“A Public Space” is a short documentary film about the cement slab that formed a community gathering place on top of Eugene's College Hill Reservoir.
The 80-year-old structure has since been fenced off as Eugene Water & Electric Board prepares to build new water tanks to serve the community for years to come.
You can see “A Public Space” Thursday Evening at Eugene Art House.
KLCC’s Rachael McDonald spoke with filmmakers Paloma and Davon Ramos.
Paloma grew up across the street from the reservoir.
Paloma Ramos: I've lived away from Eugene most of my adult life, but grew up kind of using the reservoir as just a miscellaneous public space. Davon and I have lived off and on in Mexico the past five years or so, and we were immediately struck by the different ways that people use public space in Mexico. There's always lots of activity in plazas, there's families out together, there's groups exercising together. There seems to be just a way of public life that I would say on the west coast of the United States, especially I don't really feel like I see that on a daily basis.
We moved to Eugene during the pandemic for a couple of years and we had young kids at the time. And so during that time, we started going up to the reservoir to teach our son to ride a bike. It's also where I learned to ride a bike. And, we just started noticing people doing really cool things up there. And my husband is a filmmaker and we were feeling a creative itch and we decided to just start filming people and talking to people and about that time there was talk about the reservoir being drained and taken down.
So, we decided to just celebrate and document a space that we were using and that I had known for a long time,
McDonald: This idea of a public space is celebrated and also it's kind of memorialized in light of the fact that the reservoir at that point was going to be demolished. Now it is closed to public access. What do you think made this particular space unique and special?
Davon Ramos: Honestly, we didn't really get into making the film about its closure. That kind of happened to be a side product of us spending time there and started shooting around the same time.
We just really wanted to celebrate all the great communities that were using the space. Being from Los Angeles, there isn't a great wealth of public space. To be honest, everything is being privatized. I kind of grew up going to malls and going to places where you could hang out, but you always kind of had to pay for parking or pay for entry, buy something. And so this was kind of a unique thing where everyone could come, everyone could access it, free of cost.
And you just saw people from all different walks of life. Generations of Eugene have really used this space and you would see the senior citizen Tai Chi class, led by Machiko. You would see, you know, teenagers just hanging out and practicing dance routines, roller skating. And so, it just kind of became this idea of celebrating that and celebrating this kind of unique tradition in Eugene of coming to the reservoir and just meeting your neighbor and meeting people that you wouldn't typically meet.
Paloma Ramos: One other thing that I would say about the reservoir, as opposed to other public spaces, is that it was just an enormous concrete slab. There was no defining activity to it when we would take our kids up there. It was amazing what you can do on a concrete slab with some chalk and a bike. And just the fact that there were no, there's no paths telling you where to walk. There's no landscaping telling you to look at bushes or what they are. Those types of public spaces are valuable and very cool. We have beautiful parks with playgrounds and structures. But, there's something really that brings out people's creative and weird selves when you just have a blank slate and people can do anything.
Davon Ramos: And it really brought out the best in Eugene, like a very Eugene sense. Fire dancing. You would see people, we would go up there to shoot, and there would be some sort of treasure map drawn in chalk with clues for the kids to kind of explore and walk around. Very, very cool and unique stuff that you wouldn't see anywhere else.
McDonald: Well, I was going to ask if there was anything you learned making the film that was surprising and maybe that's it. Was there anything else that wasn't what you expected to find when you were talking to people?
Paloma Ramos: When we decided to call EWEB, we didn't know what to expect. But I think if I was to have guessed it would have been, you know, some sort of corporate-feeling stuffy person who was going to say, ‘No, we don't want you to make a film’ or ‘we wouldn't want to be part of this’. And,we were really met with the opposite, I would say. I think the EWEB team was very gracious and let us ask as many questions as we wanted, interview their team. They took us inside the reservoir. We weren't able to go into the catacombs, because there was water in the Catacomb. So, we were only able to go around at the time that we did that filming. But to us, that team really felt very forward thinking, very focused on their mission of providing clean water for the community.
And that's when this film, for us, I think personally, sort of, there's a lot of other layers to for us. We live right now in Oaxaca, Mexico and there's a huge water shortage and sometimes we don't get water out of our tap. And it's a very big issue down there at the moment. And so the fact that in Eugene, clean water comes out of the tap is amazing. It's astounding really. The utility of that building is underneath the space. And that's what's most important to our community. And I think that watching the community go through this process of realizing that that was the most important thing. And it's sad that we have to lose this beautiful blank slate where people do beautiful things.
But in the end, the priority is to have clean drinking water, and kind of witnessing the community go through that realization and that process just was really interesting and we were honored to see that.
You can see the film this Thursday evening at the Eugene Art House at 7.
There will be Q and A and reception afterwards.
