Bingham Park is an approximately 12-acre facility located at 500 Bingham St. in Greensboro. It borders S. English Street between E. Market Street and McConnell Road. The park is an integral part of three neighborhoods: Eastside Park, Willow Oaks, and Cottage Grove.
The park is situated on top of a pre-regulatory landfill, a depository for garbage built before the government developed rules for how and where trash could be disposed of. There was a trash incinerator on site that burned household waste from Guilford County and the US Military. The materials placed in the landfill were ash and disposal fragments from items burned in the incinerator.
The incinerator, according to reports, operated from 1922 to 1955. The park was built in the 1970s.
In the early 2000s, the basketball court began to crack. This prompted the City to work with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ), which eventually designated the site an inactive hazardous waste/pre-regulatory landfill. The site is called a "pre-regulatory landfill" because it was in operation before 1983 when landfill standards were established to protect health and the environment.
Since the 2020s, the City has been working with the neighborhood group, the Bingham Park Environmental Justice Team, to educate the community about the park. Oftentimes meeting as frequently as twice a month, staff and the EJ Team have collaborated to find solutions to bring a park back to the neighborhood. City, community and elected leaders have worked together to identify funds for a site cleanup and plan to provide a fully functional park to the neighborhood.
