George Kinnear donated land for what became the Bayview-Kinnear Park in 1904, but the play area at the corner of W. Prospect and Third Ave. W. below Kerry Park had begun to show its age in recent years.
Enter neighborhood residents who teamed with Seattle Parks and Recreation and the Department of Neighborhoods to fix up the space with new playground equipment and landscaping.
It was a $400,000 project paid for with a combination of a Department of Neighborhoods matching grant and donated time and money from local residents, businesses and King County, among others.
The project was finally finished in time for a reopening last Saturday, Aug. 11. "Construction started in March," said Casey Margard from the Friends of Bayview-Kinnear Park.
Things looked grim for a while, however. "When we went out to bid, they were all so high," she said. "That was very discouraging." But some generous donors stepped forward in time, and the project was saved, Margard said. "We pulled it off."
Karen McHenry, a member of the Friends of Kinnear Park steering committee, was the master of ceremonies for the opening, and she said the first meeting about the project took place in May 2004.
But organizers first had to answer a fundamental question: "Why in the world would we take on a project of this size and complexity?" McHenry said.
One reason was the need to make the park a safe environment, and the old wooden playground equipment didn't fit the vision because it was very unsafe, she said. "And it needed to go."
The organization also wanted to preserve open space, but there was yet another reason to move forward, McHenry said. "We had a chance as invested neighbors in this community to leave a legacy."
That's not to say the past was completely wiped out. "At several meetings, kids begged us to save the slides," she said. "We did."
Still, a safety surface under and around the slides was installed, and recycled curbs were used to build a stairway up to the slides from one side, Margard said. New stairs have also been added on the Prospect Street side to open up the view to the playground equipment, she said.
McHenry had high praise for a number of people involved in the project. They included Pam Kliment, a parks department liaison with the Department of Neighborhoods. "No matter how crazy we sounded, you stuck with us," McHenry said to Kliment at the ceremony.
Kliment was equally complimentary. "This one has gone so smoothly," she said after the ceremony. "If every project went like this, my job would be so much easier."
More than 2,000 hours of volunteer labor was involved in the park project. Some were more rigorous than others.
McHenry's daughter Kathryn McHenry and Jarrid Nakata raised money by getting pledges for each time they went down the slide. They went down the slide several hundred times, and Kathryn said she was sore afterward.
But the two kids were acknowledged for their dedication at the ceremony. The pair got to cut the ribbon above the slide to mark the grand reopening. Then they slid down yet another time.
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