Playground Renovation: Almaden Lake Park (San Jose)

New playground report! 🛝 We checked out Almaden Lake Park’s renovated “all-inclusive” playground yesterday, and the kids (yes, even the 13 yo, despite his initial protests at my choice of after-school 😂) had fun. Here are my highlights and lowlights…

🤩 Highlights:

🔺Cool new play structure that can be explored in many ways, with a tall, fast slide — 8 yo loved it and even the 13 yo enjoyed

🔺 Cool globe-ish spinny contraption (that’s a technical term 😉) unlike any I’ve seen

🔺Ample swings, including baby, regular, and harnessed ones

🔺Fully-fenced (though gates weren’t closed), squishy ground surface, bathrooms nearby

🔺 Nice lakeside setting and easy access off Almaden Expwy


😐 Lowlights:

🔻 Few offerings for toddler/preschoolers — just a mound with a basic slide (pictured above), a frog you can climb on, a four-person bouncy thing (again, technical term 😂), and the aforementioned swings. The big structure would be very challenging for a little one and, especially on a busy day, almost impossible for a parent to help navigate. A preschool-aged kid kept crawling inside the slide yesterday (you can’t see the bottom from the top). Without a lot to attract littles, they’ll gravitate toward the big structure, creating a dangerous situation for all.

🔻No shade.

🔻The spinny thing is REALLY hard to push. I think they just screwed it in too tight. My 13 yo track athlete had to work hard to get it moving beyond a snail’s pace.

🔻There are supposedly parking fees for the main lot located next to the playground, though on the day of our visit, the machine was broken and nobody was collecting fees or checking cars. I’m not sure if this will hold true at other times.

My big “lowlight,” though, is the characterization of this as an “all-inclusive” playground. What?! Does that just mean rubberized ground surface and some harness swings? Maybe I’m spoiled by the Magical Bridge playgrounds (plus plenty of other city parks that include accessible features), but this didn’t strike me as inclusive at all. There was literally nothing a child in a wheelchair or with mobility challenges could do. No slide they could use, no spinner they could enter, no ground-level or ramp-accessible features. (The two accessible musical instruments had no mallets.) 

Playground manufacturers make SO many accessible features these days, and they didn’t include any here. The use of the buzzword without putting in the work aggravates me.

Overall, it’s a very nice new playground, but it doesn’t live up to its name.

#AccessibilityMatters #AccessiblePlaygrounds #inclusionmatters #inclusiveplay