s park system in 1895.

Old Fort Four Park Playground, where the court is located, was unveiled during the New Deal era, roughly 40 years later, when federal investment helped expand public parks across New York City.

In the decades that followed, the park evolved through periods of investment and neglect. A renovation in 1998 brought updated courts and other features, but Kingsbridge native Joel Guerrero noted it failed to address a glaring issue.

The park’s restroom, destroyed by a fire in the ‘80s, was never replaced. Instead, he recalled, kids frequented local establishments, including a CTown across the street and a nearby hair salon. This practice continued until the city added new facilities to the site last year, a project the city’s parks department cites cost more than $3.6 million.

Guerrero, who grew up playing basketball at the court, said the improvements of the ‘90s were not matched by sustained maintenance.

After earning his bachelor’s degree at Stony Brook University in 2016, the Bronxite returned to find the park nearly desolate.

“I saw we lost a sense of community,” the 33-year-old said. “A lot of the younger kids were vaping, not really socializing anymore and the basketball courts were empty.”

Shakir “Chip” Seagers also spent his formative years on the court and said this gradual decline reflected broader patterns of disinvestment in neighborhood parks, where aging infrastructure and community engagement became harder to sustain, as youth groups, including Boy Scouts of America, ceased operations in the area.

“It was like, ‘yo, this is our park with nothing to do, what else are you going to do in the park?,’ when they took all the programming away,” Seagers said. “There was no real community to it. There was no real life to it. It was just a park where [I] would get together with my friends and just hang out and do good things, bad things.”

In the years after returning, Guerrero fostered a movement to bring the space back to life, with more residents joining as it gained momentum. Community members began maintaining the space themselves and organizing cleanups, returning season after season to restore what had been lost. Seagers was among them.

In 2019, he co-founded Theory 9 with Kingsbridge native Izaiah “Zeek” Barrow, a nonprofit built around community aid and youth programming. Since then, the group has revived the park through a range of events, including basketball tournaments and holiday celebrations.

Guerrero became a constant voice at community board meetings, raising roughly $10,000 through grassroots outreach to replace broken backboards and begin restoring the courts. His advocacy, combined with sustained community involvement, helped elevate the project into the city’s capital pipeline.

“We went and painted the benches, we went and painted the court,” Seagers said. “There were no lines on the court, and we painted them every year.”

Those repeated efforts, he noted, helped rebuild a sense of ownership, a sign the park remained an important part of the neighborhood.

Council member Pierina Sanchez, whose district includes Kingsbridge Heights, was among those advocating for the space. Born and raised in the area, the lifelong resident remains a common presence at Old Fort Four Park, which she often frequents with her young children.

“This is all your fault, Joel,” Sanchez joked at the basketball court’s ribbon-cutting on April 13.

“Thank you so much for your advocacy, your tireless advocacy, and it did not stop even when we got the award.”

The $500,000 renovation was paid for through a participatory budgeting award, a city initiative that allows residents to decide how public funds are spent in their neighborhood, the Council member said. She added that this was one of the first projects to win one of the awards.

Community Board 8 Parks & Recreation Committee Chair Deb Travis said the improvements reflect years of persistence by residents working through a slow-moving capital process and keeping the project on the city’s radar.

“The courts hadn’t been renovated in a long time,” Travis told The Press. “This is something the community has been asking for, and it took a lot of advocacy to get it done.”

Although the new court and restroom improvements address long-standing needs, Travis said other parts of the park still reflect years’ worth of needed maintenance.

“The playground equipment is aging, and there are still issues with fencing and other infrastructure,” Travis said. “There’s more work to be done to bring the whole park up to where it should be.”

For years, the board has included a capital budget request for a full renovation of Old Fort Four Park, including replacing play equipment and benches, repairing stone walls and adding lighting for the basketball courts. This year, the board ranked the park’s reconstruction as its fifth-highest priority in the district.