2 weeks Ago
The fate of the St James Park and Amphitheatre is embarrassingly common to many facilities meant for public use. Opened in 1996—28 years ago—as a community hub for artistic and other activities, the St James venue is now vandalised, dilapidated and abandoned, inhabited by the homeless and drug addicts. Not only has it deteriorated into an ugly blemish, it emanates the stench of faeces and urine.
Conceived and presented to the population as a place to fly the flag of community activity, solidarity and development, it now suffuses the western end of St James with the scent of governance decay. St James is a community rich in historical national significance and one of the main homes of the annual Hosay commemoration. The St James Amphitheatre was no doubt meant to add to the town—already home, famously, to the police barracks and the hangman’s cemetery—a facility that would serve as an outlet for the creative and other expressions of its residents.
After all, Nobel Laureate VS Naipaul and Grammy Award rapper Nicki Minaj both have roots there. And for some time the facility did just that. It is perhaps best known as the venue of the annual St James WeBeat festival, a cultural and social celebration of pan, tassa, calypso and popular music that ran for ten days.
That festival returned briefly in 2022, following cessation of people-centred activities during the Covid-19 pandemic. In that year, only three days of activities were staged: a steelband concert, a night of vintage calypso and a health and wellness day. The facility was a creature of the Tourism Development Company Ltd (TDC).
The TDC no longer exists; it folded in August 2017 and was replaced by three entities to oversee its four main areas of responsibility: tourism investment and incentives; cruise passenger visitor services; airport visitor information services; and sites and attractions. The TDC handed over the facility to the St James Community Improvement Committee (CIC), formed to manage the venue and uplift the St James community. Former CIC president Anthony Ferguson told this newspaper that maintenance of the facility became nearly impossible for the CIC, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic, when revenue from events dried up.
Mr Ferguson, we feel, would agree that deterioration of the amphitheatre started pre-pandemic. Custodianship of the facility was assigned to the St James CIC with an expectation of government support that never materialised, he told us. Now, there is a promise that the 2025 budget would include funds for the rehabilitation of the facility that was built without toilets and roof.
It was meant as an open-air performance space, creatively utilised, readers would recall, for the Drummit2Summit musical protest that accompanied the Summit of the Americas meeting held in T&T in 2018. Mr Ferguson told the Express a scope of works was submitted to the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts following a site visit from officials, including Tourism Minister Randall Mitchell, who expressed interest in refurbishing the facility. According to Ferguson, the ministry assured the CIC that funds would be sourced for repairs following the 2024/2025 budget.
We urge the authorities to press on with repairs but, ahead of that, to have the space properly cleaned to devise a proper maintenance programme, that basic necessity that continues to elude us..
