It’s playtime on the bayou trail
Latest amenity blends natural and social ecologies for young children
Old-fashioned playtime is back in style.
It involves running and jumping, climbing and splashing and getting a little dirty in the process. The Barbara Fish Daniel Nature Play Area feeds into a national movement to get kids outdoors and connecting with nature.
In a serene spot on the north bank of Buffalo Bayou Park — next door to the underrenovation Jamail Skatepark at the Sabine Street Bridge — the 1.5-acre play park is designed to bring natural and social ecologies together for young children.
The larger park, which stretches 2.3 miles on 160 acres along Allen Parkway from Shepherd to Sabine, has brought newly usable greenspace to downtown residents, workers and visitors for a while now.
Extended walking/cycling paths draw nearby residents, workers who trade their wingtips and heels for sneakers at lunch and others looking for a little vitamin D with their exercise. The Johnny Steele Dog Park opened in January 2015 and the Dunlavy event space opened the following October along with the play park, funded with a $1 million donation from the Ray C. Fish Foundation.
Catherine Daniel Kaldis, president of the foundation, said helping create the play park was a meaningful way to honor the family’s late matriarch, Barbara Fish Daniel. “The idea of a nature play area in the central city was compelling for our family. To see it today — filled with children and surrounded by runners and other parkgoers all enjoying the trails and the other amenities — is inspiring.”
Anne Olson, president of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, said she hopes the growing park — and expanded parking that will result from an overhaul of Allen Parkway — will stimulate development as Discovery Green has for downtown.
She noted that a late-winter count showed record numbers of daily users throughout the park. On an anecdotal level, she said, it’s doing what the partnership hoped — bringing all kinds of people outdoors.
Scott McCready, principal at SWA landscape architects, handled the design with consultation from the Natural Learning Initiative, a North Carolina State University-based group that creates natural play spaces at sites such as museums, botanical gardens and childcare centers.
A generation ago, parents often shooed their kids outside to play. They got on their bikes and used their imaginations, playing kickball, tag and hide-and-seek in the grass, among the trees and in front and backyards. The publication of Richard Louv’s “Last Child in the Woods” in 2005 launched a grassroots movement that continues today, with followers promoting outdoor play as fundamental to children’s health.
The new play area at Buffalo Bayou Park reflects that philosophy with a design that engages young children, an age group often forgotten in playspace design, McCready said.
In fact, don’t call it a playground. That’s a “loaded word,” according to Robin Moore, a professor of landscape architecture and director of NLI, the group that consulted with the park’s planners.
“People think of manufactured play equipment, not so much something that’s custom-made, in the side of a bayou,” Moore said. “We try to get away from the image of a standardized piece of play equipment and talk about space that’s comfortable and exciting to kids but also a place where parents want to be — instead of watching their kids play for 10 minutes and wanting to leave because they’re bored.”
The space is small and had only a few old-growth trees for shade, though more have been planted. A 30-foot drop in its slope — yes, a great place for a slide — was immediately viewed as an opportunity rather than a challenge.
Everything about the park is intentional. Plants serve as sensory stimulation. Logs, rocks and a sinuous path looping through the park all symbolize the bayou that runs down below.
And it’s designed with child development in mind. The dozen or so activity areas are meant to address the needs of a small age range — 3 to about 6 or 7 — but with a huge difference in abilities.
The park’s entrance provides a “lookout” area on two levels, so parents and adults both can see what’s out there and appreciate the beauty of the overall site. Young children can imagine they’re in a treehouse, even though they’re on solid ground.
A stationary rock bed includes a wheel that kids crank to draw water that trickles down like a miniature creek. If kids want to move rocks around to dam up water, that’s fine — it means they’re using their imaginations and developing their motor skills.
A couple of grassy areas have gentle slopes for kids to roll down.
Two high-traffic areas include a big sand pit with logs arranged like a haphazard teepee frame that engages the youngest children and another area with a tall, steep slide and two climbing areas to draw the 6- and 7-year-olds.
Moore said he imagined that the play park’s visitors would be young families with a toddler and maybe an infant in a stroller. Earlier this week, that’s exactly who was there.
Kristian and Nathaniel Borden were there with their children, an infant, a toddler and a 4-year-old celebrating his birthday with treats and his play group.
Kristian Borden said she and her friends live nearby, and this was their third visit to the park, which they watched with interest as it developed.
On their first visit, some of the kids didn’t even want to get dirty. Soon they learned how to turn on the water that trickles over the rock bed. Then they started moving rocks around, and eventually they discovered that mixing water and sand makes mud.
And that sand pit? It was more like catnip for toddlers, with boys and girls squirming through sunscreen application when all they really wanted to do was dig and climb.
The developmental and design issues at play here are “affordance” and “territoriality,” Moore explained. Affordance is how a child reads and responds to an environment; territoriality is how a child sees challenges as he ages and grows.
So that slide that looked too intimidating at age 3 is more approachable at 4 or 5.
The log teepee is a shape that child-development experts know works with young children, Moore said. It’s just a frame, but in a child’s imagination it becomes a place to hide with other kids, promoting interaction.
“Engaging kids’ imagination is a big part of it,” McCready said. “You can sit on it, pour sand on it or climb it. We want it to be evocative of a house, and we want kids to not be so literal and use their imagination.” What’s important is that kids have fun and parents know their children are safe, Moore said.
“If the kids are having fun and running around and joyfully exploring the place, that’s the bottom line. Hopefully, parents who are hesitant will see it’s OK. If it’s good for kids, we’ve done our job,” he said.