Gilbert Ramirez Park

This park lacks restrooms and the playground doesn't have much either, but the sprinklers here are great on a hot day.

It's cute here!... The playground has an NYC subway theme. There are swings, some shade and patches of grass, chess tables, basketball courts, and handball courts. There's also some great metalwork in the fence surrounding the playground.

" Alecksandra Szefke’s whimsical design, which takes its inspiration from both the subway line and the proposed city water tunnel that run beneath the site, received the Art Commission Award for Excellence in Design in 2001. The materials and style of the construction reflect an exciting urban-industrial environment. The diagonal lines of the underground tunnels ascend to a play area with a subway theme. Musical chimes accompany a series of water spray arches. A fence along the edge of the property features cut-steel panels depicting neighborhood scenes."

Beautiful Park

McKibbin playground emerged from the wilderness with no clothes and no obvious capacity for language. For years, doctors and specialists attempted to lure it from its emotional shell, but in many ways McKibbin only physically left the woods. That is, all of its swings and platforms and walkways and benches seem to exist here in our society only as objects, but not in spirit. Nurses and orderlies repeatedly noted, over the course of its stay at medical retreats, that they would find the park at odd hours, merely staring into space, its gaze locked into the distance at a patch of forest, or in more pitiful cases, at the closest shrubbery. A small splinter group of experts set off on an expedition into the woods in 2005, claiming that the real McKibbin is still out there, that the reason we haven't been able to lure the real essence from its shell is because the essence simply isn't in there, that the shell is empty. In this way, if these experts are correct, then the park is the opposite of the Trojan Horse, where in this case nothing will spring out. Whether they are right or not, the expedition was reported lost years ago. Some speculate that they died at the hands of beasts or weather, while others imagine that the learned men and women are simply enjoying the swings and slides and walkways, somewhere deep in the forest.