Finally, A Brand New Playground (Let's Wear this Kid Out)

A Little Back Story

Anyone who follows me must know by now that I live in the overcrowded city of Los Angeles, specifically in the neighborhood of San Pedro. It's kind of funny because even though San Pedro has been a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles for over 100 years, people here still treat it like we are a separate city.

That is understandable when you consider that San Pedro really has its own identity within Los Angeles. Just hopping on the 110 North for a couple of miles and everything changes quite a lot. In many ways it feels a bit stuck in the 70s here, but in a nice way. Old school lowriders, old music, and really laid back people. Not the hustle and bustle like you experience when you leave the LA Harbor.

The biggest negative that I feel living here is that often it seems like the city of LA just doesn't give a crap about keeping things up in San Pedro. I have been noticing, however, that this has been changing a bit recently. Many of the local parks have climbing structures that are quite frankly down right dangerous.

From broken slides with sharp edges to rusted out swing chains, I have seen derelict park equipment sit unrepaired for years at a time. For example, there is a nice park with a large open field right next to a local Target. It has a large plastic tunnel that kids can crawl through to get to a winding slide. At one point about 3 years ago the plastic split down the middle at the top of the tunnel.

You could see that a little kid could get their leg stuck in there and do some serious damage. The city's fix was to wrap a chain around the entrance to the tunnel and strap a wet floor sign to it. This was their solution for the next several years. Kids eventually folder back the wet floor sign and crawled through.

About a week ago, I stopped by the park and noticed that seemingly out of nowhere, the tunnel had been completely replaced and repaired. I thought it was a fluke, but certainly wasn't going to complain. Now I could start letting @little-ricky play on it again!

The City Finally Did Something Nice

There seems to be some larger effort to fix up the parks around town, because this was not the only repair and upgrade that appears to be going on. I have posted before about the Korean Bell sitting at the highest point here in San Pedro. It is a popular spot to hang out and look out at the ocean. There has always been a really neglected small climbing structure and swing set there. The swing was in really bad shape and sounded like howling banshees when used.

To my surprise, when I showed up a few days ago the old stuff was completely gone and replaced with all new state of the art equipment. And that is what you see in the attached photos. It's kind of cool too because it follows the theme of the Korean Bell with the shapes as well as some musical instruments that have been installed.

There are some large xylophone type instruments that are tuned in a pentatonic scale that is common in east Asian music. While little Ricky is playing and climbing, I get on the musical instruments and likely drive the other parents crazy writing some new tunes. These are actually quite usable instruments compared to the normal playground 'toy' instruments.

I am not holding my breath that the city will continue to make improvements like these, but there does seem to be a concerted effort to spend some money where it actually matters for once. This is probably part of the effort to make the last affordable place in LA unaffordable, as home prices have nearly doubled here in just the last few years that I've lived here. At this point if something drastic doesn't happen I may die paying rent to very wealthy people.

For now I will just try to appreciate the fact that we finally have some safe and decent equipment for the little ones to use without having to drive to the fancy beach cities just to visit the park. I will call that a win for the day!