The women sit most mornings on the wooden benches in the middle section of the townhouse complex reading the books, occasionally tugging at a cigarette.
They began doing it shortly after July 9, the day the first memo went out, the one management crafted that forbade children under age 16 from playing outside without parental supervision.
When word of the rule reached the newspapers last week, it sparked a firestorm of outrage that didn’t subside until management last Thursday relented and rescinded it.
The decision arrived that morning via a three-paragraph letter taped to the front door of each unit of the brightly painted Eagle Place Town homes on South Boulder Road in Lafayette.
“Foremost, management and ownership will always provide every resident and occupant, including children, an equal opportunity to the use and enjoyment of the community,” the letter read. “To the extent that any rule is contrary to this policy, such policy is rescinded effective immediately.”
Lynzey Pier, a 28-year-old hospital technician and a single mother of three, seethed as she sat on her bench, the letter just pulled from her door.
“How do you tell a kid, ‘Sorry we wrecked your summer; we made a mistake.’ They put these children in jail all summer, and now they’re sorry?”
She and Lisa Grant, a 50- year-old grandmother of two, decided weeks ago they would spend their mornings on the benches as a way to allow the scores of children who live in the complex to play freely.
The nearby playground, though, on this morning did not trill with the sound of children’s laughter. Bicycles, tricycles and plastic play kitchens sat abandoned on patios.
“People here are scared still,” Grant explained. “They are mostly low-income families who fear being kicked out if somehow they violate the rules. They keep their kids inside until dark and management leaves.”
She was among the first to move in when the complex opened three years ago. Before July 9, there would be at least 12 kids in the playground on this morning, another 10 riding bicycles through the complex.
Management in its letter attributed the rule to a child being injured on the property. Calls to the number printed in the letter were not returned.
Grant said she witnessed the boy jumping off an air conditioning unit, snagging his foot in an iron planter. She held him until the paramedics arrived.
“The only problem with their timetable,” she said, “is the boy was hurt three weeks ago, long after the rule went into effect.”
“I think management looks at us as low-income people who just sit on the couch, milking the system, people who don’t look after our kids,” Pier said. “It is such nonsense. What 15-year-old is going to ask his mom to come outside and watch him play?”
The real tragedy of the past week, and going back to July 9, the women said, is the way the no-play rule has devastated the townhome community.
“I have been here long enough to know that a lot of these children have so little other than their play group,” Grant said. “To take that away from them is devastatingly cruel.”
Will things ever go back to normal?
“No,” Grant said. “Look around. Do you see any children? In one month, I have seen the children here go from bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kids to zombies.”
There has been talk of organizing a community ice cream social, maybe a barbeque, to get the families of Eagle Place back together, to let the children play and the adults look forward.
“Getting back to normal,” Pier said, “that will take some time.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
