When Jordan Johnson was a toddler, his parents helped build the original PlayTown Suwanee playground. He and his siblings had years of memories from playing on it.
Although he grew up in Suwanee, Johnson now lives in Charlotte, N.C., with his wife and their budding family. He got to introduce a new generation to the PlayTown experience during a visit to see his parents last weekend.
The completely rebuilt, and bigger, PlayTown Suwanee opened last weekend, and the grown up Johnson was there with his family, gently pushing his 18-month-old son, Micah Johnson-Wolff, in a swing to the youngster’s delight.
“It’s cool,” Johnson said. “It’s a cycle repeated and it’s better than I remember ... It’s great, everything is new. I couldn’t make it better.”
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Credit: Curt Yeomans
The new PlayTown Suwanee playground is part of the new Town Center on Main park, next to the Suwanee library branch.
The overall park — which will include an outdoor stage, lawn, bridge and walking trail — is still undergoing finishing touches, but the playground is now open to the public. Children broke a paper link chain to officially open the play area.
The new playground replaces the original PlayTown Suwanee, which was built 20 years ago but was in need of a significant enough revamp that city leaders felt it was better to just tear the original down and build a new playground.
“It started at a workshop we were having. We were building this shiny new park next door and maybe it’s time to clean up PlayTown Suwanee and maybe update it a little bit and fix some of the broken pieces of wood and that sort of thing,” Suwanee City councilwoman Beth Hilscher told attendees at the grand re-opening.
“It quickly turned into, ‘Oh there’s too much work to do to just update it so let’s just do it again. We did it 20 years ago this month, let’s do it again.’”
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Credit: Curt Yeomans
The new park has three main play areas. One is “Kiddie Hall,” a complex playground set that is designed to resemble Suwanee City Hall and features wheelchair ramps, stairs, slides, a sliding walkway that shifts as kids walk across it and a rock climbing wall.
Another area is a treehouse-inspired structure with rope bridges, monkey bars, stairs and slides.
The third is a drive thru restaurant-themed set up with a sandbox, benches, seesaws and toadstool steps.
“That’s where the talk with the students comes in,” Suwanee Assistant City Manager Denise Brinson said. “We met with about 20 classrooms in, I think, five different elementary schools, and they said ‘We want a drive thru restaurant to play restaurant.”
There are also two areas where kids can play on swings and two more areas where kids can bang on plastic drums or strike notes on a colorful, xylophone-style wall. A wall was installed to teach kids sign language for each letter of the alphabet as well.
And, the playground is fenced in with only one entry point so parents have an easier time seeing whether their kids are walking out of the playground or not.
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Brinson explained that the lifespan for playgrounds that were built 20 years ago and were heavily wood was about two decades, which is why the city felt it was easier now to just build a new playground.
But, Suwanee residents see it as a continuation of the old playground, just revived for a new generation of children.
“Its awesome because we brought our kids here and now our grandkids,” Suwanee Mayor Pro Tem Linnea Miller said as her grandkids took a break from playing on the new equipment.
The new playground was built by volunteers, including Atlanta Falcons football players and cheerleaders who helped cut some of the wood and put up some of the posts last year.
The decision to include Suwanee residents and other community partners in the construction came, quite simply, down to what it was like getting the community involved in building the original PlayTown Suwanee 20 years ago, according to Brinson.
“It was such a great experience with the community build last time,” Brinson said. “People still talk about it — ‘I was there. This is what I built. I built the house there was there before’ — it was great memories so we wanted to have that, really, for a new generation of community members.”
Credit: Curt Yeomans
Credit: Curt Yeomans
It also received support from the Primerica Foundation, which donated money to help cover the playground’s costs.
“We don’t typically do parks and playgrounds (but) what was the grab here was the access to all kids to be able to come and play, and a place where the community could come together,” Primerica Foundation Vice-Chairwoman Anne Soutter said.
“Suwanee is sort of a shining example. Everything they’ve done has always been about community coming together, but we were very interested in the inclusivity of all children being able to come and visit the playground.”
For the Johnson family, getting to enjoy the new PlayTown Suwanee on its opening day brought back a lot of memories.
Jordan Johnson’s father was one of the volunteers who helped build the new playground.
“There are just so many happy memories,” Caroline Johnson, Jordan’s mother, said. “Walking in, I was 20 again ... We spent a lot of time here.”
Micah will have plenty of opportunities to build memories of playing on the new playground during visits to his grandparents. And, he has a little sister on the way who will also get to build her own memories at PlayTown Suwanee.
“We’re going to come (here) every time we come,” said Sanny Johnson-Wolff, who is Jordan’s wife and Micah’s mother. “We come like once a month and we like to hang out with the family.”
Credit: Gwinnett Daily Post
Credit: Gwinnett Daily Post
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