Six-year-old Onome Grell (left) played with other children in the new fountain at the grand opening yesterday.
(John Tlumacki/ Globe Staff)
Long-awaited playground makes its Codman Square debut
Six-year-old Onome Grell (left) played with other children in the new fountain at the grand opening yesterday.
(John Tlumacki/ Globe Staff)
Five years ago, Dorcas Dunham could only envision what the vacant lot on Elmhurst Street would look like if it were remodeled as a playground.
As children splashed through a spouting water fountain and went down slides yesterday for the first time at the lot, Dunham no longer had to use her imagination. The dumped car parts and discarded kitchen appliances, the bushes and the weeds had all been cleared away.
“It is such a blessing,’’ she said of the new Elmhurst Playground near Codman Square. “This is what happens when a community comes together and stands together.’’
Dunham, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and more than 70 neighborhood residents welcomed the fresh green space yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony held at the playground. The event capped eight years of fund-raising spearheaded by the Trust for Public Land and kept well-energized by community support. Yet despite the ceremony, the playground will not permanently open until July 10, when the plants and grass have had time to stabilize in the ground.
But Menino said he will work toward opening the park earlier - in time for Independence Day.
“This is a day of celebration,’’ he told the crowd. “This is your park, let us make sure we maintain your park.’’
To help choose the location of the new play space, the Trust for Public Land conducted an analysis eight years ago that looked at areas throughout the city with the highest proportion of children and the least number of parks, said Whitney Hatch, vice president and New England regional director of the trust.
“It led us right to this neighborhood,’’ Hatch said. Boston has 14 acres of parks for every 1,000 residents, while Dorchester has five, the study found. Codman Square has the least number of parks, with only 2 acres per the same number of residents, Hatch said.
The new playground stretches for 10,000 square feet and includes all the typical enticements for children, including a swing set, a tall playhouse with a slide, and even a gushing water fountain that they (or their parents) can activate. But its difference is in details.
Community organizers and residents, including children and teenagers, voted for the type of activities and decorations that would go into the play space and worked closely with city artists to draft out their designs, including its freshly painted, red steel front gate and a silver tree sculpture, which stands in the middle. Shaulita Francis, 13, said she and friends helped pick the playground’s picnic tables and the mat under the swings.
“It was so empty before,’’ said Francis, who lives across the street from the lot. “We used to play kickball in it.’’
Park planners began spurring community involvement in green space projects in 2004 to lower the crime rate at public parks, after a string of shootings and stabbings on Boston playgrounds in Dorchester and Roxbury. Sherimon Harris became a volunteer on the Elmhurst project when she was 16. She went knocking on doors to engage neighborhood residents, she said.
“It is just something for the kids,’’ said Harris, now 19. “They play on the street where they can get hit by cars, now they have a place to play.’’
Jazmine Ulloa can be reached at lulloa@globe.com 
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