A state-of-the-art playground that opened Wednesday is bringing motion and color to a community once known for snake oil salesmen and red-light-district diversions.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Castleberry Hill was also an outpost for travelers, vendors and farmers arriving with crops and wares through the south side of Atlanta. In recent years, the area has been growing into a hip place to live and hang out, fashioning a creative urban identity of galleries and loft-living out of the historical streetscapes of warehouses and rail lines. But safe places for children to play and adults to relax, picnic and exercise? Those haven’t exactly been the neighborhood’s claim to fame.
“Urban gentrification has to stop somewhere,” said Cynthia Gentry, founding director of the Atlanta Task Force on Play. Gentry works to establish safe, quality playgrounds around the city. “Up until now, all this great stuff has been happening in Castleberry Hill, but it’s as though it just hadn’t hopped over Northside Drive yet.”
The renovated playground at Cleopas R. Johnson Park on Northside Drive between Fair and Larkin streets is billed as a gateway to Castleberry Hill and sits among that neighborhood and West End, Vine City and the Atlanta University Center. In late 2009, 35-foot-high sculpture by Zachary Coffin was erected as a tribute to the park’s namesake, who led Morris Brown College’s marching band to prominence from 1962 to 1996.
Pat Katz, landscape architect for park design with the Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs who has has been working on the park for the past few years, paid homage to the colleges by incorporating their school colors throughout the new playground: The climbing structure is in Spelman’s blue and white; the swings are Clark Atlanta’s gray, red and black and the NEOS electronic play structure is Morris Brown’s purple and black.
She also took residents’ nearly unanimous requests to remove a large wall, which opened the park up and gave it safer, more inviting feel.
The new site is the result of numerous neighborhood and park-advocacy groups working together, namely with a grant from the MetLife Foundation. The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit, worked with the city of Atlanta to determine where MetLife’s funds would have the most impact.
“This park has the opportunity to really provide a civic space that has eroded over time for that neighborhood,” said Georgia State Director for the Trust for Public Land Helen Tapp. “The revitalized playground is helping the area to be an attractive, safe place to draw people young and old from all sorts of neighborhoods.”
The playground’s highlight is a 17-foot hexagonal climber that provides a view of the city from its apex.
“What they’ve done with this design is opened it up and put in innovative things like the climbing web,” Gentry said. "So it’s really open and fresh, and the air can get through and the light can get in. It helps change the dynamic of the space, and I’m thrilled MetLife paid for this because it’s not easy to raise money to put something into this part of town. They took a gamble, and it’s critical that we have this here."
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