Call it a crack-top!
The city must repair a broken blacktop in a Marine Park playground before a kid trips and gets hurt, locals are demanding. Area kids and students from PS 278 — the school adjacent to the neighborhood’s eponymous park — use the courts for basketball and other activities, but it looks more suited for water polo, thanks to large pools of water that accumulate from the giant cracks and slants in the pavement, said one teacher who brought his class of middle-school boys to the park for field day.
“There’s a water puddle right here. You can see just by looking at it that the same thing happens over there,” said East Flatbush Community Research School teacher Richard Boucaud, pointing to various depressions that pockmark the play space.
There are so many puddles that even the most skilled ballers can’t stop the rock from rolling into the water, said 12-year-old Henry Sevulveda, who bikes over to the park with his dad and sister every week.
“When the ball gets loose, it mostly gets wet,” he said.
And kids may be better off trading in their Chuck Taylors for cleats, because the blacktop is peppered with patches of grass bursting through the pavement, which are causing dangerous cracks and unevenness, said Sevulveda’s father, also Henry.
“You can twist your ankle,” he said. “They never fix it here. We come here every Sunday.”
But the Parks Department does not have enough money to repair the entire blacktop now, a spokeswoman said.
“There’s no funding for large-scale improvements right now, but in the meantime, we will look into what we can do in-house,” she said.
The department is amid a $6.15 million overhaul to the park, but that work will not include the playground, officials have said.
