November 2010 - Parks & Recreation - 18

Who, What, Where & how Around the Parks

It was also at the Environmental Summit that an NRPA colleague happened to
mention adventure playgrounds to one
of the Mercer Island staff. Further research proved compelling: Adventure
playgrounds offer just the kind of creative avenue to self-directed outdoor
play that Mercer Island Parks and Recreation was seeking.
Started in Europe after World War
II, adventure playgrounds sprang up
on vacant land across the United States
in the 1970s and 80s. Only a couple remain now, in Berkeley and Huntington
Beach, California. Mercer Island is only
the third city in the nation with an adventure playground.
At their best, these playgrounds help
perfect the art of self-directed play for
children. Ramshackle forts, bridges,
and other imagination-fueled structures
take form and evolve over the course of
the season as successive waves of children add their own touches to them. The
beauty of these structures is not so much
in the primitive construction as in the
pride and sense of ownership the children come to feel about their space.
Given a park, a beach, or a forest to
call their own, children will form emotional attachments to places, just as they
form emotional bonds to parents and

16 Parks & Recreation

No v e m b e r 2 0 1 0

Kids use their imaginations to create
their own playground out of basic
materials at Mercer Island, Washington.

friends. If you are a parks and recreation
professional, chances are you had such
a special place when you were young.
Positive attachment to a particular place
or places in childhood can grow into a
larger sense of " world connection " in
adolescence and adulthood. That attachment, in turn, becomes the foundation for
environmental ethics and leadership.
In planning Mercer Island, the primary goal was to marry the attachment to
place that an adventure playground provides with a forested setting-to nurture
in each participant a bond with the forest
environment.
Fortunately, there was an existing playground ideally suited to such a
program. Deane's Children's Park is a
wooded two-acre site with several play
structures on the south end. The north
end of the park is forested and intended
for free play. However, dense, non-native
vegetation had made that part of the park
less attractive over the years.
A grant from the Mercer Island Preschool Association allowed for the pruning and cleanup of that forested area:
Workers thinned the vegetation, removed tree hazards, and fixed breaks
in the existing fence. A temporary fence
was also installed to secure the playground between play sessions-and a

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decommissioned restroom became the
playground headquarters. Enthusiastic
staff assembled materials, tool kits, and
sign-in forms. Berkeley Adventure Playground staff added to the momentum by
generously providing their experience
and advice.
Attendance at the Mercer Island Adventure Playground was strong from the
start. By the end of the summer, 1,200
children from Mercer Island and surrounding communities had come to enjoy imaginative, self-directed play in the
forest. The playground creators were
surprised and delighted by how quickly
word spread across the island about the
fun, innovative new playground.
So what exactly is it that makes
this playground such a unique and

November 2010 - Parks & Recreation

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