At the edge of Richmond’s Iron Triangle neighborhood, a highly anticipated community park project more than 10 years in the making is close to becoming a reality along the Richmond Greenway Trail.
Pogo Park — a nonprofit community development organization that converts blighted city parks into safe green children’s play spaces — has been working since 2013 with the city, Richmond LAND and neighborhood residents to transform the two-block Harbour-8 Park into a place that has everything from a fun zone with a 25-foot, three-story transparent climbing structure to a tot lot, a commercial kitchen and a 100-foot zip line mounted on a rubber surface hand-crafted by team members to look like a volcano.
While they’re still raising the last $6 million of what is a $28 million project, the first phase is expected to be open by July, said Toody Maher, executive director of Pogo Park.
Maher said she grew up dreaming of one day converting a typical, standard city-owned children’s park into something unique.
“I always thought that I was going to get rich and once I got rich I could take a city park and just really make it fantastic,” she told Richmondside, while giving a tour of the Harbour-8 park construction site at 1 Harbour Way.
Maher, who grew up in Canada, studied at UC Berkeley and played volleyball for the school, eventually played professionally in Switzerland where she made personal connections that led her to become the West Coast distributor for Swatch Watch.
She eventually transitioned into nonprofit and entrepreneurial work, but her park dream never left her as she settled in Richmond.
After researching playgrounds and the importance of playing for a child’s development, Maher traveled to other parts of the country and saw different methods of creating children’s parks.
“There was this one park in New York City that copied this theory from England (parks) which have play workers — someone who is staffing a playground — not organizing or directing play but facilitating this rich, creative, unstructured play,” Maher said.
With some encouragement from her partner, Maher began looking at Richmond’s 54 parks and ways to incorporate them into the community during the late-2000s. She fell in love with the city’s playlots — small, pocket parks situated in neighborhoods — and eventually honed in on Richmond’s Iron Triangle, one of the city’s most economically disadvantaged areas.
She was very critical of the city’s method of park revitalization, pointing to the $500,000 renovation of the blighted Iron Triangle’s Elm Playlot at the corner of Elm and Eighth streets. The resulting project wasn’t one that the community felt connected to, and it eventually became a victim of blight again.
“Someone from Berkeley got it (the contract to develop the playlot) and then the construction jobs went to some guy in Sacramento and then the landscape architect who was hired bought all this plastic play equipment from a company in Texas,” she said. “The mayor came and cut the ribbon, but it pretty much went back to what it was.”
Park lover helps residents feel invested their neighborhood park
It was at that time, in 2007, when Maher connected with residents who lived next to the Elm playlot at 720 Elm Ave., who eventually formed the Elm Playlot Action Committee (EPAC) — a group of neighbors who were not volunteers but were paid to care for the park.
“They are the PhDs of the neighborhood. They know their neighborhood more than anyone else, why something works and what doesn’t work,” she said.
One such lifelong Iron Triangle resident, James Anderson, said he initially began working with the Pogo Park project after he asked a local elder if she knew of any work opportunities. She connected him with the project, which had him do neighborhood outreach work.
“After that outreach work I stayed on and was hired by Toody,” Anderson said. “I then started taking care of the park before moving on to the building design team and became one of the leads.”
Providing work opportunities for neighbors has always been an essential part of Pogo Park, Maher said. Although the Elm Playlot is owned by the city, the EPAC approached it as their own, persistently cleaning it daily and addressing park needs.
“We started cleaning up every day,” Maher said. “If something like graffiti was up, we’d take it down. If someone came to dump a mattress we would call the city and they’d come and get it.”
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“If something is tagged, we get right on it. If something is broken, we fix it and get right on it.“
— James Anderson, an Iron Triangle resident who helps design local parks
Though he was not on that original EPAC team, Anderson, who lives across the street from the park, said that he and other residents joined the cause and make sure they are constantly vigilant about the park.
“We get right on it because if we don’t get on it then the kids eventually keep doing it,” he said. “If something is tagged, we get right on it. If something is broken, we fix it and get right on it. The community actually looks out and gives us a call.”
From there the group transitioned to free programs, buying an adjacent home where they began serving meals, ultimately becoming a distribution point for school meals, serving 12,000 of them in the first year.
Instead of hiring an architect to rebuild the Elm Playlot, Maher and neighbors including Anderson began designing the park with full-scale mockups of what would become park features, such as the disc swings, trike path, sandboxes, a teepee and community garden.
“If someone had an objection to where something was placed we wouldn’t move past it until there was an agreement by everyone,” she said.
After communal decisions were made by residents on what they wanted in the park, Maher and the group hired an architect to teach them how to draw in architectural scale. They eventually built a quarter-inch model of the park.
Scientific Art Studio taught residents architectural and fabrication skills
A partnership with Scientific Art Studio, a local business that operated in the Iron Triangle for 40 years, trained the residents to do fabrication work, giving them a space at the business for almost 16 years. The studio recently closed after its founder, Ron Holthuysen, decided to focus on art-based work, although he remains involved with Pogo Park.
“The Pogo team at this sheltered supportive place learned to weld, learned molding, woodwork, painting,” Maher said. “We learned how to work as a team. The whole park was really built by hand.”
Anderson credited Scientific Art Studios with nurturing talents he already felt were inside him.
“It’s where I learned to pick up a lot of those skills. I had it in me, but I had to finesse them out and get better at it,” he said.
Currently, Pogo Park hosts a number of free events year round at the Elm Playlot. The most recent was a “Spring Fling” where children looked for Easter eggs and played other games. They also offer free Zumba classes for parents and free eye exams and glasses for children. Last winter, the group converted the play deck into an ice skating rink.
Maher said that the playlot has become a place where the neighboring parents can confidently send their children and know there are programs being offered that will look after them.
“To have something in the neighborhood that a parent can really say to a kid, ‘You know what, go to Pogo Park and don’t come back till 5 p.m.,’ ” she said.
Elm Playlot neighbors-as-builders model is replicated at Harbour-8
The group began applying the successful Elm Playlot communal approach to the Harbour-8 project in 2013. It adopted the area along the Richmond Greenway, removing illegally dumped trash and remediating other blight.
After years of incremental projects funded by various public and private donations, in 2019 Pogo Park received almost $1 million in development grants to install a community plaza, mini-play field and landscaping, followed by $22 million in state grants in 2020, one of which was an $8.5 million Prop 68 parks grant. A final $6 million is needed to finish it, with the group seeking $3 million from the city and $3 million in private donations to finish the second phase of the park by 2027, Maher said.
During the COVID pandemic, the team spent months creating another life-sized mock-up model — using string, stakes and 2x4s — for what would eventually become the conceptual design of the park.
Anderson said Harbour-8 park is a way for the Pogo Park team to “show what we are about.”
“I’m pretty sure if we can draw the community the same way everything will be good and maybe we can move on to another area and do it again,” he said.
For Anderson, the park symbolizes a generational connection to the Iron Triangle and a passion for building community in the neighborhood emboldened by Maher’s vision.
“Each individual that came on to Pogo Park has picked up skills and advanced in it because they’ve been doing the work more and more,” he said. “All I can say is it goes both ways. Toody, having a boss like her that had a vision to do certain things and take ownership of the area we were adopting, and having residents who have that desire to make changes in that community.”
Credit: David Buechner
