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Mooney’s Bay cannot get a great playground for $2 million.
Councillors, eager to get half the costs of a playground by the Rideau River covered by a production company that’ll make a documentary series about it, gloss over that. A big playground, yes, which is what we’re being promised. But not a great one.
Let’s look this gift horse in the mouth, really get in there for a good study of the dentition. Because it’s not a gift horse. Sinking Ship Entertainment, which makes the series Giver for TVO, is paying $1 million, but in a deal that was a fait accompli when the city announced it, we’re also paying nearly $1 million to install a big playground a couple of hundred feet from one of the bigger ones we already have, near Mooney’s Bay Beach.
Forty-six hundred square metres is very large for a playground but it’s still not that big: the size of about three hockey rinks, for instance, or a bit smaller than a football field. That’s total area. The structures sit in the middle of the playground, so most of the 4,600 square metres will be sand or woodchips or rubber.
The work is in conjunction with the city’s parks department, which managed to screw up a splash pad at Lansdowne. It was off all this past glorious weekend, when all the others in town opened. The city couldn’t explain why on Tuesday. It doesn’t appear on the list of city splash pads, either. Confidence grows.
In 2014, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board put together an inventory of its school playgrounds, including their surface areas and what it would cost to replace them. Take just about any school playground you might know. Scale it up, multiply the cost to match, and building something like it at Mooney’s Bay size would cost between $1.8 million and $1.85 million, using the board’s figures.
The figures are amazingly consistent and clear: You can’t build something on the scale of Sinking Ship’s plans, at the price they’re talking about, and get quality or innovation much beyond what you’d find at a primary school.
(Do kids care if their climbers are in the shape of a moose?)
Giver does have public profile and relationships with contractors and suppliers that will stretch the $2 million, says Rennata Lopez, the show’s producer. They get donations and discounts.
“Even though the (dollar) value is at $2 million, it is much more valuable as a playground,” Lopez says. Plus, she adds, “we have some really amazing designers.”
Fair point. Much of the creativity is in the concept, however — in the idea of a playground whose pieces represent Canada, arrayed in a particular way. It’s not in the execution, which consists of standard swings and slides.
“They’re traditional playground equipment,” Lopez says. Sinking Ship is bound by safety regulations and city policies. “We’re not — we can’t build anything that you wouldn’t normally see in a playground.”
She suggests looking at the show’s website to see what a Giver playground looks like. Which is, well, a totally ordinary playground. Colourful plastic parts on metal frames. If anything, they’re sparser than most, smallish structures amid big expanses of sand and mulch. Lots of neighbourhoods would be happy to have them but they’re not knock-your-Crocs-off awesome.
(The plans for Mooney’s Bay do include the world’s longest set of monkey bars, a title currently claimed by an adult-oriented obstacle course in Britain with a 120-metre set. They destroy hands.)
Mooney’s Bay is getting custom pieces, which are more expensive from the get-go. Sinking Ship is working with manufacturers already, because installation is supposed to start in July and last till end of August. The kids in the show, who aren’t yet cast, will be involved in “the creative,” the decorative aspects, but there’s not a ton of time for mould-breaking work.
But hey, we’re getting it cheap. Maybe that’ll be perfect for telling future generations how Ottawa did things at this point in its history.
查看原文...
Councillors, eager to get half the costs of a playground by the Rideau River covered by a production company that’ll make a documentary series about it, gloss over that. A big playground, yes, which is what we’re being promised. But not a great one.
Let’s look this gift horse in the mouth, really get in there for a good study of the dentition. Because it’s not a gift horse. Sinking Ship Entertainment, which makes the series Giver for TVO, is paying $1 million, but in a deal that was a fait accompli when the city announced it, we’re also paying nearly $1 million to install a big playground a couple of hundred feet from one of the bigger ones we already have, near Mooney’s Bay Beach.
Forty-six hundred square metres is very large for a playground but it’s still not that big: the size of about three hockey rinks, for instance, or a bit smaller than a football field. That’s total area. The structures sit in the middle of the playground, so most of the 4,600 square metres will be sand or woodchips or rubber.
The work is in conjunction with the city’s parks department, which managed to screw up a splash pad at Lansdowne. It was off all this past glorious weekend, when all the others in town opened. The city couldn’t explain why on Tuesday. It doesn’t appear on the list of city splash pads, either. Confidence grows.
In 2014, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board put together an inventory of its school playgrounds, including their surface areas and what it would cost to replace them. Take just about any school playground you might know. Scale it up, multiply the cost to match, and building something like it at Mooney’s Bay size would cost between $1.8 million and $1.85 million, using the board’s figures.
The figures are amazingly consistent and clear: You can’t build something on the scale of Sinking Ship’s plans, at the price they’re talking about, and get quality or innovation much beyond what you’d find at a primary school.
(Do kids care if their climbers are in the shape of a moose?)
Giver does have public profile and relationships with contractors and suppliers that will stretch the $2 million, says Rennata Lopez, the show’s producer. They get donations and discounts.
“Even though the (dollar) value is at $2 million, it is much more valuable as a playground,” Lopez says. Plus, she adds, “we have some really amazing designers.”
Fair point. Much of the creativity is in the concept, however — in the idea of a playground whose pieces represent Canada, arrayed in a particular way. It’s not in the execution, which consists of standard swings and slides.
“They’re traditional playground equipment,” Lopez says. Sinking Ship is bound by safety regulations and city policies. “We’re not — we can’t build anything that you wouldn’t normally see in a playground.”
She suggests looking at the show’s website to see what a Giver playground looks like. Which is, well, a totally ordinary playground. Colourful plastic parts on metal frames. If anything, they’re sparser than most, smallish structures amid big expanses of sand and mulch. Lots of neighbourhoods would be happy to have them but they’re not knock-your-Crocs-off awesome.
(The plans for Mooney’s Bay do include the world’s longest set of monkey bars, a title currently claimed by an adult-oriented obstacle course in Britain with a 120-metre set. They destroy hands.)
Mooney’s Bay is getting custom pieces, which are more expensive from the get-go. Sinking Ship is working with manufacturers already, because installation is supposed to start in July and last till end of August. The kids in the show, who aren’t yet cast, will be involved in “the creative,” the decorative aspects, but there’s not a ton of time for mould-breaking work.
But hey, we’re getting it cheap. Maybe that’ll be perfect for telling future generations how Ottawa did things at this point in its history.
查看原文...
