NewHolly community gains a place for its 2,500 children to play

Celine Glavan displayed all the patience of a 2-year-old.

"I wanna go play on the playground," the wee one told her mom Friday, as a couple of hundred volunteers were midway through building an entire playground at her neighborhood park — all in a single day.

Work that began at 9 a.m. ended six hours later with a ribbon cutting, signifying another step in the evolution of the NewHolly community in Southeast Seattle.

The basis of the playground design came from about 50 NewHolly children, who offered fanciful ideas in August, their suggestions ranging from chocolate fountains and swimming pools (nix on those) to spiral slides and monkey bars (got 'em).

"Whenever I would see a tree in the park with a bent limb, I'd think about how nice it would be to have a playground with monkey bars so that kids could hang on something other than a tree," said Sam Cheng, who lives in view of the park and is the father of a 2-year-old and 6-month-old.

Formerly the Holly Park public-housing project, the 1,400-home Seattle Housing Authority redevelopment, completed in 2006, is an experiment in urban living that mixes people of diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds in a high-density setting.

NewHolly also is a neighborhood with a lot of children — about 2,500 in all. Yet its largest park — a rectangular strip of green — lacked places for younger kids to play.

One end of the park gets a lot of use as an impromptu soccer field and also has basketball hoops. But the other end, designed as a naturescape of grass and boulders, was underused, said Joy Bryngleson, who works for the housing authority as NewHolly's community builder.

"An idea behind NewHolly was for this to be an evolving community where the people living here would get to choose what they wanted their neighborhood to be," she said.

Several parents requested a playground, so Bryngleson contacted KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit that works with communities and corporate partners to build places for kids to play.

KaBOOM! teamed with Bank of America, which donated $62,000 for the equipment and provided the majority of the volunteers Friday who did everything from assembling the play equipment to constructing wood benches where adults will be able to sit and watch their children play.

Feliz Sanchez, another NewHolly resident volunteering on Friday, said her two boys, Jefferson, 11, and Raphael-Geomar, 5, have been bruised and bloodied playing on the boulders in the park.

While looking at the park from her third-floor apartment window, Sanchez said she had prayed for a playground — and now her prayers have been answered.

"This playground is proof of progress taking place at NewHolly," she said.

Hodan Mohamed said her two young daughters submitted ideas for the playground, the 6-year-old requesting that the equipment be pink.

The equipment is colorful — though not pink — as are freshly painted checkerboard tabletops where adults can play chess. The playground area also is adorned with colorful directional signs that point to places like Somalia, Ethiopia, Mexico and China.

Although construction ended Friday, the playground isn't scheduled to open until next week after newly poured cement cures and safety inspections take place.

Sorry, Celine, but you'll have to wait a few more days.

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com