October 26, 2005

Designers turn to the playground set to create new site.

By Tobin A. Coleman
Staff Writer
The Advocate

Design consultants for a playground along Mill River will go to school tomorrow to get ideas from those who know jungle gyms best.

Students at Stillmeadow and Hart elementary schools will explain what kind of equipment, space and uses they want in the playground, which will run along the river's western edge from Tresser Boulevard to Main Street.

After they meet with students in the morning, consultants from Weathers Associates will produce sketches to share with the community at 7 p.m. at the Yerwood Center at 90 Fairfield Ave.

"Members of the Mill River Collaborate are playing a design role with the kids and their families," Land Use Bureau Chief Robin Stein said. "We also have 40 people serving on various committees on the playground from design to actual construction."

Weathers Associates has experience in the United States and Canada gathering ideas from schoolchildren and residents on designing playgrounds and recreation spaces that reflect their desires. The evening meeting is being billed as a "design party," complete with refreshments and a playground song and cheer by the Cloonan Middle School Bulldog junior varsity and varsity cheerleaders.

The playground site currently has a basketball court. Before playground construction begins, the court likely will be moved to another site in the 26-acre Mill River Corridor, which extends from West Broad Street to Pulaski Street, so basketball games will not be disrupted, Stein said. Steve Crews, co-chairman of the community Playground Committee, said Weathers Associates will spend several months putting the plan together while his group helps organize hundreds of volunteers who will build it in about one week in the spring.

Crews, who works for GE Commercial Finance Real Estate, said the plan is to have the playground ready when children get out of school in June.

"I don't know what this will ultimately look like, so I don't know what kind of skill set we're going to need," Crews said. "But chances are we're going to need some people who are very skilled at trades . . . and some people who have the time but not the skill set."

The playground is part of a larger plan of mixed-use residential and commercial structures, a riverside walkway and other recreational venues that will be combined with dredging to redirect the river. The project is aimed at making Mill River Park a central recreational area for downtown.

Milton Puryear, who works with the Land Use Bureau, is project coordinator for Mill River Park. Ideas for the new playground focus on the theme of restoring the river -- also known by its American Indian name Rippowam -- "and what the river means in an ecological environment," Puryear said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is a week or two away from signing an agreement that will put the river on its priority list for funding of a $5 million project to dredge Mill River Pond and remove the dam at West Broad Street to prevent future sediment buildup, Stein said.