Vandalism now at epic proportions at municipal park, intentional damage spills over to historic trail

by Dan McClelland

The costly scourge of vandalism that has attacked the village municipal park with a vengeance since the start of summer continued unabated this past week and has spread over to the Tupper Lake Heritage Walking Trail, where several informative signs of Tupper’s history have been destroyed.

It has village leaders ready to pull out their hair, they are so frustrated.

The vandals had a field day late Tuesday or in the early morning hours Wednesday breaking in and damaging the door of the Riverpigs announcers’ booth, gifted to the village years ago by the Tupper Lake Woodsmen’s Association. They apparently used a knife to destroy the lock area. Once inside the two-story building they removed cases of soft drinks, the sale of which the baseball team used as a fundraiser. They went upstairs and removed four large boxes filled with 1000 souvenir t-shirts the team also sells. Estimated value of the shirts is approximately $5,000.

Fortunately they didn’t touch the expensive public address system.

The vandals drank many of the sodas and left the cans strewn all over the entrance area of the park and around the dug outs. The main floor area of the announcer’s building was strewn with debris. Several pieces of furniture- chairs and tables and benches- were smashed.

“It’s absolutely insane,” Police Chief Eric Proulx said Wednesday morning surveying the damage.

He said seldom does a morning pass that Department of Public Works Chief Bob DeGrace doesn’t find evidence of vandalism in the local park, he said.

He said vandalism “has become an every day thing this summer. Every morning Bob (DeGrace) calls me and says: ‘you won’t believe what happened again!’”

Vandals strike almost daily, he said it seems.

The money it’s costing the village employees to make the repairs, material costs and the amount of time his officers are spending to find these culprits is approaching “ridiculous.”

A week or so ago vandals broke through one of the washrooms in the restroom building in the outer ball field and stole thousands of dollars of DPW maintenance machinery and equipment. Fortunately the local police department apprehended the felons the next day and retrieved most of the stolen goods.

The village now has about 10 cameras at various points around the park and some of the culprits have been identified.

If he or one of his officers don’t recognize the kid, then he takes their photo to the school where they are identified.

“My plan is for the village to start issuing orders of ‘no trespassing’ around the park. “If the parents don’t stop their kids from coming here and damaging the place, I am going to arrest them for endangering the welfare of a child….I don’t know what else to do!”

For next summer, he said he has had some volunteers contact him recently who are willing to patrol the park with radios to alert the police when they spot vandals damaging the park.

The chief said, however, he has some concerns about that. “I see how the kids talk to adults who approach them” and he worries an altercation could occur after the village’s shift ends at 7p.m. He said the state police rarely attend to incidents in the village park.

“I have a group of 20 kids right now” that I’m waiting to meet with the mayor so we can serve their parents.”

He said all summer the teenagers have been hanging out on Demars Blvd. near the park. It makes it “look like a circus” is going on between 7p.m. and 10p.m. every night.

“We started this summer by putting magnetic door locks on the bathrooms so they could be put on a time schedule, so we don’t have to pay someone to lock those doors every night.”

He said the doors with those locks were designed to repel a force of 600 pounds. “But the kids were popping those doors open” like they were closet doors.

The chief said with the arrival of October they figured that when the village park worker, Arty Sparks, left for the day at 3p.m. he could lock and dead bolt the doors.

“Now every day the kids go over to those doors, put their feet up against the wall and try to pull off the dead bolts! It’s insane!”

Last week as the vandalism moved to the new historic walking trail that connects the uptown and downtown areas, at least three of the expensive and decorative signs were destroyed. The heritage trail is a valuable tourism amenity that outlines the people and populations who founded this town. The project was underwritten by the Aseel Family Fund as a gift to the community. In several cases the sturdy metal-supported signs were pushed over. Holes were created in several. In at least one case, the message board was ripped entirely from the standards that supported it.

Trustee David “Haji” Maroun, the chairman of the “Keepers of the Diamond” which is the big support group here for the Riverpigs, stopped at the park about 7p.m. Tuesday and the gate to the ball field was open. He said he checked the area out and saw no vandalism, so he locked the gate.

He drove by about 11p.m. and saw a bunch of kids hanging around but there didn’t seems to be any foul play. None were around the announcer’s booth, he noted.

Chief Proulx said he ran the footage of a camera at the diamond and up to 11p.m. that night nothing was going on. “So the vandalism had to have happened in the middle of the night!”

Anyone with information about these culprits is asked to call the village police department.