Washington Park is a normal community park in Richfield in the northwest corner of the Cedar/77 and 494 intersection. An old friend mentioned it as some place they were hoping to check out and I guess I beat them to it on an overcast day. My overall feeling was that there wasn’t any one particular thing that I would recommend about this park, and assessed as a whole it is “fine”. It looks new in the last 5 years, is a GameTime setup, and has play equipment for both the 2-5 and 5-12 year old groups and a few swings. The playground is centrally located in the park, which also has 6 pickleball courts, a basketball court, a small picnic shelter, and some wide open grassy fields.
The playground
The one thing that stood out about the play equipment is that the 5-12 year old structure is actually more challenging than I feel I typically see. It’s largely “unstructured” climbing, with a bunch of different pieces packed tightly together. There is a hanging chain set of steppers, which I normally see made of ropes. The use of bare chain actually made it difficult for me to make it across, but my five year old managed so I guess middle-aged men are not the target demographic. The spiral slide also stood out, as the ladder up to it inverts, with the ladder sloping backwards as the climber ascends. These kinds of challenges felt unique and interesting.
The structure for the younger age group had less going for it, but still completely fine. Stairs up to a few slides, an additional climber, some colored panels. Not a lot to speak of here. My young toddler spent most of her time attempting a climb on the older equipment.
Washington Park does have a set of unique swings, but with one drawback. One swing bay has a baby bucket + strap swing combo, and a inclusive seat + strap swing combo. These are fun and always appreciated at a playground. The second bay of swings is just two strap swings (the stiff plastic kind) but they are situated very high off the ground. Sometimes this happens due to wood chip decomposition, but that didn’t seem to be the case here. It feels like a bad install, though I can’t know for sure.
Everything else
The biggest strike against Washington Park is the complete lack of trees or other shade. There is a shade umbrella poking out the top of the younger play structure, but it’s so high from the ground and small that the shadow cast by it is only help for probably a few specific hours a couple days of the year. We enjoyed it on an overcast morning, but I would never visit this park in the sun.
For the moments you want to sit, parents have a single installed bench which barely faces the playground. There are a few metal picnic tables around that look like they could be scooted around by two people, as well.
One bright note is that there was a water fountain, but I didn’t take the opportunity to confirm it was functioning (and if it wasn’t, I couldn’t be sure if that was permanent or just due to the season at this point). Speaking of plumbing, there was also a port-a-potty available as well.
To reiterate the point made at the start, this is a fine playground. But I would probably stop at half a dozen neighborhood parks in Minneapolis between Washington Park and Longfellow before I came to this one again.