There are no safety hazards, but the artificial turf installed a decade ago on the playfield in the Queen Anne Bowl is showing its age and needs to be replaced, according to Seattle Parks and Recreation.
"It's not the optimum playing surface right now," explained Ted Holden, a senior landscape architect with Parks. That's the bad news. The good news is that the company that manufactures the artificial turf will sell it to the city at cost, he said.
It's a way for the company to say "thank you" because Seattle Parks and Recreation was the first agency in the Puget Sound region to use the turf, Holden said "It came out of the blue," he said of the offer.
Cost of the synthetic turf will be $150,000, and it will cost an additional $150,000 to remove the old surface and install the new one at the Queen Anne Bowl, Holden said.
But that's a bargain compared with the original $1-million cost, he said. "Yes, the initial cost is huge, but you don't have to mow the surface or water it."
Artificial turf can be played on year-round, unlike grass, which stops growing and goes dormant when overnight temperatures drop below 40 degrees, Holden said. If people continue to play on grass fields after that point, the grass gets worn away to the dirt, and further play beyond that starts taking out the root system, he went on to say.
The field in the Queen Anne bowl is heavily used, and it raised the bar for Parks, according to Holden. "That kind of set the tone for what the public demanded on our fields," he said.
The same artificial surface is now in place on several other city fields that include the one in Interbay, Bobby Morris Park, Genesee Park and Loyal Heights, Holden added.
Signs by the Queen Anne Bowl say the work on replacing the turf will begin Oct. 15, but that's no longer accurate. "We had an incredibly wet September and early October, he said, explaining that soggy conditions prevent a good installation.
Holden estimates the field will be dry enough to install new turf in November. The job will only take about a month, he added.
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