Hector Alvarez enjoys the new playground after a ribbon cutting ceremony celebrating the re-opening of the Lakefront Park playground. Photo made Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023
Kim Brent/Beaumont Enterprise
Beaumont Enterprise
Kim Brent, Photojournalist
Pleasure Island’s brand new Lakefront Park playground was broken in Thursday afternoon as a busload of children from Wheatley Early Childhood pulled up just before a ribbon cutting ceremony officially opening the site.
“I wanted the kids of Port Arthur to be the first ones on the playground,” Pleasure Island Advisory Board Director George Davis said.
He reached out to Wheatley Principal Fredia Washington with an invitation to join the board, Port Arthur City Council, Parks and Recreation and other officials, for the grand opening event.
“Kids, are you ready to have fun?” Davis asked the group of nearly 50 students seated at the picnic tables beneath the park’s canopy-covered pavilion.
It’s not a question he had to ask twice, and before the scissors had even cut through the blue ribbon stretched in front of the playscape, they were off and running.
As officials took the commemorative ribbon cutting photos, the students and other community children scaled the main feature of the playground – a blue and orange pirate ship with two flags adorned with a skull and crossbones.
The ship is filled with tunnels and crawlways, multiple slides, interactive features like a ship wheel, a large movable tic-tac-toe game and numerous places for children to develop their climbing skills.
Behind the ship, a smaller interactive playscape for younger children stands. The north end of the playground was edged with a bank of swings, including a “mommy and me” set, which allows an adult and small child to swing in tandem, Kraftsman Commercial Playgrounds and Waterparks builder Dan Johnson said.
The playground's floor is made of a Pour in Place material – a cushiony surface that makes it more inclusive for people with disabilities, Johnson said.
It’s a feature of the playground that appealed to Port Acres resident Lindsay Schaller, who brought her two boys to check out the city’s newest playground,
“You don’t have to worry about them getting sand in their shoes or pools of water,” Schaller said.
Johnson said other material choices were made with ecological and sustainability objectives in mind.
The playscapes are made entirely of recycled plastic, which will last longer in Southeast Texas’ climate where wood and steel don’t fare well for very long.
That was part of the problem with the Fun Island Depot playground that was torn down in the spring to make way for the new playground, whose build began in mid-June.
That playground was built in 1999, but it hadn’t seen the kind of activity that filled the park Thursday in several years, as its wood and metal was degrading, causing a spiral of never-ending costly repairs, Davis said.
“We did an assessment of the playground in 2021, and it literally failed every test,” Davis said. That prompted the Parks and Recreation to permanently close the playground, which was deemed a safety hazard for families and children.
“It was essentially abandoned, and that turned away a lot of people (who were visitors to Pleasure Island),” he said.
That created an even larger impediment to Davis and the advisory board’s efforts to spearhead a revival of Pleasure Island as “a premiere destination for families in the future,” board member told The Enterprise in April when the board opened a bird blind in the park’s walking trails.
That blind, along with the renovation of the park’s disc golf course, were among the earliest segment’s of the revitalization plan.
To make the park a true family destination, they needed a playground, Davis and board members told Port Arthur City Council, who created a voter-approved bond in 2022 to fund the work.
Upon approval, plans for the facility got underway.
Davis said they chose the ship playscape as the main feature, because the nautical theme fits with the culture of the island.
The blue and orange colors also fit with the City of Port Arthur’s rebranding campaign and the Wayfinding Project, which entailed erecting blue and orange monuments at each of the city’s six main entry points.
Looking around at the flurry of activity in the new playground, Davis noted the city staff who not only attended the opening, but also brought their children.
“Everybody’s been waiting on it,” Davis said, though he acknowledged that some still mourned the loss of the old playground.
“I know that Fun Island Depot had a lot of sentimental value for people in the community (who helped build the original playscape and enjoyed childhood memories from its hay day) – myself included,” Davis said. “But we have a different era of kids, and we wanted them to have something as nice as we had in the original playground.”