THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 5, 1995 TAG: 9510030096
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 20 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JOAN C. STANUS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
After almost two years of planning, the Imagination Island community playground at Northside Park finally is becoming a reality.
An estimated 200 volunteers are expected to descend on the 160,000-square-foot site Oct. 14-15 to put the final touches on a ``giant erector set'' of whirlwind slides, spiral climbers, overhead fliers and other playground clusters connected by nautical-style docks and bridges.
To prepare the site, crews from the Army's Seabees Unit 411 and the Navy's USS Bainbridge have worked every day for the last month excavating the property, marking out posts, putting down concrete, erecting decks and doing other work on the various clusters.
``We're trying to finish about 80 percent of the job before the community comes out,'' explained Brent Hobbs, an Army chief in charge of the Seabee crew.
On ``Volunteer Weekend,'' the largest job left will be assembling the playground's attachments.
``There's a lot of attachments ... so we'll need a lot of people out there that weekend,'' noted Lorraine Perkins, a Norfolk mother of three who serves as an organizer of the project. ``This playground is not like Fun Forest or Kid's Cove. This playground is too technical for volunteers to put together from scratch. We needed some people who know what they're doing to prepare the base part.''
Unlike the wooden community playgrounds in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach that Perkins mentioned, Imagination Island will consist of plastic-coated steel equipment.
In addition to their work over the last month, the servicemen also will help on Volunteer Weekend. The Seabees unit will tackle the construction of an exterior fence, and crews from the Bainbridge will build a sandbox boat.
Many of the servicemen involved in working on Imagination Island are veterans of other area community playground projects.
``It's fun, and it gets me away from the desk,'' Hobbs explained. ``And we really like helping out the community in this way.''
Navy chief Kevin Devine added:
``This helps keep the guys busy while we're preparing for our decommissioning. And it's just great seeing projects like this one come together.''
Although organizers are ``excited'' that an idea hatched by Norfolk schoolchildren in 1993 finally is materializing, the more sobering bottom line continues to haunt the project.
Even as Army and Navy crews prepare the site for Volunteer Weekend, organizers are discovering they need another $10,000 beyond the $200,000 they've already raised.
``We thought we had enough money, but we had a lot of overruns,'' Perkins explained. ``We thought some things like the concrete would be donated, but that didn't happen. And in the beginning we didn't realize we'd need certain things. We've also got a wish list of some other extras things we'd like to see done.''
Early last spring, however, organizers wondered if the playground ever would be built. In March, more than $110,000 short of their goal, they announced they would be forced to postpone construction until the spring of 1996, a year later than they originally anticipated. But this summer, several community heavy hitters got behind the project. By the first of August, the targeted $200,000 had been raised from local foundations and business contributions, and organizers began planning to move forward with building the playground.
By mid-October, those schoolchildren who so long ago donated their pennies toward a dream playground finally will get a chance to play on it. ILLUSTRATION: Scott Baker of Seabees Unit 411 shows Capt. Chris Weaver how to
handle the controls of a bulldozer that was being used to help
excavate the site for what soon will be the Imagination Island
playground at Northside Park.
Photos by GARY C. KNAPP
by CNB