Agree, this one was a little boring and the splash-pad-sand-pit situation was precarious for anyone who didn’t want to get covered in wet sand.
The trees are beautiful, the snacks proximity is great, but I mostly just wanted to go to Niagara since we were over there. Do they take toddlers?
I was surprised to learn that Tompkins Square Park actually has two distinct playgrounds. The West playground is visible from Avenue A. We had just stopped at Ralph’s Italian Ice for a treat. The Italian Ice was in fact a ploy to leave the playground at Union Square, but having no better place to eat it, we ended up in the park.
I was surprised how many pieces of playground equipment were here. There were five distinctive play areas and a whole lot of benches. The downside is most of these pieces weren’t all that interesting, and they all felt disconnected from each other. Instead of creating a large play area with a cohesive space, they were all zoned in a way made each individual piece feel inadequate.
The children using the park were congregating in the areas around the shady portions. The tree coverage here was mostly great with large old trees looming over the toddler areas.
The benches in the park have seen better days. The wood was well worn and some of the bench seats were even moss-covered. At one point the city must have sold naming rights to these benches, but even those with plaques on them were falling apart.
One of the big problems with this park was that the water feature and the sandpit were connected. A lot of the sand had been removed from the sandpit and was spread out in the splash pad, which meant mostly there was a lot of wet sand. It was a messy situation and hard to avoid, since the waterjets were dead center in the playground without any fencing around.
Bruno sampled each of the pieces he could climb. All but one of them had places where he could reach. But again, none of these were particularly interesting to him, and he seemed to lose interest in each piece of equipment quickly before moving onto the next.
