By Geoff Page
The City of San Diego held its ribbon cutting ceremony for the Cañon Street Pocket Park Wednesday, November 27 at 10:00 a.m. The event was originally to take place 11:00 a.m. the previous Wednesday, November 20, but the city cancelled it at the last moment with little explanation.
Without a doubt, all the stories that have appeared, or will appear, about this park opening will be positive to a fault and will probably consist of the city’s announcement word for word. This account will not be one of those.
For starters, the time for this ceremony was a head scratcher. Most of the public would ordinarily be working at ten or eleven on a Wednesday morning. The re-scheduling was equally puzzling, holding the ceremony on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when most of the public was busy with the holiday.
But, after much experience with the City of San Diego, looking for common sense is a fool’s pursuit.
There was a small crowd of people at the opening. A good number of those people, however, were either city people, news media, Peninsula Community Planning Board members, and others not necessarily the “public.”
The crowd size could have been a result of inefficient noticing about the event or the lack of parking. The new park is meant to be one that people walk to. Because the whole park is barely two-thirds of an acre, no parking was included in the design.
The park entrance is at the north ending of Avenida de Portugal. This is a residential street and all of the area nearby is also residential. Those who choose to visit the park by car will be impacting the surrounding neighborhood.
The lack of parking may explain the city’s choice of time for the event. The city may have realized that too many people coming would be a real parking problem for local residents.
The new park also lacks any restroom facilities. This will be a problem for small children and seniors, exacerbated by the lack of parking. Living near Collier Park, a park also without a restroom, this writer has witnessed many incidents of public micturition. (Tip of the hat to The Big Lebowski.)
What the park does have is a children’s play area with a main structure and three other features, a grassy area, and a piece of “art.”
The main play structure is one kids can climb on and slide down one of two slides. The drop is less than five feet, short slides.
Play structure slides
There is an interactive booth. The booth contains a telescope and a series of handles that, when moved, hit a specific musical note. The kids will love this because it makes noise and drives parents nuts. Recommend bringing ear plugs.
Interactive booth
There is a large yellow, open bowl that can hold several children and spins in in place.
Spinning bowl
There is a circular feature with a ship’s wheel in it.
Ship’s wheel feature
The play area has large expanses of canvas over it. It appears that this expensive item is more for esthetics than for practicality, such as shade. The canvas is mounted on tall poles, too high to block much sun except for perhaps when the sun is directly overhead.
Shade?
The poles on the right in the picture are 20 to 25 feet tall. The picture was taken about 3:30 in the afternoon and the intrusion of sunlight in the play area is obvious.
The floor of the play area is a type of foam, very soft.
Clearly, this is the type of play equipment that toddlers enjoy, a couple of short slides, a spinning cup, noise to make, and a pretend ship. But, here is what was posted about the design.
Playground ages
The design ages boggle the mind, from 5 to 12? So, the site was not designed for toddlers under 5 but was supposedly designed so that kids as old as 12 will enjoy it. Neither age limit makes any sense. It is children under 5 that mothers regularly take to parks like this for entertainment. And, it is difficult to believe that any kid from 8 to 12 would find this place at all entertaining.
Beyond the play area is an expanse of grass that is dwarfed by all the concrete at the site. A wide sidewalk runs through the park from Avenida de Portugal north to Cañon.
Cañon exit looking north
Cañon exit looking south
Notice that this park, designed for young children, has no gate where the sidewalk empties onto Cañon where the speed limit is 45 mph. This appears to be glaring omission on the city’s part.
There is a fence along the side of the park that parallels Cañon. Once again, there appears to be a lack of common sense in the design. Most of the park is considerably above the elevation of Cañon. The fence is a serious safety feature intended to keep children from tumbling down the slope into traffic moving at 45 mph.
Unfortunately, the fence is only about three and a half feet tall, easily, quickly scalable by children. A six-foot fence would have alleviated this danger.
Artwork
The art piece was located away from everything else, down the wide sidewalk not far from the Cañon Street exit. It looks like a colorful piece of a wooden dock with an image on top. It has a hard finish to it. According to the artist’s plaque affixed to the foot of the installation, it is made of acrylic paint, accoya wood, steel, and concrete.
side view of pier
pier image
artist plaque
Accoya wood is produced by a Netherlands company with a process that apparently transform any type of fast-growing, sustainable wood into Accoya® wood through the acetylation process. The process of subjecting almost any wood to acetic anhydride essentially turns softer woods into hardwoods.
Needless to say, this wood is expensive, even more than hardwoods. The benefit is that the wood will handle the elements better. But, one has to wonder why wood was used and not some artificial materials that can withstand the elements. Because of the coloring, it is not apparent to a viewer that the pier is made of wood.
The budget for this piece of art was $30,000. It is not known if the entire budget was used, or if more money was needed. That will have to wait until the actual costs of the park are obtained from the city.
Cost
The sign in the following picture was posted at the park site.
site sign
The sign is deceptive. It shows the park cost as $1.8 million. The words “Construction Budget” are important to understand, that is just the construction cost. The total project budget for the park was $3.3 million. Almost half of the cost went to professional park designers and city management.
The first $840,000 that went into the park budget came from developer fees. Over 170 condos were built on the site that was once the Barnard Elementary School. Instead of using the money to fix the deplorable condition of Barnard Street, it was used to build a little pocket park way over in Point Loma. Here is Barnard Street.
Barnard Street
The additional $2.5 million was added to the park budget by city politicians with no public input.
The Ceremony
The final observation about this ribbon-cutting ceremony is about how the city oriented the speechmaking. The picture below shows the backs of the speechmakers. District 2 Councilmember Campbell is there with other city officials with one exception. One of those pictured is the chair of the Peninsula Community Planning Board.
These people are all facing the Avenida de Portugal entrance because that was where all the news cameras were set up. Their backs are to the people who came for the park opening. This could not have been more exemplative of this city administration, what was most important to them were the cameras.
The city was more concerned with its image than it was with the people it built the park for. That image was cameras filming them showing the park and the people behind them. The idea of turning around and addressing the crowd that came for the opening, the people the park is for, probably never occurred to the city at all.
Some of the criticism here seems off if you consider the neighborhood and the available land for the park.
Bathrooms and a parking lot would take up so much space there’d be even less park than the already small one that was able to be built. No thank you to an ugly parking lot and bathrooms (who knows what would end up going on in those) taking up so much space. This park, much like the Carrillo North Park and Lucy Evans Memorial Garden are not regional attractors but small green spaces meant to be enjoyed by those nearby.
If you need everything to have huge parking lots and bathrooms then only go to larger areas where all these amenities can be fit and let our smaller neighborhood green spaces be green.
As an older local, the lack of restrooms is unforgivable and stupid.
I said in my piece the site was too small for parking. My point is, why spend $3.3 million on a park that you can only walk to? Why did the city need professional park design consultants? Put in some grass and a few benches and that would be fine and far less expensive. As for a restroom, they don’t take up too much space. And, if you’re worried about what might take place in them at this site, then don’t build a park you can’t maintain..
My apologies: I initially left out the photo of Barnard Street; it’s now in.
I dunno, Geoff. At the age of 12, I might have used the spinning bowl as a place to sit and smoke cigarettes.
Fast forward to the present and they might sit in it to scroll through their phones.
Seems to have lost focus since commitment in 2016: “There is widespread sentiment for features that celebrate the neighborhood’s Portuguese culture and nautical history while allowing visitors to stroll through colorful plantings that can be a model for water-wise gardens. Cultural features being discussed include a “Man and the Wheel” statue and one of “Woman and Children” staring out at San Diego Harbor, awaiting the fleet’s return. Historical placards sprinkled through the park would tell of key moments in the neighborhood’s history such as the first Portuguese settlers around 1880 and the era of 20 tuna canneries in 1910-20.” The “art” piece is, instead a view from Ladera St. or La Jolla cliffs. A lost opportunity for community place making. Tunaville is special to San
Diego.
I enjoy that Portuguese theme for the park, as I was part of it working with some of the Pioneers of that tuna industry. Cosimo Cutri (F/V Toro Bravo) & Julius Zolezzi (F/V Jeannine). Some of the best years of my life.
Yes, I too was surprised to see nothing about the Portuguese history in the park. I remember it was a big part of the discussions early on. There was even a push to name the park something that included the word Portuguese.
I imagine the City of SD thinks that the SES Hall & the Cultural Center across the street, along with the Tunaman’s Memorial on Shelter Island, are all that “Tunaville” needs. The commercial high-seas tuna fishing fleet in San Diego is a bye-gone era of 35+ yrs now.
All we can do unless we ask is speculate. Not everyone was in favor of naming this Portuguese Park or something like that, but everyone thought something about that history in the park was a good idea.
Do the demographics of young users for the play equipment support this pricey amenity ?
I was more surprised at the five age limit than the twelve. Moms are constantly taking toddlers under five to parks, all week long. Once the kids turn five, they are in school, so then mostly weekend outings. Why they did not design a toddler friendly park is a mystery. And, bear in mind why that sign is there. It is not meant to be informational, it is meant to protect the city. If a child under five is injured on the play structure, that sign will provide the city a measure of relief from liability.
I just sort of accidentally came across more information about the “art work.” The original budget of $30,000 was increased in January of this year to $36,600 in an amendment to the artist’s contract. The increase was for:
“the protracted delays have resulted in cost increases for materials. which
will require an increase of $6.600. thereby requiring an increase of the total contract to an amount not to exceed $36,600”
The original agreement with the artist was in 2017. To an observer, it looks like $6,600 would be more than enough to build this little piece of dock.
Regardless, it is unimpressive. The “dock” has no connection to the rest of the park, which essentially has no theme going for it.