LASN is a photographically oriented, professional journal featuring topics of concern and state-of-the-art projects designed or influenced by registered Landscape Architects.
Issue link: https://landscapearchitect.epubxp.com/i/85881
Above The custom "mound slide" (Columbia Cascade) provides a six-foot-wide, 30-foot-long space for children and families to ride down in tandem. Custom stainless steel hoops and "Spirelli" Climbing Poles (Urban Design Berlin) are anchored into the safety surfacing (Tot Turf) for other play options. Middle Custom climbing nets (Landscape Structures) were installed in the "slice of the pie" left out of the central mound. The wall beneath the climbing net is covered in a vertical faux-boardform finish (Fitzgerald Formliners) and climbing holds (Passe Montagne Climbing Systems). PHOTO CREDITS: KLA In March, San Francisco's 14-acre Mission Dolores Park became the new home to the Helen Diller Playground, an urban play area filled with customized features that hundreds of local children, school groups and parents now use on a daily basis. The new play area replaced a small playground built in the 1920s in a converted wading pond that had been filled with sand to create a soft base for climbing structures and slides. For decades, the former pool would flood after rainstorms from surface runoff and groundwater seeps. Despite the flooding, the playground carried on until its last injection of public capital in the mid-1980s. Laden with lead paint and caustic wood preservatives, the playground was finally closed and demolished. 42 Landscape Architect and Specifier News By the time local officials cut the ribbon and opened the new play area on March 31, 2012, the drainage issues were resolved, the new slides and climbing features took full advantage of the hilly topography San Francisco is famous for, and groves of palms and shade trees nestled the play space comfortably into the park's terrain. After nine months of construction and $3.5 million invested, the playground is once again the main attraction for families from the Mission and Castro Districts, and has become a destination playground for the region. The property that Mission Dolores Park inhabits has a long and colorful past, beginning with the Yelamu tribe that lived in the area prior to the arrival of Spanish missionaries in the late 18th century. After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, the site served as