It’s forty-seven feet long, wide enough to race a fleet of tricycles through the middle, two stories high at the funnel, with the familiar forest-green-and white livery of the real thing: a Washington State Ferry.
Scaled down perhaps, but through a child’s eyes, not by much.
“To a little kid,” Doug Slingerland says, “it’s going to feel life size.”
To the fascination of passerby – many of them, wide-eyed future “riders” – the KidsUp! Ferry Boat is almost ready for launch at Battle Point Park.
Working from a handful of schematics and drawings (and sometimes their own intuition), the Park District construction team puzzled the ferry into existence – all steel panels, railings, hatchways, ladders and decking, and the thousands of nuts and bolts and clamps that hold it all together. What in shipbuilding parlance would be the “keel” is a forest of more than three dozen steel stanchions, now cemented into place, around which the giant play structure took shape.
Slingerland, who helped manage the project for Bainbridge Metro Parks put it thusly:
“It’s like IKEA on steroids.”
Three years in the planning, the Ferry Boat play structure was dreamed up by a group of island parents, working with Bainbridge Metro Parks officials, the Parks Foundation, and equipment vendor Landscape Structures, Inc., of Delano, Minn. The committee was brainstorming a playground centerpiece, something that would define KidsUp! The Next Generation of Play as had the Sherwood Forest-like pilings and castle towers of the original playground.
Landscape Structures offered a standardized kit from which a stylized “pirate ship” could be fashioned, but that didn’t really fit the Northwest theme. But there was a real boat nearby that would fit right in: a ferry.
The vendor rounded up ferry photos, sent their designers back to the drawing board, and came back with a new plan: a one-of-a-kind play structure that would not just evoke Puget Sound’s maritime heritage, but mimic its signature vessel.
“We wanted something that would tie the entire playground together, and the ferry really does that perfectly,” committee chair Curt Thomas says. “It’s a one-of-a-kind creation for our island, and I can’t wait to see all the kids playing on it.”
Coming this summer: a playground of wonder
More than a standalone feature, the Ferry Boat is one link in a giant loop around the expansive new playground. A surfaced pathway will wind over berms and through the original castle towers, and connect up with the ferry’s top deck at both ends. A new Trike Track will run right through the ferry “car tunnel” and meet up with the playground path at several points.
All around the ferry, a panoply of new swings, spinners and a wheelchair-welcoming merry-go-round are falling into place. Climbable Orca whales will “swim” ahead of the ferry, just off the port bow. A “Lookout Pier” and sandy beach beckon, “Land, Ho!”
The play elements and the Ferry Boat itself will welcome kids of all abilities and mobility, with extensive fall-friendly soft surfacing – a model of inclusive design.
The playground has grown in area by about one-third from the original.
“It’s a huge scale,” says Dawn Janow, Park Board member. “Kids are not going to get bored here. They’re just not.”
A late-summer opening is planned, and fundraising continues: the KidsUp! campaign is still $45,000 short of goal. The Park District Board recently advanced the money to move the project forward, funds that are needed for other park projects.
“The board wants this to happen, so they’re saying, ‘Go. Don’t let funding hold you up,” Singlerland says. “If we don’t have to spend that money on the playground, it goes back into our general fund and helps us do the other things we need to do. It ends up benefiting the whole community.”
Tax-deductible gifts to complete KidsUp! The Next Generation of Play can be made through the Bainbridge Island Parks Foundation.
Four playground sponsorships remain: the Roller and Tunnel slides, the Trike Track, and the Sound Garden musical element, at various levels. A fifth sponsorship, a community drive to name one of the ferry wheelhouses after the “KidsUp! Founders & Friends” of the original playground, is about two-thirds towards its $9,000 goal.
When the playground opens – now projected for late summer – the Ferry Boat play structure is going to leave quite a wake. So too, the whole playground.
“I’m blown away, honestly,” says Janow, whose own kids grew up with the original playground and treasures those memories still. “This is just phenomenal and fantastic. To see this filled with kids is going to be incredible.”
