Neighborhood children will help design new playground at Skiddy Park

Neighborhood children from the Near Westside will share ideas about what they’d like to see in a new playground to be built in Skiddy Park next month. The children, ages 7-12, are members of after-school programs in Peace Incorporated and Imagine Syracuse.

The group will meet with Karen Armstrong, architect for the playground, and Glen Lewis, of the City of Syracuse’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Youth Programs. The group will meet, Tuesday, Sept. 20, from 4-6 p.m. at PEACE Inc., at the intersection of Wyoming and Marcellus streets.

“It is important that kids from the neighborhood have some say in what this playground looks like,” says Maarten Jacobs, director of the Near Westside Initiative. “They are the ones playing on it, not us. With their participation, we know they’ll have more respect and interest in the playground then if we had gone in there and just built them a playground without asking them what they wanted in it.”

Members of the Near Westside Initiative raised $40,000 to build the playground. The City of Syracuse has agreed to match funding. New basketball courts, funded by the Courts for Kids and the Boeheim Foundation, were installed in July.

Construction on the playground is scheduled to begin in late October and will be completed in November. For more information, contact Jacobs at 480-7678 or mjacob01@syr.edu.