The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
PARK VANDALIZED
Police search for vandals who caused $20,000$30,000 in damages at Sunnyside Park this week
Lorain police are searching for vandals who destroyed a west side park this week.
Sunnyside Park, on Reeves Avenue south of West 24th Street, had most of its slides destroyed and the hard rubberized plastic borders that surrounded the play structure were torn up from the ground sometime between Aug. 13 and 15, city officials said.
Lorain Safety-Service Director Dan Given surveyed the damage Aug. 15 and estimated the cost at between $20,000 and $30,000.
“Who does this?” he asked. “When I was on Council, we fought like heck to get these playgrounds into these poorer areas, because these kids need it the most.
Garcia said this is the third incident of vandalism of a city park since June, including breaking into the bathrooms at Central Park, 401 W. 26th St.
“Most parents, if you’ve got a job, you’ve got your own playground at your house and stuff. We fought like hell to get this here, spent a ton of money on some of these parks and this is the way its treated.”
A large plaque on the playground shows that it was installed in 2002 during then-Mayor Craig Folton’s administration using a recycling grant from the Lorain County Solid
Waste District.
Despite its roots lying in recycling, the park was strewn with trash and graffiti.
The question now, Given said, is whether to spend the money to replace the damaged equipment or just scrap the playground altogether.
“I was asking whether we can just buy the end pieces (of the slides) that were broken,” Given said. “But most of the time, all we can do is buy a whole new slide.
“Each slide is about $5,000 and not even the real big ones, but the small ones.”
As for the border pieces, Given said the city likely will not replace them and just use a grader to smooth over the area left behind by their removal.
Given said the police are working on a report on the incident.
But when he said he spoke to some of the neighbors, they were not forthcoming with information and claimed not to have noticed anything.
Given said he found this unlikely.
“They had to have made a ton of noise, because historically, (the plastic used on the slides) is flexible,” he
said. “This took someone quite a while.”
Given then picked up a pipe on the ground nearby and took a few whacks at one of the slides.
“You hear how loud that would be?” he said turning to Lorain Public Property Manager Lori Garcia.
“And look how it’s not really (hurting it),” Garcia replied. “You’d have to do that for a long time to get through there.”
Garcia said this is the third incident of vandalism of a city park since June, including breaking into the bathrooms at Central Park, 401 W. 26th St.