With their strollers and their one-, two- and three-year-olds in tow, they don’t look like your average citizen activists. But a band of about a dozen mothers who live near Columbus Park has been raising hell recently over the sudden closure of the park’s 2,500 square foot toddlers play area last month. “You move into a neighborhood that has a park, and you don’t expect it to just close down one day,” said Tracy Solodar, who used to take her two-year-old daughter Kiera to play in the toddlers’ area a few times a day. “But that is exactly what happened. No notice. No signs. No explanations, just closed.” About two months ago, county officials, who maintain the park, closed the swing set and mini-jungle-gym-filled area indefinitely because they feared for the little tykes’ safety. Not more than a credit card’s width away from the toddlers’ area’s west fence, a wall to a six-story apartment building complex is being built. “They are building right up to the very edge of the park,” said Julie St. Jean, a spokesperson for the Hudson County Executive. “We don’t want to open the playground for fear that something could fall during construction and hurt one of the kids or their parents.” In fact, the new building, which was designed by Hoboken-based architect Dean Marchetto and received a fistful of variances from the city’s zoning board, is being built so close to the park that it has actually undermined some of the park’s land, leaving the ground in the toddlers area unstable, officials say. While angry parents have been lighting up the switchboards of county and city offices looking for a solution to the problem, answers have not been forthcoming. Trading charges County officials have hired a surveyor to assess the boundaries of the property and help determine what is necessary to save the park. Options include moving the swings, climbing equipment and benches that make up the toddlers’ area to another part of the park or fixing the damaged ground. Preliminary estimates are that a full-scale move would cost the county $1 million, while repairs would only cost $50,000, officials say. It is not clear where the money would come from. While the surveyor does his job, which is expected to be completed by the end of the week, and the construction crews continue to put the edifice up, the politicians have been left to point fingers at each other over who is to blame for the mess. “I’ve been living and breathing this,” said County Freeholder Maurice Fitzgibbons, who said he has spoken to a number of concerned parents about the problem. “If [Mayor Anthony] Russo did not overdevelop the city, we would not have to have children suffer like this.” City officials scoffed at Fitzgibbons’ charge. While George Crimmins, the city’s business administrator and a member of the planning board, acknowledged that the developer had received some variances, he explained that they had nothing to do with the location of the wall that abuts the park. (The variances included one that allowed them to build up to six stories, instead of the usual four, and another that allowed them to cover a greater percentage of the lot.) “We don’t have side setbacks,” he explained. “If we did, none of these row houses would be able to be built. So the developer is perfectly within his rights to go right up to the property line.” Crimmins also pointed out that the city’s office of construction oversight made the developer take out the original footings that the contractor had installed, since it was determined that they actually crossed over the boundary of the developer’s property. Those encroachments created some damage to the city-owned athletic field, which sits to the north of the development site, and city officials simply negotiated a payment from the developer to make the necessary repairs. City officials said that the problems with the toddlers’ park are symptomatic of a drag-your-heels approach that the county has with respect to the park. Plus, look at those courts “The tennis courts in the park are in bad shape too,” said Russo, an avid tennis player. “Those lights have been out for years. I’ve written letters and I know there was a petition drive, but still nothing.” Fitzgibbons was upset when he heard that the mayor was making an issue of the tennis courts. He promised to have new lights put in by “the end of the season.” “In the grand scheme of things, it would have been two years before the lights were put in there,” he said, “but I pushed so they are going to do it soon. The mayor should call and thank me for that, instead of this.” Meanwhile, the mothers who used to bring their kids to the park have been trying to entertain their kids on the blacktop that is also a part of the park, or in the giant sandboxes. “It’s just such a waste, because they have all that equipment in there and nobody can use it,” said Jane Riggs Wednesday evening as her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Lucy looked wistfully at the new orange fence that prohibited her entry. “I’ve seen some people lift their kids over this fence and let them play, but that does not work for me since I could not follow. We go over to Elysian Park but that is standing room only now because of this.” “Yeah,” says Eve Farley, whose young son Joseph was at her side. “It is kind of funny, but part of why we bought our apartment on Roberts Court is because we knew that he would have someplace to play. Oh well.”
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