A Special Central Park Playground Gets a Multi-Million Dollar Update, With Extra Attention to the Hippos

By Michael McDowell

The hippos are here to stay. After a comprehensive effort, including almost a year of construction, Central Park’s Safari Playground reopened last week, just in time for summer.

Safari, which is known to many Upper West Siders as “Hippo Park,” is perched atop a bedrock rise at 91st Street. The inviting space offers magnificent views of the Reservoir.

The playground, which is shaded, features a water sprinkler; colorful, spongy terrain (recycled rubber, a common safety surface); and formations that resemble the mysterious hillocks built by the pre-Columbian Mound Builders. A play structure atop these mounds leads to an irresistible metal slide.

“We wanted to create topography throughout the playground,” said Bob Rumsey, Studio Director of the Landscape Architecture Team at Central Park Conservancy, who led the Rag on an advance tour of the space. “We’re going from the mountains down to the water, the river is flowing. That’s the abstract form of the playground,” he added.

Bob Rumsey.

The first iteration of Safari Playground was built under the direction of Robert Moses, in 1936.

“All 21 of Central Park’s playgrounds were put in during the Moses era in the 1930s, but they’ve changed over time,” Rumsey informed.

Hippos didn’t arrive on the scene until much later.

In 1997, the Conservancy hired a St. Louis-based artist, Bob Cassilly, to design the animals. But now, after nearly two decades in the big city, these animals have returned to Missouri.

New hippos were a key element of the renovation.

“We 3D-scanned the original hippos, each one of them: the baby hippos, the adult hippos, the swimming hippos,”—the hippos sunning themselves—“and the scans were brought into a program. An initial form of them was fabricated with a CNC machine; they have a steel framework, but the outside is fiberglass, which was hand-carved,” Rumsey explained.

He had made his way toward two of the hippos, and eyed them warily.

“Artists created their skin, with scratching and molds, and when you look at the faces…we talked ad nauseam about some of these eyes,” he recalled. “Although there was some artistic license.”

The layout of the hippos was changed slightly.

“The two kissing hippos were kept, as well as relationships between hippos—baby hippos and mother hippos, which we tried to maintain—but we took some liberties elsewhere,” he admitted.

While there was a canoe in the playground prior to the renovation, a second canoe has been added. Both are accessible to a child in a wheelchair, as is most of the space, including the approach from Central Park West.

Aside from the rehabilitation of the playground and accessibility improvements, site work included challenging upgrades to a drainage system, which meant drilling into bedrock. All of this resulted in a price tag of several million dollars, funded as part of the Plan for Play campaign, part of Forever Green, a major, decade-long Conservancy initiative to restore and preserve Central Park.

Of the 21 playgrounds in the park, 15 have been fully restored, and the remaining six are due for upgrades in the next few years; renovations are on the horizon for the Diana Ross Playground, at 81st Street, and the Abraham and Jospeh Spector Playground, at 86th Street.

That’s important, as Central Park’s playgrounds receive more than three million visits annually by children and their caregivers, according to the Conservancy.

As the tour concluded, three engineers conducted impact attenuation tests using a tripod, which apparently tests a surface for how hard or soft it is.

Rumsey surveyed the as yet unplayed-upon playground with satisfaction. Prior to construction, several years of design, planning, approvals—including public comment—and all manner of review had gone into this renovation.

“The great thing about this playground is that it’s a place for open, creative play.”