Officials Meet to Decide Fate of Popular Tire Swing
Weiss, an urban design director for the State Department of Transportation, was joined by others involved with Battery Park City's newly opened park. They were there to give the "tire" (actually a plastic replica) some hard swings as part of a test of the equipment's disputed safety. As of Wednesday, June 23, no decision had yet been made.
Just hours after the playground opened on May 28, two 8-year-old girls bumped their heads, without serious injury, on the crossbeam of the swing, according to their parents, and the swing was removed.
The parks group, which included Battery Park City Parks Conservancy executive director Tessa Huxley and the park's designer, Signe Nielsen, met to measure the installation as well as observe its trajectory. Following the meeting, the swing was again removed.
According to measurements taken by the group, the tire swing conforms to specificatons set by its manufacturer, Columbia Cascade Co., of Portland, Ore.
"The manufacturer is the one that ends up getting sued so they're standing by their product [if] it was put in the way it was suppoed to be put in," said Huxley. "As best as we can tell it's just as the manufacturer said it should be."
Weiss, who brought along a photo of a similarly designed—but not identical—swing in Central Park, said she wants to check with city Parks Department officials on their tire swing experience, and confer again with the manufacturer before deciding whether the equipment will be reinstalled. But like all playground equipment, she said, there is no such thing as total safety.
"There are certain inherent risks using a playground," she said. "It's impossible to make it completely accident-free."
The new West Thames Park, an amenity provided by the State Department of Transportation as part of the Routh 9A reconstruction project, replaced a smaller park, affectionatelly dubbed "Tire Swing Park" because of its centerpiece, a simple but popular piece of equipment that children played on for years. The state agreed to include a tire swing in the redesigned park following eleventh-hour negotiations with parents who had protested the destruction of the park.
As the group conferred nearby, toddlers were drawn to the hanging tire like candy and Weiss found herself reluctantly explaining to caregivers that it was temporarily off limits.
"I know it's a lot of fun," she sighed as a nanny gently pulled one little boy away.
By Carl Glassman