For a little while on Monday, Mother Nature gave back what the city of Lewiston took away.

Children and adults gathered Monday for Visible Community’s winter carnival in the city’s empty Maple Street Park. They built multi-colored frozen mountains, and carved steps into their sides, as piles of snow temporarily replaced the thousands of dollars worth of playground equipment long removed.

So for a few hours on a bright wintry afternoon, the forlorn park moonlighted again as a community resource, and ditched its day job as another vacant lot in a city scatted with them. By carnival’s end, the park seemed to smile, with only a forgotten snowbound Burger King bobblehead remaining, gently nodding in the breeze.

The saga of Maple Street Park has pitted the interests of community activists versus the ambitions of city administration for the economic redevelopment of Lewiston’s Southern Gateway. It’s a casualty of change, as the transformation of the area has turned the tiny park into prime commercial real estate.

The park is not in Lewiston’s nicest neighborhood, and its proximity to high-traffic corridors does make Maple Street Park less than ideal for family recreation. It’s overlooked because of these factors, and without the vociferous campaign for its revival, it could have been built upon or blacktopped by now.

Both still remain the park’s likely fate. More should become clear about Maple Street Park’s future later this week, when the Lewiston City Council discusses tentative plans for new construction in the Southern Gateway. The park could become a parking lot for a new, job-creating, office block.

Supporters claim the area’s redevelopment can accommodate Maple Street Park, but if the land becomes a linchpin for an injection of economic vitality to benefit all of Lewiston, the argument to maintain the small community park starts to weaken, despite its cherished status inside the neighborhood.

In the past, we’ve suggested moving Maple Street’s equipment to Kennedy Park, but such an effort has failed to materialize. Other compromises must exist that can capture the spirit of the park preservation movement and channel it into immediate results, and end this stalemate.

Lewiston has enough reminders of what was: empty mills, empty buildings, empty lots. Maple Street Park is no agonizingly different, but unlike the city’s numerous brick-and-mortar shells, the park’s lifeblood – its equipment – is primed for immediate revitalization, reuse and rebirth.

Monday’s carnival was a political statement, an outcry to City Hall to replace what it had taken away. Perhaps it should be considered instead as a rousing bon voyage to a fine facet of the community taken before its time, and a coming out party for an effort to recreate it elsewhere in Lewiston.