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CNG Boro Politics

Cobble Hill playground is a parent trap

By Ariella Cohen
The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper / Amy Sussman
What’s wrong with this playground? Jason Licht says that Long Island College Hospital isn’t doing a good job maintaining it. You be the judge.

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The quintessential health care debate — public versus private — has spilled out from Cobble Hill’s Long Island College Hospital onto its playgrounds.

LICH owns and maintains three colorful public parks within its campus on Henry and Hicks street south of Atlantic Avenue. All three jungle gyms were built in 1993 under an agreement that allowed the hospital to build an eight-level, 430-car garage on a half-acre of city-owned land once known as Van Vorhees Park.

The colorful, animal-themed parks are popular with kids and parents alike. Most users hardly remember that when the parking garage was built, naysayers predicted that the privately owned “public” playground would fail.

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But one local dad, Jason Licht, remains a naysayer. Licht believes that the LICH-maintained park at Henry and Amity streets suffers from a lack of oversight that has created safety hazards that the city Parks Department would never tolerate.

“Things break all the time and no one is accountable,” said Licht. “The hospital fails to maintain the park and blames it on their budget.”

On Monday at the Henry Street park, toddlers flew down metal slides and kids climbed wooden jungle gyms. One dad, John Hoitsma, pointed out that a four-foot ladder was missing one of its rope handles. He said that his 3-year-old, Sarah, fell off the ladder a year ago when the rope snapped off.

Luckily, once the tears dried she wasn’t injured.

Despite the incident, Hoitsma called the playground “one of the nicest around,” but added, “there are certainly repairs that could be made quicker to keep things safer.”

Last year, for instance, a spring-loaded ride broke. It took nearly a year to replace the tyke rocker.

Fittingly, it was shaped like a snail.

But not everyone agrees that there is trouble in playland.

Community Board 6 District Manager Craig Hammerman said, “When we get complaints, we give them to LICH, and each time, we have seen them act.”

Diana Sullivan, the hospital’s vice president of operations, told The Stoop that LICH “remains committed to the upkeep of the playground.”

After calls from The Brooklyn Paper, the Parks Department set up an inspection of the playgrounds this week Stay tuned.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper

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