Blog du Wren

Our Town Our Park

For those readers who reside in the Anacortes area, this is probably old news; it has been the talk of the town, front page news, etc. For the rest of you, I wanted to clue you in on a great project going on here in town.

Our Town Our Park is a community project to build a new playground at Storvik Park. The park was designed by the community (with input from kids), funded by community fund raising, and constructed using volunteer labor from the community, with all sorts of other community involvement (donated meals for the volunteer crews, donated materials, etc.). The organization and enthusiasm for the project have been great and it looks like everything is coming together wonderfully.

I went and put in my shift of volunteer labor yesterday. My team put up a little hut in the 2-5 year old section, a hut that I will be able to forever feel a special pride in*. It was amazing how many people I ran into on the build site: old teachers, parents of friends, high school friends who I haven't seen in ages. Granted the majority of the volunteers have some personal stake in the project (i.e. have kids of their own), but there were other who were there just for the community involvement.

The grand opening for the park is this evening at 5:00pm. Hopefully their website will be updated with pictures of the build in progress as well as the final project (which, I must say, comes close to rivaling the best playground of all time, South Whidbey). The whole deal has been another one of those I-sure-am-happy-to-live-in-Anacortes experiences.

Sunday June 1 2008

File under: Anacortes

Toggle Comments (6)

comment?

on Mon 02nd Jun, 2008 09:53 am PDT Saxtor said:
I went and checked this badboy out. This playground is really, really awesome*. Once I went down to check out the progress on Sunday evening, I was left wishing I had pitched in. Not because they appeared desperate for help (because the place was crawling with helpers, and people willing to help at any moment), but I would have loved to have put in my piece for the community.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this, if you are within driving/visiting distance of Anacortes, this playground demands a special trip, whether you have kids of your own or not.
************************
on Mon 02nd Jun, 2008 12:25 pm PDT Christen said:
What a great project!!! No pictures on their website that I can find, so post some please! Still needing that extra little something something to get us to make the A-town trip this summer, maybe this will put us over the edge!
************************
on Mon 02nd Jun, 2008 02:14 pm PDT Saxtor said:
Ask and you shall receive. Someone took some photos...from Flickr
************************
on Mon 02nd Jun, 2008 02:17 pm PDT Saxtor said:
I should add that the photos look nothing like what I saw on Sunday evening. I'd guess that those were taken on Saturday or early Sunday. And, I can also tell it would be hard to represent the scale using photographs. In part due to the limitations of the format, but I don't think they make a point-and-shoot kid-scale camera, either.
************************
on Wed 04th Jun, 2008 02:40 pm PDT Wren said:
I haven't gotten a change to go up and get pictures yet, but there were a few in the Anacortes American this week. I poked around on their website and came across this slideshow of the process.
************************
on Mon 09th Jun, 2008 09:39 am PDT Wren said:
I finally got around to stopping by the park to check it out. It looks even better now that it is all painted up and fully operational. I grabbed a few quick shots to share: 1. 2. 3. .
************************

<<Familiar Voice on Marketplace

FC 34 - An Industry Trend I Can Support>>

Name:
URL: (optional)
Comment:
speak yer peace