Centennial Garden is now finished. The following are Board President Richard Ceriello’s opening statements during the dedication and ground breaking of The Centennial Garden, Saturday 07/25/20 at 8:30am.
Greetings and good morning everyone and welcome to the ground breaking of Centennial Garden, here in Willow Branch Park, our gift to this neighborhood, this city and to the LGBT community, here in this historic patch of wooded greenery, this island of trees in a urban ocean.
In recent years this park had fallen upon hard times. Tired, abused, trash spewn and largely ignored, without a proactive advocate to voice these concerns. Furthermore, its aging tree canopy witnessed accelerated loss from storm damage and disease, leaving the park looking broken and lacking color and vitality.
Now the park is being transformed. No longer neglected, it now enjoys renewed city wide attention. No longer voiceless, it now has an organized, vocal and tenacious advocates in the Board of Directors of the AIDS Memorial Project, as well as the many concerned neighbors of this community who had bared witness to its decades long downward slide. The AIDS Memorial Project of NE Florida has fully embraced this place and it’s surrounding community with its rich history of LGBT culture. We have adopted this place as a loving child needing care and protection from neglect and want. We WILL NOT cede one inch from our duty to remain ever vigilant and with foresight and prudence for its future. We are here to stay!
In a city with almost no remaining existing markers of the struggles for the civil rights and liberties of its local LGBT citizens, no venerable center of progressive thought or action, no battlefield of brave defiance against the voices of hate, no point on a map showing the ugly confrontation to visibility, no reference to a locale where lesbians and gays could hold their heads up high and be proud. No place….except HERE! This is our Stonewall! Those 300 men and women who attended Jacksonville’s first Pride celebration on that summer day in 1978, could never have imagined the historic events they were about to usher in. This humble place provided familiarity, proximity and relative safety to many in attendance.
Today it stands as a living testament to those first tentative steps on the long journey to full equality. This is hallowed ground!
Under our stewardship, this place has seen an infusion of new trees planted in the last couple of years. A beautiful mural created by a talented young artist will be started soon. And our crowning achievement will be the construction of a public art piece in the form of a bridge, designed by a local architect with international distinctions, in memory of the 5-7 thousand residents lost to AIDS related diseases. And now, this garden of native flowering plants and trees, made possible through the generosity of a wide spectrum of individuals from the larger community and the tireless efforts by a handful of activists.