Sam Dean The Roanoke Times

Dogs and their owners are such a constant presence at Roanoke's Highland Park that less-welcome visitors have wandered off.

Sam Dean The Roanoke Times

Sarah Zimmer and her dog Boone enjoy Roanoke's dog park Thursday evening. The amphitheater stage is now largely unused.

In the recent history of Roanoke's Highland Park, there's a before and an after, and standing on the border between are dogs.

Big dogs, little dogs, fat dogs, skinny dogs, quiet dogs, yappy dogs, fancy pedigree dogs and dogs of unknown origin.

It used to be Highland Park was the turf of men cruising the park in their cars, drug peddlers and others up to undesirable if not illegal activity. That's the before part.

The after picture starts six months ago on Ma y 21 -- the day the fenced area for off-leash dogs opened on a hillside in the northwest corner of the park.

Since then, neighbors and the police say that unwanted activity has all but gone away, and they credit the natural vigilance created by people coming to Highland for the dog park.

"If I was a person looking to do something I shouldn't be doing, I would be very hesitant to go to that area," said Rob Engl of the Roanoke Police Department. Engl is the community resource officer for that part of the city.

With three dozen or more dogs and their owners in the dog park at peak times, there are just too many eyes on the park for its former users to feel comfortable, he said.

Roanoke police received 172 calls for service in the park between May and November 2008. During the same period in 2009 -- the time that the dog park has been open -- the department received 125 calls.

Engl and other officers used to patrol the park four or five times a day. Lately, it's more like once a day, and that means police can focus on other problem areas.

The park has "taken on a whole new persona," said Steve Buschor, Roanoke's director of parks and recreation. "It used to have kind of a seedy underside to it. Now it's almost like it's alive again."

That's exactly the outcome the dog park's proponents were hoping for. NewVaConnects, a young professionals organization affiliated with the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce, had been pressing the city to create a dog park, but without luck.

Some members of the Old Southwest Inc. neighborhood organization, meanwhile, were looking for a way to curb the undesirable activity in the park. A dog park was on their list of ideas, said Marla Robertson, an OSW Inc. board member.

"We were prepared to really go in there and get rid of the crime," said Robertson, who lives next to the park. They called police frequently, she said, but the problems they were addressing were "the type of crime that's there and gone before police can get there."

The two groups got together and pushed for the park, but the idea was not met with universal approval.

"They're the ones that pushed this thing onto the Old Southwest community," said longtime Highland Avenue resident Doug Turner, one of a number of park neighbors who opposed the dog park. After the city's Architectural Review Board approved the dog park, Turner appealed the decision to the Roanoke City Council, which upheld the ARB's approval.

Six months of living with the park hasn't changed Turner's mind.

Turner's beef was not with the idea of a dog park, or even one in Highland Park, but he objected to the specific site because it "basically destroyed" the hillside amphitheater in that part of the park.

There are three other locations in the park that would have been better and not infringed on other park uses, Turner said. He polled 50 park neighbors and found 76 percent favored one of the other locations.

The amphitheater's stage is still there, but the dog park has taken a good portion of the hillside seating for it. To use the amphitheater now would mean contending with the smell from the dog park and the unsightly barren hillside all the dog traffic has created, Turner said.

"Granted that there's probably a lot of folks in Old Southwest who wanted a dog park, and wanted a dog park somewhere in Highland Park," Turner said, "but not at that location."

Bill Bestpitch, who lives a block from the park, was one of two members of the ARB to oppose the park plan. He called the dog park a "wonderful amenity" for the city, but still thinks a different location would have been better.

Not only did the park intrude on the amphitheater, he said, it required the moving of a tree planted in memory of Roanoke lawyer and gay rights activist Sam Garrison as part of the city's commemorative tree program. The tree was moved across the road within the park and subsequently died.

It has since been replaced, said city arborist Dan Henry, as have other commemorative trees. One in 10 transplanted trees won't survive, Henry said. The tree's new location was approved by Garrison's partner, Henry said.

Bestpitch also objected to the use of chain link fence to enclose the dog park.

"It certainly doesn't look any better than I thought it would look," he said.

He noted that promises to landscape around the park to conceal the fencing haven't been met.

Lauren Ellerman of NewVa Connects said that landscaping is still part of the plan, as soon as money can be raised for it. Right now, the group is raising money by selling commemorative bricks to be laid as a patio within the park. Money raised will build a walkway within the park area, and an information kiosk.

Meanwhile, the dog park has gotten steady use by usually very responsible dog owners, Ellerman and Buschor said.

There have been at least a couple of aggressive dog incidents, Ellerman said. People sometimes leave cigarette butts, which are bad for dogs.

But users are good about picking up after their dogs, Buschor said. And he's got numbers to back it up. The year before the dog park opened, the city went through about 3,000 "mutt mitt" plastic bags for picking up dog scat. This year, that figure is up to 5,000.

Park users interviewed recently called for more lighting and even an expansion, but they still seem to love it.

"I'm always really comfortable to come here," said Sarah Zimmer, 27, who lives about three blocks away. She was at the park about 4:30 p.m. on a recent warm Monday. "I came here in the dark last night. ... I mean, there's always somebody here."

"It's starting to be a meeting place," said Lindsay Howell, 23, who brings her beagle pup, Petey.

"There's really a community here," said John Harlow, 44, who with his wife, Ashley, 40, brings his black Labrador retriever, Max, to the park almost daily.

The couple drive over from their neighborhood off Brambleton Avenue, and when they turn off Elm Avenue toward the park, Max starts to bark and howl.

It's not some other dog he's barking at, John Harlow said, it's, "How much faster can you get me to the dog park?"