Huchiun Park Review

Huchiun Park is too new for google street view to give you any current images, or for its trees to give shade, though if you time it right, the adjacent apartment buildings will blot out the sun. Toddlers love the trains that pass by, once or twice a play session. What’s there is good: the swings, the slide (the rattly roll-y kind), and the climbing tunnel, which is surrounded by rubber ground that slopes in ways that make it fun to run up and down, and to fall. There are more empty picnic tables than playground equipment, though. There are some wooden modern-art-ish looking climbing poles, and a mirror maze on the other side of the green space, and both are fun. They stop being “play structures” when there aren’t kids in them.

It’s all very new. The water fountains work in the way that so many older water fountains don’t, the basketball courts are basketball courts, and people are often doing grass things on the grass. All of it is clean, built on the ground that was once occupied by a Sherwin-Williams factory that put a lot of lead in a lot of paint for about a hundred years. Like the twentieth century, we must trust most of that is gone, and hope not too much of it is left in our bodies. There used to be a huge sign here, visible on the freeway, that showed a paint can dumping paint on a globe. “Cover the Earth,” was the slogan.

(Like the Athletics, Sherwin-Williams has since moved to Nevada.)

“Huchien” is xučyun, a transliteration of what a land acknowledgement is likely to call “the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people.” Now it’s an English word for “this playground.” The Confederated Villages of Lisjan is not federally recognized, but they hold protests at the mall nearby, when the American word for now is “Black Friday.” The land, generally, is acknowledged on nearby commemorative informational signs.

No one seems unhappy, but they don’t start a lot of conversations here. It’s a still space, mostly filled with what isn’t here, which is still mostly still and empty space. There are never any toys left over on all that clean and bare ground. Maybe someone comes to clean at night, someone you don’t see, though it may also be that people just know, without being told, not to leave toys for other people’s kids to play with. It’s just not that kind of space.

Sometimes a tech dad flies a drone. If the fenced in community garden is open, you can walk around in it, and try to prevent your kids from picking all the flowers. Mostly it’s locked, but a guy came down from his apartment, once, to let us in, and we dutifully played in it.

I’m tempted to call this a gentrification aesthetic, though the families tend not to be white. All that empty clean space, the few play pieces surrounded by so much minimalism… it’s pleasing to look at, and be in, for an adult. But toddlers run out of interest. They’ll start walking along the walls, or playing on the rock-things, or climbing around the tables and chairs, and then wandering into the street, which are calm and mostly carless. A fence-less park needs a kind of gravity, needs a lot of stuff to keep the kids in orbit. This park’s center doesn’t really hold. The bike path will lead you, surely, toward that temple of commerce—on top of the Ohlone shellmounds—and the fences are secure at all the places where a toddler could get hurt or die if they weren’t, as you walk towards the newly renovated fod court and play area, where you can get pizza, where you can play with giant connect four games, and bang on the resonating tubes with hammers whose strings are much too short. There are stairs to walk up and down; on your way there, you may see some trains passing by—both the fast short Amtrak and the occasional long cargo train—but a lot of sun will hit your bodies on your way back, and toddlers will get tired. The public exercise equipment along the way is fun for the kids, who are the only people I ever see playing on it. The dog park along the way is usually empty. Everyone you see is passing through.