Equipment by Landscape Structures.
Surface: rubber.
UDPATED SEPTEMBER 2022. OLD REVIEW HERE.
Thanks to a recent rejuvenation, this East York playground has upgraded itself from forgettable to…
…slightly less forgettable. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit mean, but I’ll explain.
First, the good stuff:
equipment by Landscape Structures is always a good thing. Here, it features some of their wonderful rock and cave elements, which hide all sorts of creatures that kids love looking for. (Side note: if your kids love these caves, you can find more extensive examples at the Morse Street Playground and Moorevale Park.)
the splash pad is improved. Now includes those buckets that fill slowly before ambushing the unsuspecting kids playing below.
a couple of panels on the senior climber have interesting nature-type stuff on them. One neat one shows various types of animal footprints, and invites you to find certain circled ones hidden around the playground.
there’s also a junior climber, which there wasn’t before.
there’s a sandbox, which there wasn’t before.
And now the not-so-good:
the footprint of the playground is still frustratingly small for such a large park. So that “find the animal footprints” game that I mentioned above is a bit less fun because the playground is just so small.
one of the benches is placed so close to the splash pad that it gets significantly wet when the splash pad is on. Feels like an oversight.
the sandbox isn’t shaded, and the sand feels – am I a sandbox snob? – kind of low-quality. Like it has bits of gravel mixed in or something.
So it’s better than before…but not startlingly better. The park as a whole remains a decent one, with a large field, baseball diamond, parking, a hockey rink and skate trail in addition to the playground. But the improvements aren’t quite enough for me to tell you to go out of your way to visit this one.