CityofSantaBarbara
Source: City of Santa Barbara
Find out everything about one of Santa Barbara’s most exciting projects!
Join us Thursday, July 29, for an update on the Dwight Murphy Field Improvement Project. Inspired by ideas and feedback during a productive public engagement process, this park will be packed with fun features:
• An outdoor fitness area
• A regulation-size soccer field (Santa Barbara’s first and only!)
• A youth baseball field
• Sport field lighting
• Water- and maintenance-saving artificial turf with organic fill
• Gwendolyn’s Playground—the first fully-inclusive playground in Santa Barbara
• New restrooms
• Beautiful (and functional) landscaping and trees
• Easy parking
Let Parks and Rec Department project planners tell you all about it on Thursday, July 29 at 6:00 p.m. Meet us in the park (Ninos Drive and Por La Mar, but you can put 501 Ninos Drive into your navigation app)
Looks expensive I’m glad they have money for this.
What’s a fully inclusive playground?
Children with disabilities, but I assume you already knew that.
I assume you know what I was asking, but I’ll be more specific, what does the “FULLY” part actually mean? Does that mean any/every element of the playground has to be completely usably for any/all ages and ability? How the heck does “fully inclusive” tangibly manifest?
Better have 24/7 Security.
I don’t know man, why don’t you just be glad kids are going to have a mother place to play and stop complaining for a whole minute.
That looks like THE most boring playground ever.
Sorry but this is hideous and will firmly cement this stretch of our waterfront as eternally and tragically pomo (postmodern, for those of you who don’t get it). Between the very dated Red Lion (can’t keep up on the hotel ownership these days, you know what I’m talking about), the rainbow arch, and this monstrosity, we’ve got a real little triad of ugliness. I’m all for an inclusive playground. Why does it have to look like someone on LSD designed it? It will age horribly and then we’ll have to redo it again in a decade. Why don’t we try something classic looking? Would you see something this hideous displayed in prime real estate in any other world-class city? No. Let’s build it to last. Kids World is actually a pretty good example of this. I think it looks great after all these years.
Yes, sbtownie, the mushrooms look like fly agaric, which are hallucinogenic.
Looks beautiful and colorful! I love it, but I can foresee lots of teens/young adults “day tripping” around there. I know I would have back in the day!
SBTOWNIE – you and others missed the critical point of this playground. It is ALL-inclusive, meaning for kids of ALL physical/mental abilities. Many kids with disabilities are unable to play on and enjoy your “classic looking” playground. This is for those kids. Let them have it, they deserve it.
DUKE – that means it’s designed for kids of ALL physical and mental abilities. It’s for the kids that have no playgrounds. Can we just leave it alone and let them have this?
Jon, no I didn’t miss the point. In fact, I said I’m in favor of erecting “inclusive” playgrounds. Heck, let’s have many of them peppered throughout town. But this isn’t aesthetically appropriate for the waterfront, which is the front page – if you will – for our town for many visitors. I think sympathetic and kind people often find themselves caught up in wanting to do a “good thing” at the expense of creating a greater whole thing. This is an example of that. We don’t need this playground on the waterfront. Let’s put it somewhere else in town. It’s incongruous with our aesthetics. You may say well it’s in line with our values, and I agree, but placemaking is serious work and you don’t see hallucinogenic mushroom statues and purple concrete playgrounds featured prominently in the main drag of any world-class cities or their parks in places that face the public. Just because it’s a good thing and we should build it, doesn’t mean we should build it where it’s proposed.
SBTOWNIE – this is hardly the “entrance” to our town. Unless you’re staying in the nearby hotels or going to the zoo, most tourists don’t see that part of the park. It’s impossible to see while walking/driving/biking along Cabrillo. See for yourself. Even if visible from a distance, it’s really not that offensive. Psychedelic mushrooms? That’s hilarious. Cubensis (the ones most people know of) look nothing like that. Those shrooms are the fairy tale/Alice in Wonderland type that all kids know and love. Seriously, you have to be a real curmudgeon to see a cartoony, fantastical “magic” mushroom structure in a kids playground like this and complain that it’s “drugs.”
Well Jon I may be an old curmudgeon but thank you for antagonizing me because I can see after actually looking at a map that this is not a visible area and I had incorrectly assumed based on my interpretation of the rendering that this was at the corner of Cabrillo when in fact it is the park area several blocks away by the zoo. They are, however, psychedelic mushrooms. While they’re not “shrooms,” they are toadstools (as Big Brownie correctly pointed out) and their psychedelic effects (and poisonous ones) figure heavily in Nordic lore and other places where they grow. I’m not upset they’re “drugs” and now that I know they will not literally be lining the waterfront (which was the source of my outrage), I really don’t care. And for the record regarding Alice in Wonderful, no, Carrolll was not on LSD when he wrote it as urban legend claims, but he was a heavy laudanum user and may have been a p*d*phile, which you can google. The playground serves a great purpose and we should have more of them. I hope the children enjoy it. I hope we will somehow create more usable parks for all residents of SB including in locations closer to where children actually live.
SBTOWNIE – sorry if you felt antagonized, I was just sticking up for the kids 🙂 And yeah, most adults know that “magic” mushrooms can make you see things, but these are the cartoony and commonly used “Fairy” mushrooms used in playgrounds and kids areas around the world and also in Mario Brothers and many more kid related things. No kid is going to turn into a drug user because their playground had a big mushroom in it…..
https://www.google.com/search?q=red+and+white+
mushroom+playground&tbm=isch&ved=
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playground&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQAzoFCAAQgAQ6Bgg
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LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=KFIEYaTBCpHytAW
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950US951&safe=active
For the record, I welcome any and all good-faith antagonizing, especially if I am just blatantly incorrect about something. Please, if I am stating an objective falsehood, then do tell me. Had you not challenged me on the visibility, I may not have mapped the actual place and gone off of my incorrect interpretation of the rendering. I am not worried about the kids becoming drug users. The mushrooms are cute. I just thought they were ridiculous when I assumed they would be lining the waterfront.