Open Space II: King Street Playground

I was mistaken in my most recent post about the King Street Playground.

Two recent visits showed the George Robert White Play Space to be locked at night and, during the day, to be open, peaceful, clean, and picked up.

Much less than the usual amount of end-of-winter, wind-blown urban trash was present. There were two make-shift bird feeders, unsurprisingly full to the brim, given the recent deluges.

Pawing around in Google produced a brochure from Native Landscapes who designed the rehabilitation of the play space. Their plan for the play space is on page 13 of this link [4.2 MB pdf].

What I had remembered as, and probably was, part of the playground apparently has been conveyed to the ISB.

Regrettably the George Robert White Fund only owned the parcel at the corner of Roxbury and King streets.

This little park contains a well-proportioned shallow sunken pool. Perhaps in better days it was an infant wading pool or contained a fountain.

Before the mosque was built it was an quietly exquisite place to sit unmolested, contemplating the huge willow tree that graced the parcel that now bears the mosque, with the bustle of Roxbury Crossing in the background. One can see the modern granite bollards in the picture above.

The picture to the right shows the corridor of land from the mosque's parking lot to Roxbury Street.

It suffers in comparison from other disused lots in the neighborhood only in that it has been disturbed more recently and nature has had less time to reclaim it.

Given a couple of more years of passive neglect, it will blend right in with the rest of the disused lots.