Coolin’ at the playground

In case you’ve wondered why this merry-go-round at Memorial Park playground (at Kenmore Avenue and Mary Ball Street) has been decked out with Halloween-orange netting for so long, a replacement is in the works, but not another merry-go-round.

This one broke a while back, and since it was installed, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s playground standards have changed, identifying new risks associated with these rotating platforms. Parks and Recreation Director Bob Antozzi said the city always kept this one up to snuff while it was operating, ensuring that the distance between the ground and the platform didn’t get so great that a child could easily get trapped underneath, but when it broke, parks staff decided it would be best to replace it with another piece of equipment.

So, kids, you’re getting…a see-saw, or teeter-totter, as some say. It should be installed sometime in the near future, according to Antozzi. The roughly $2,000 expected cost of buying and installing this new piece of equipment will come from the parks department’s contingency budget.

As you might imagine, there’s not a whole lot of local tax money laying around these days for new playgrounds, so donations play a big part in getting these going. The Memorial Park playground was made possible in the first place by the Fredericksburg Area Service League. Now, efforts are under way to raise funds for a new playground at the corner of Cowan Boulevard and Powhatan Street, in an area that contractor W.C. Spratt has spruced up after using it as a staging area for its massive utilities project along the U.S. 1 corridor in recent years. I’ll have more in the paper soon about this effort.

In the meantime, for readers of my generation who are craving a nostalgia fix after reading the headline of this blog post, I’ll save you a Google search.

Permalink: http://news.fredericksburg.com/citybeat/2010/12/13/coolin-at-the-playground/