Project Playground opens on Saturday, Sept. 29 at noon. The playground burned down in April 2017, and was rebuilt in recent months including some new features and improved accessibility (watch our 360° tour of the new playground here).
Insurance covered much of the cost, but the city raised money from donations to cover the deductible and improvements to the playground.
Read more past stories about the playground fire and rebuilding process.
The community build portion of construction for the new Project Playground began on Wednesday and continues through Sunday. The project is still seeking volunteers with different levels of experience (including kids over 10) and also needs to borrow tools including drills, speed squares, carpenters squares, tape measures, and 4-foot levels.
Listen to Jacob Steinberg’s audio postcard from the construction site, featuring Mike Goldstein, Joyce Levine, Norton Gregory and Sherri McDonald.
The construction of Project Playground continues until the end of the day Sunday. To volunteer or for more information, go to the project web site.
Construction begins next week to rebuild a beloved Juneau playground more than a year after it burned down. The project should wrap up in September.
Contractor Carver Construction will begin preparing the Project Playground site this week. The west end of the parking lot and shelter at Twin Lakes will close beginning June 4. Family Fishing Day will proceed as normal on Saturday, June 2.
The public bathrooms and beach will remain open and accessible throughout the project. The city asks that the public be mindful of closures and detours on the walking path.
The original play structure was built in 2007. It was destroyed by arson in April 2017. Much of the construction costs are being covered by insurance money, but the city had to come up with the $100,000 deductible.
A community committee has been working with the city to solicit donations and fundraise. More than $350,000 has been raised.
“We could have just gone with the insurance funds that the city had and made no changes, but we went for some pretty hefty changes from a safety and accessibility standpoint,” said committee Chair Mike Goldstein.
Plans for the new playground include two 30-foot ziplines, improved lighting and surfacing and an artificial turf field.
Goldstein said there are still plenty of inscribed fence pickets available for families and individuals to purchase. The pickets will help pay for special safety surfacing to make the playground more accessible, rather than the typical shredded rubber surfacing used in the past.
“I think we might be somewhere in the order of about $50,000 shy of getting 100 percent of the safety surfacing that we wanted,” Goldstein said. “That’s after a lot of generous donations from communities, people and businesses, folks from all over the state and outside.”
Volunteers are invited to sign up online for the community portion of the build from Aug. 8 to 12.
The Juneau Assembly has accepted the first wave of donations from about 500 separate donors toward rebuilding Project Playground at Twin Lakes.
The Juneau Community Foundation presented an oversized novelty check Monday for $235,000.
The original playground was completed in 2007 by a volunteer effort. It was razed almost a year ago in a fire authorities say was intentionally set by a pair of middle schoolers.
Plans for the ambitious replacement are replete with a pair of 30-foot ziplines.
Contractors are expected to break ground as early as June. Volunteers will be encouraged to pitch in from Aug. 8 to 12.
“It’s during those days we’re going to have long-hour shifts,” said Mike Goldstein, a member of the playground steering committee. “We’re going to look for folks to sign up and we’ll put out the available sign up sheets for everybody to get involved in the way that they can.”
Project Playground is also selling personalized fence pickets to raise the remaining $80,000 projected to complete the project.
“If y’all remember the old playground, there were names on those pickets and we’ve sold about 600 to 700 of those pickets and we’re trying hard to sell all 1,800,” said John Pugh of the steering committee.
The playground was insured but the city has to meet a $100,000 deductible to replace the original structure. Including corporate donations the total raised has reportedly exceeded $350,000 in donations.
Designs for Juneau’s Project Playground have been released. The rebuilt playground will be similar to the one that burned down in April of last year, but with a few improvements, including:
Two ziplines are planned for the north end of the playground, each about 30-feet long.
Most of the cost will be covered by insurance, with donations funding the rest. Fence pickets are still on sale to raise additional money for the new playground surfacing.
Construction is scheduled to begin in June, with an opportunity for the community to help with some of the building in August.
The project web site is ProjectPlayground.org.
Here’s a look back at the capital city’s biggest stories of 2017.
State officials continued slashing budgets, cutting Alaska Permanent Fund dividends and closing a gap between state spending and revenue with savings.
Gov. Bill Walker vented at a July press conference.
“The process is broken. There’s no question, the process is broken that we use in Alaska on budgeting. I’ve heard from many Alaskans that are frustrated with how long it takes for something to happen, how long it takes for the budget to be passed. Last three years, we’ve gotten right up to the edge of a government shutdown. At the very last, it doesn’t, but we have to send out notices to thousands and thousands – tens of thousands – under the contract. Teachers get pink slip notices. We can’t do the uh, the Alaska Marine Highway System can’t put out a ferry schedule because we don’t know where the funding is going to be or not. It’s just a, a terrible way to, terrible way to run a state.”
The membership of the Alaska Legislature isn’t changing much in the upcoming legislative session, and with elections in the fall, lawmakers are poised to continue drawing down state savings again without a sustainable budget.
The contraction in state government is catching up with the capital city.
“Juneau really bore the brunt of those losses,” analyst Meilani Schijvens said, addressing the Southeast Conference in September. “If you look at Juneau, they had their third largest population decline in the history of that community, because they’re really ground zero for state jobs and state wages.”
Fall enrollment numbers in Juneau schools are down. The city’s municipal budget is down.
One area where Juneau’s outlook is bright is in tourism. The city completed a $54 million cruise ship dock expansion to accommodate bigger ships, better. Seasonal passenger counts are projected to grow by about 50 percent to about 1.5 million people in the next decade.
At Twin Lakes in April, smoke billowed and flames roared as a beloved, community-built playground burned to the ground.
Kala Burras was 11 at the time and had watched the fire crews put out the blaze at Project Playground.
“It was really important because I liked to play on it every day and it was just really fun to play on it and now that it’s gone, it’s really sad,” Burras said.
No one was injured. Local authorities charged two 13-year-old boys with arson. They recently received the juvenile justice system’s equivalent of a guilty verdict. The state is seeking supervision and restitution. Specifics are confidential.
Insurance, fundraising and community labor are expected to cover a new and somewhat improved Project Playground. The working timeline calls for a contractor to do major construction in June and smaller scale community construction in August.
In March, the city condemned the historic Bergmann Hotel over health and safety issues, leading to the mass eviction of about 50 residents.
The hotel was one of several properties owned or controlled by James M. Barrett, his mother Camilla Barrett, aka Kathleen Barrett, or limited liability corporations they control.
In August, heavily armed police kitted out in body armor served a search warrant on a downtown home the Barretts own. A few weeks later, James Barrett was temporarily detained as police executed a search warrant on his downtown home. Authorities did not publicize charges or arrests after either search.
“So we’re hoping that whoever owns the property where all these negative happenings are going on will be held accountable and have to clean up their properties – physically and human activity-wise,” Monica Ritter said after the first raid. She’s a co-founder of the Uptown Neighborhood Association.
Meanwhile, the city’s lawsuit to recover demolition costs is still pending for another condemned downtown property the Barretts own: the Gastineau Apartments.
The trial date in Juneau Superior Court has been pushed back repeatedly, and is now scheduled for Feb. 26.
Juneau’s indigent and homeless population endured several forced displacements, though new social services also came online.
The Juneau Assembly adopted an “anti-camping” ordinance in February. It empowers police to cite people sleeping on private property in downtown areas between midnight and 7 a.m.
More people lost their homes with the Bergmann Hotel’s closure, including Chris Clark. At a temporary shelter, he said he lost his rent money — and a lot more.
“I paid $750 and they’re not giving me that money back. I’m not only homeless. I’m homeless with AIDS and I have no clothing, no medication, no anything. I have nothing,” Clark said.
Later, a tent village sprung up on the vacant subport lot downtown. The Alaska Mental Health Trust owns the land and served the campers with trespass notices. It cleared the camp in September.
Also in September, apartments for 32 of Juneau’s most vulnerable people opened. Juneau’s Housing First complex provides permanent, supportive housing, and features an on-site clinic.
Mariya Lovishchuk helps manage the project.
“The idea is just having housing, nice housing, in itself is a stabilizing force in people’s lives,” she said. “And what we know from other projects is that even though people don’t have to participate in services, they participate a lot more than when they have to do it as a condition of something.”
This winter, the city also opened a new emergency warming shelter for especially cold nights. There are temporary cots for up to 20.
Jeremy Hsieh is the news director of KTOO. Follow @jmlhsieh
