After long wait, kids ready to play
New features grace Mountain Lake Park after 2-year closure
It sure took a long time to get the swings up and running at Mountain Lake playground, said 6-year-old Ollie Dias.
“Way too long,” he said, gazing through the fence that has kept him outside, looking in, for more than two years. “The grown-ups should have worked harder.”
The grown-ups were still working this week but, on Thursday, the fences came down and the teeter-totter started tottering.
The playground debuted the same week as the long-delayed opening of the remodeled $14 million Glen Canyon Recreation Center, complete with a climbing wall. And a new batting cage opened Thursday at Victoria Manalo Draves Park at Folsom and Sherman streets South of Market.
The remodeled Mountain Lake playground adjacent to the Presidio reopened after a $3.15 million face-lift. Architects began tinkering with it four years ago, and the fence went up in 2015. Then a clerical error on a contractor’s bid sheet — along with torrential rains of winter — led to long delays involving lawyers and idled construction workers.
“Mountain Lake Park is a jewel for the surrounding neighborhoods and for our city,” said San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell, whose district includes Mountain Lake Park. “This renovation is a terrific example of the community and city partnering together to fight for nec-
essary improvements and upgrades that generations will now be able to use and enjoy for years to come.”
For two years, Ollie and his kid sister, Daphne, 5, had been gazing at the park through the fence, wondering when the heck they will be able to go on a swing or a slide.
Their mom, Liz, said the family was looking forward to getting acquainted with the jungle gyms to climb on, the springy wooden discs to jump on and the concrete frog to scramble atop. To the delight of the Mountain Lake playground faithful, the old concrete slide has been refurbished with the addition of a wheelchair ramp and is now ready to rip the pant seats of a whole new generation of toddlers.
“Whee,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the city Recreation and Park Department, the other afternoon as he gave the new old slide a try. “It does give you a little bit of a wedgie.”
The mommies and daddies of the neighborhood, under the banner of the Friends of Mountain Lake Playground, got into the act, picking and choosing among the various pieces of playground equipment offered up by Richeter Spielgeräte, a high-end German playground company that makes its jungle gyms out of pricey larch wood from the Alps.
The mommies insisted that the concrete animals selected for the little kids’ half of the park be based on critters that can be found in nearby Mountain Lake. Hence the frog, along with a turtle.
“We rejected the bunny,” said Claire Myers, who helped do the picking.
The mommies and daddies also insisted on a clear sight line from the parents’ bench to the restrooms, for peace of mind in the modern age.
Missing in the big kids’ half of the playground is one entire swing. There used to be three swings, now there are two.
Also missing from the remodeled playground is sand, a playground staple that got evicted for not being compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act. In its place is a sea of spongy yellow mats. Ginsburg said sand was a “legitimate play element” and said there was plenty of it at Ocean Beach, for those interested.
Perhaps the most startling feature at Mountain Lake playground is a collection of 13 tall metal poles set askew into concrete, not intended for climbing on. Designers said they were intended to look like a grove of trees.
“They look like metal poles,” said 5-year-old Daphne Dias, who added that she knows what a tree looks like.