Editor’s note: In lieu of The Lookout’s normal coverage, below find a special report about Church Hill’s l’affair pétanque, about which over a dozen readers have contacted me this week. Consider upgrading to support independent journalism about your neighborhood if you haven’t yet. And as ever, send tips, photos, etc., about this matter, or anything East End-related. Here’s how. Regular programming resumes next week.—Dave.

On Tuesday, the bulldozers arrived at Chimborazo Playground, and by Friday, they had mostly completed work on two new square plots graded for pétanque, a somewhat obscure French bowling game that is favored by a long-running local club. In the intervening three days, in neighborhood groupchats, on social media, and in the park itself, questions flew thicker than construction dust.

Was there a meeting about this, or even a posted sign? Who signed off on a project to roughly double the park’s existing pétanque footprint by converting green lawn into gray crushed stone? Who paid for it, and how much did it cost?

Or as Church Hill resident Erika Stanley put it in a phone interview with The Lookout Thursday: “What the hell happened?”

The Richmond Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), which operates the ~3.5-acre public space just south of East Broad Street between North 29th and 31st Streets, acknowledged The Lookout’s request for comment, and forwarded it to the Capital Improvements Projects (CIP) team. No city official provided with more information before publication. City Council President and longtime 7th District representative Cynthia Newbille did not respond to a request for comment.

An unofficial proposal for the new pétanque courts reviewed by The Lookout estimated the cost for the project at north of $17,000. (For the uninitiated, the sport is sort of like bocce.) Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia, the organization that was formed in 2005 and played twice weekly on the existing courts at Chimborazo Playground since they were built—a process that itself triggered neighborhood disputes over the use of limited space and resources, according to reporting and commentary from a decade and a half ago indicates; multiple sources described it to me this week as “heated”—said DPR is footing this bill.

“When we gave them our plans and specs, we were prepared to raise the funds to do it, and that's on the specs that we gave them,” said Boulefrog president Karen Morris-Rankin. That was about a year ago, the Church Hill resident said in a phone interview Thursday. Representatives of the Boulefrogs and the Friends of Chimborazo Playground (FOCP; Morris-Rankin is a treasurer of that group) began meeting with a DPR deputy director, Shamar Young, about various improvements to the park, including paving underneath the unloved “surprise hoop” that the department had installed on the pétanque court closest to the playground in 2024.

(The Boulefrogs, she explained, had “ceded” that court because it was poorly constructed and flooded constantly, but also because they didn’t like it. “Basketballs kept getting thrown at us by by accident, and it’s just so far away from the other courts,” she said. “We were separated by [the defunct parkhouse] building, so it wasn’t as social.”)

Starting in January 2026, she continued, Young looped in other city officials, including Haywood Harrison, who is listed on LinkedIn as a senior capital project manager. (Harrison did not respond to a request for comment.) A plan took shape to do a bunch of work at the park in one fell swoop, including the expansion of the pétanque plaza directly east of the existing four courts. “They said that they had funds at the moment and that they would do it,” said Morris-Rankin. (A message sent to the FOCP Facebook page was unanswered by deadline.)

It is not clear at what point DPR decided to move forward with the FOCP/Boulefrogs’ request for more courts, or why. The Lookout was unable to locate DPR’s official blueprint for this project, or a record of the budget from which the money is getting drawn. A cursory review of the past few years of CIP budgets surfaced no mention of pétanque courts, and the project is not marked on the city’s Capital Projects map. The finalized plan for this project, if one exists, does not appear to have been circulated to the public.

As bulldozers arrived on scene earlier this week, this apparent no-process process rankled residents. “Everyone in the community deserves to enjoy public spaces, and that means everyone gets a say,” said Enzo Chiarriello, who has lived in Church Hill for roughly a decade and often walks his dog, Batty J. Chiarriello, in Chimborazo Playground. A petition Stanley drafted with neighbor Will Jordan-Cooley and began posting on telephone poles in the area and online on Thursday echoes this critique. “We believe that major changes to our community spaces deserve transparent decision making and full public notice,” it reads in part.

Emails reviewed by The Lookout between the Boulefrogs’ secretary, Mark Rankin, and the Church Hill Association’s (CHA) board, as well as posts made from the club’s Facebook account earlier this week, point to mentions in multiple issues of the neighborhood organization’s meeting minutes from November/December 2025 and March/April 2026 as evidence that the public had been notified of the project. But not everybody in the neighborhood reads the CHA’s minutes, and the phrasing of those entries described the project in vague and open-ended terms. Moreover, no matter how convenient it may be for the resource-strapped DPR to treat CHA as a proxy for public sentiment, that’s not what a ~300-member org in a neighborhood of thousands is or does.

Not that CHA supports the pétanque expansion. Via email Friday morning, president Jake Naugle told The Lookout that while “some members” of the org’s Park & Beautification committee “were involved in the conversations about this initiative as the plans developed,” it was never put to the board for formal support or to membership for a vote. “Thus, the pétanque court expansion is not a project that was endorsed by the CHA.” (Disclosure: I am a dues-paying CHA member. The org had no influence or input on this or any Lookout coverage.)

“My concern is not that pétanque players should not have space in the park,” Jordan-Cooley, a born-and-raised Church Hill resident, told The Lookout via email. “They should. My concern is that Chimborazo Playground is public space, and any further expansion of dedicated, single-use court space should involve broad neighborhood input before construction begins.”

Morris-Rankin said multiple times that DPR officials told the Boulefrogs that “because this was simply an expansion of existing” facilities in Chimborazo Playground, no public notification was required. And she emphasized that the Boulefrogs have for two decades contributed time and effort to beautifying the whole park, not just the courts, after our conversation emailing a list of improvements she says the club has made to Chimborazo Playground over the years. Said an audibly distressed Morris-Rankin: “We’re not monsters.”

Still, she acknowledged that “the optics are poor,” and that the Boulefrogs should have urged DPR to do more neighborhood outreach about this project, and done so as a club itself, especially given the contentious history of the original courts. “I'm sorry,” she said. “We really should have handled that better, absolutely. I'm gonna own up to that.”

If the primary issue is a matter of public exclusion from decisions about public space—and interviews conducted with half a dozen residents, along with a canvass of social media posts about the matter, suggest it is—then the question of how much of that space should be dedicated to a small group of enthusiasts of a deeply niche sport that boasts only ~30,000 players nationwide is running a close second.

“Honestly, I was willing to put my grouchiness aside if it had been something a little more useful for the general community,” said Sarah Sahlaney, who lives adjacent to the park. In my reporting this week, that’s about as diplomatically as anybody managed to express their frustration. In a park that already has a busted water fountain, a single portable toilet, a cramped and poorly maintained playground, and—crucially—three totally functional pétanque courts, neighbors cannot grasp how adding two more was the highest and best use of the limited green space, or DPR’s limited budget.

Back-of-the-napkin demographic math only compounds the confusion. While the Boulefrogs are dedicated to the sport, and have tried to recruit younger enthusiasts with outreach to local schools, there simply are not very many of them. The club has 45 active members, Morris-Rankin told The Lookout. By contrast, data from Esri Business Analyst, a popular urban-planning tool, indicates that more than 10,100 people live within a 15-minute walk of Chimborazo Playground. The club’s total membership, in other words, is under one half of 1% of the park’s potential base of patrons with in a reasonable walking distance. (Forget about driving.)

If the newly graded plots represent two additional pétanque courts, there would be one court for every nine Boulefrogs. Eyeballing the newly bulldozed squares, it seems plausible there will be more than two, though, given the long-and-slender dimensions of an official pétanque court. (The unofficial proposal document obtained by The Lookout suggests the two plots could be divvied into six total courts.) Even at five pétanque courts—not counting the “ceded” one—Chimborazo Playground would offer roughly five times the accommodation to the tiny sport as it does to to tennis and pickleball; five times more than soccer (or 10, if you count that one metal cage as a half field); and more than double basketball. The lawn, which will take awhile to regrow after being torn up by the machinery, has been reduced by more than a third.

Morris-Rankin insisted that despite their name, pétanque courts are not strictly for pétanque, noting that the courts are also “great for bocce,” and that neighborhood kids can “ride their little tricycles in there [and do] drawing on the courts.” But all of those activities can take place on other surfaces, and often do. Only pétanque requires the courts’ specialized boundaries and crushed-stone surfaces. Prominent signage in the park declaring the Boulefrogs’ standing reservations for the existing spaces on Thursdays, Sundays, and holidays calls them what they are: pétanque courts.

It’s not clear what will happen next in Chimborazo Playground’s l’affair pétanque. Stanley and Jordan-Cooley, the co-authors of the petition to halt construction, are hosting a meeting on Sunday, May 10th in the park to discuss possible paths forward. “Our hope is to have an information sharing, sharing session, dialogue, and, you know, express our unhappiness,” she said, noting that basic fact-gathering has been challenging due to the lack of official communication from the city, the fractious nature of social media, and byzantine interrelation of various involved groups (Boulefrogs, CHA, FOCP, DPR, etc.) Like an unhealed wound, she said, if the project is allowed to move forward without this public accountability, “they are inviting ongoing, festering bad blood in the in the neighborhood.”

I asked Morris-Rankin if the Boulefrogs would proactively advocate with city officials to halt construction and conduct a more democratic public-feedback process about the project as a demonstration of good faith, even if that meant the new pétanque courts might ultimately be removed.

“Well, like you yourself say, we are in a minority, so that could be an interesting proposition,” she said. I pointed out that minority rule is not a particularly American tradition.

“I wouldn’t call us rulers, by any means,” the Boulefrog’s president responded. “We asked, and Parks said yes.”

This has been a Lookout special report. Regular programming resumes next week. Please submit tips, photos, etc. about the East End for editorial consideration.

Clarification 5/8/26: Due to what appears to be a platform bug, the metadata on this article (the text you see when you copy/paste the link into a groupchat or social-media window) did not update as normal before publication, meaning people who shared the post shortly after it was published shared a hed/dek that was slightly different than what it looked like in the email and on the website. Thanks to the Lookout readers with a programming background who leapt to my aid to troubleshoot this. The metadata should now be correct when you share the link to this article, and I’ve filed a support ticket with the publishing platform to address this bug. Thanks for your patience and sorry for any confusion!—Dave.