When Luis Perez Demorizi reports to his new job on Sept. 15, he’ll walk into his 527-acre office as Franklin Park’s first executive director.
Mayor Wu and an advisory team that included the members of the Franklin Park Coalition chose the 41-year-old Demorizi after a search that took about a year-and-a-half. He will serve under the commissioner of the Boston Parks and Recreation Department as the first overseer of a single park in Boston – though such arrangements are common elsewhere.
“I’m super excited for the role because Franklin Park and the Boston park system really started landscape architecture,” Demorizi told The Reporter on Monday in noting that it’s an important part of both his education and the landscape architectural profession that he said started with Frederick Law Olmsted. Franklin Park is a major legacy of Olmsted, he added, and “as a landscape architect, he’s someone we all aim to emulate in some way.
Having studied that legacy, he said, “I knew Franklin Park’s significance and I’ve been to the Zoo and the Kite Festival with my daughter, and I thought this was a great opportunity to bring this park to a newfound glory.”
Demorizi comes to Franklin Park after seven years as director of Parks and Open Space for the city of Newton, and before that as a landscape architect with several Boston firms.
He grew up in a family of five in the northwest Bronx, where parks were his “backyard.” For all that, it was when he returned to his family’s native Dominican Republic that he came to realize the value of parks to communities.
“I grew up as an undocumented immigrant in New York City and after high school I had to go back to the Dominican Republic,” he said. “When I was there, I began to notice open space and I saw public open spaces in Santo Domingo as so many missed opportunities.”
He soon enough returned to New York City with his wife and later became a naturalized citizen while pursuing his career at Boston Architectural College (BAC) where he took up Olmsted’s ideas from the last half of the 19th century, which he hopes to carry full throttle into his work at Franklin Park.
“For me, my passion for open space is the idea of it being a backyard for folks to gather and enjoy nature no matter what walk of life you come from – whether you have two pennies to rub together or not, parks are there for you,” he said.
Parks Department officials clarified that Demorizi will not be supervising his own fiefdom. His position will empower him to interact officially with the surrounding community and to collaborate and coordinate with other park-site organizations like the Franklin Park Zoo and the Devine Golf Course, which are run by separate entities.
The evolving White Stadium and Shattuck Hospital properties will soon operate under outside authorities, but he’ll have a key voice in their plans.
“I see a lot of opportunity in activating the park a lot more than it currently is,” he said, “specifically talking about more multi-seasonal events and programming and working with stakeholders that already make use of the park.”
He mentioned focusing on winter activities like cross-country skiing, perhaps ice skating in a park that was once a haven for sledding and had well-sued a seasonal toboggan run that could make a comeback.
For those who live and work around the park, large festivals – such as last weekend’s Dominican Festival and this coming weekend’s Caribbean Carnival – have become sources of concern with their large numbers and activity that can spill into the neighborhoods with negative consequences. But Demorizi said he envisions collaborating with neighbors to make those events manageable, while allowing the larger city-level conversation to go on.
“The size of the park makes it difficult to contain some of these events and I would want to start looking how to better contain [them] so they don’t spill out into a broader area,” he said. “I’m really big on culture and festivals in the park and these events have been around a long time. I’m certainly not going to be the one to say that can’t happen here. My role as executive director in Franklin Park will be to be the connection to the community.”
Demorizi also said he plans to start with a “deeper dive” into the Franklin Park Action Plan, the document that created his position. He called the plan “solid” with “clear and actionable items” that only need funding to begin.
“One thing that attracted me to the plan aside from my new role was the level of community engagement that went into it,” he said. “That is something I always dreamed about as a landscape architect.”
He did mention he would like to see the plan pay more attention to the waterways and Scarborough Pond, but he noted that most days will involve him absorbing the park in all of its intricacies, living and breathing Olmsted’s legacy.
“It’s going to be great to be seen and walk the pathways and engage with people, and I think it’s a smart move to have the job based here at the park,” he said, noting that his formal office will be in the maintenance building off Canterbury Street.
To accept the position, Demorizi needed a one-year residency waiver, which was granted by the City Council.
He said he and his family intend to move to Boston from their current residence outside the city once his teen-age daughter finishes her upcoming school term.
