Spring Garden Park - The Adventure Continues...

So there's been some action surrounding Spring Garden park for a while (click this small photo which will expand to a larger view if you need to know where Spring Garden park is...)

On Tuesday night at the MNA meeting, Hannah Davidson made a presentation and gave us some information about future plans for this park. Basically, she communicated that Bob Schultz of Portland Parks had raised the idea of creating an "adventure park" with Spring Garden park in mind. The important part of this message is that Bob had mentioned that this might be able to happen WITHOUT putting in curbs and sidewalks, which is a very expensive proposition that also defeats the purpose of the vision of the park which is laid out as "natural open space with muted play equipment". More details about this plan can be found in Thursday's Oregonian, which is likely in the recycling by now, so here's a link to the article on Oregonlive.

I should point out (that Hannah pointed out) that Spring Garden is NOT a dog park, despite the prominent dog in this article.

Anyone who's as old as me refers to an "adventure playground" as just a regular "playground". I remember this movement the FIRST time around, in the late 70's, which was widely referred to amongst my peers as "when playgrounds got cool". Here's a snippet from Berkeley's adventure park website that lays down the info:

The concept for Adventure Playground originated in Europe after World War II. A playground designer studied children playing in the at-the-time “normal” asphalt and cement playgrounds. He discovered that the children actually preferred playing in the dirt and lumber of the post-war rubble. He realized that children had the most fun designing and building their own equipment and manipulating their environment....

Some of the pictures we were shown included things like large hollow logs, and old boats as the play structures, which immediately reminded me of the fun time Jr V had when we last visited Bend, at Harmon Park which features a large boat embedded in the play area. Sorry, I can't find a better picture of this....

As far as Spring Garden goes, a group is being formed to develop a formal plan for an Adventure Park, this is expcted to take around a year with the planning process between February and June of 2007 and fundraising (you knew that was coming) in July of 2007. So, we might expect to see an adventure park in Spring Garden park around spring 2008 barring any unforseen problems, and if all goes well.

Here are some links to various adventure park sites and resources:

• Adventure Park at UC Berkeley
• The very cool looking St. Kilda Adventure park, down in Oz
• Huntington Beach, CA Adventure Park, with the world's longerst URL - you should see this thing
• And here's an NPR story about why European-style adventure parks are "dying out" in the US due to liability issues.

I'll keep you all posted as information comes in and the project moves along. Whatever you call it, Adventure Park, Eco-playground, or just plain old "park", it sounds like the opportunity to make something cool that my son for one, will enjoy.