Cobbs Creek Park Play Art Project Finalizes Resident Feedback
Clean Air Council, Tiny WPA, and Amber Arts and Design are gathering community inspiration, creativity and imagination to re-envision four Cobbs Creek Park entrances between Spruce St and Florence Ave. The goal of this project is to encourage community members to explore the park and trail at safe crossings, offer new play and learning spaces for children, and connect residents to park programming and activities.
This project follows years of community advocacy surrounding dangerous driving behavior and an absence of pedestrian infrastructure along Cobbs Creek Parkway. Cobbs Creek Park residents reported feeling unsafe walking, biking, and driving near the Parkway, creating a barrier to access the park and trail. Community demands for safer roadway conditions were finally answered in 2021 by the Streets Department and PennDOT’s Highway Safety Improvement Project, which installed life saving road safety measures including new guard rails, traffic signals, speed cushions, and other traffic calming measures.
With new road improvements installed along the Parkway and additional safety improvements planned for the future, neighbors can more safely connect to Cobbs Creek Park. The Cobbs Creek Play Art Project aims to strengthen these connections by creating an overt welcome to the park and trail and inviting residents to have their fun. These sorts of inviting infrastructure, signage, and safe spaces follow recommendations from the Equity of Access to Trails Study, which was informed by Cobbs Creek residents.
The Play Art Project will incorporate asphalt art murals painted on the paved trail, and play structures immediately adjacent in the park next to the trail. The murals will highlight safe entrances with bright colors and community inspired images, themes, and words. Play structures next to the trail will further connect residents to and from the park, and offer features that children can climb, jump, and interact with to create lasting links between neighbors and the benefits and resources of the park and trail. Both features will offer learning opportunities that build children’s literacy related to the nature found in the park.
Three community workshops were held in the Spring of 2024 to identify locations, ideas, and themes for the project’s design inspiration. Workshop activities included Lego building, image voting, theme identification, collective poetry, location selection, and group mural drawings in order to identify community themes and subject matter for the designers to draw inspiration from.
Over the Spring of 2024 the project team sorted through resident input and feedback collected through the workshops and landed on final project locations and themes. Several themes emerged from workshops and survey’s with three guiding focuses for the design including active play, nature, and seating. The design will include child age appropriate connections to nature that highlight native plants, animals, creek/stream and trails that can be found within the park. The project will also include active play and rest areas that have elements of climbing and various forms of balancing. Four locations were identified for the project including Cedar Ave, 61st, Thomas Ave, and Florence Ave along Cobbs Creek Parkway/63rd St. The Play Art Project will begin design, permitting and fabrication in Summer of 2024 with installation due in Fall of 2024.
The Cobbs Creek Park Play Art Survey is open through June 1st, 2024 for Cobbs Creek Park area neighbors to inform the project. To learn more about the Cobbs Creek Play Art Project contact Will Fraser at wfraser@cleanair.org. Many thanks to KABOOM! And William Penn Foundation’s Play Everywhere Philly Challenge Grant funding for making this project possible.
