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 […]

Artist David Franklin revisits, will touch up the 20-year-old works 

David Franklin was just finding his touch as a professional artist when he was commissioned to create pieces for a new playground called KidsUp!  

Schooled in the Northwest Coast Native style, Franklin, of Indianola, saw a dearth of public art on Bainbridge that reflected the island’s first inhabitants and their culture.  

Working with red cedar, Franklin carved a large-format Northwest Coast-styled mask and a smaller eagle, figures that would welcome visitors to the playground for the next 20 years.

“This cultural language is something I speak in support of Northwest Native artists,” he says. “It doesn’t represent me per se, but it is a language I’ve learned … A whole generation of Native artists are coming up who are really vital and doing great things. This is from an era where that didn’t happen as much.”

Now, as the playground’s new […]