Skip to main content
A popular and refreshing summertime tradition in the Brooklyn neighborhood has been suspended on orders by the city.
The Brooklyn Park waterslide in Southeast Portland—used by youthful summer day campers for nearly 50 years—was shut down after coming to the attention of Portland Parks & Recreation.
The official reason is that the “slide”—a wetted 100-foot-long, 20-foot-wide strip of polyethylene sheeting—damages the grass.
“Heavy plastic sheeting causes severe damage to natural grass when applied directly to the lawn, particularly during hot weather,” public works supervisor Kyle Ricciotti wrote to the volunteer head of Friends of Brooklyn Park, Craig Montag, last week. “On sunny days, the plastic acts as a heat conductor, rapidly raising soil temperatures and causing severe turf damage or grass death in less than an hour.”
The slide has been a popular feature of the Brooklyn Park Summer Youth Program since it began in 1978. It’s now staged by the Friends of Brooklyn Park, a citizen group that assumed control of the free day camp and began funding it when the city cut funding for the program in 2017. A neighbor has provided water for the slide since that time, according to an email Montag sent to the parks bureau on July 19, in which he asked for clarification of the city’s decision to ban the slide.
“The city told us we could not use park water on the waterslide. So a next-door neighbor sends their water to us,” Montag wrote, calling the waterslide “an institution 49 years in the making.”
Not a day care nor a supervised day camp, the program is all-volunteer funded and parents are encouraged to supervise their children “to their own comfort level,” according to the Friends of Brooklyn Park website.
In his email to the city, Montag called the city’s decision “disappointing, upsetting, mysterious and sad.”
According to Ricciotti, who responded to Montag with an explanation on July 23, the continuous flow of water compounds the damage to the grass by heavily saturating the soil, creating extensive mud and causing significant ground compaction. “To ensure the park’s grounds remain well-maintained and accessible for the entire community, we are unable to permit the setup of large plastic waterslides on the turf,” he wrote.
The decision by the parks bureau also affects dunk tanks and other “high-impact water activities” on natural grass across the city—not just at Brooklyn Park.
The inciting incident occurred three weeks ago when a staff member from Portland Solutions, the city’s homelessness and livability office, found a person sleeping on the waterslide, which had been damaged by a fire.
Friends of Brooklyn Park was notified the city doesn’t permit such features as they can rapidly and significantly damage turf, parks bureau spokesman Mark Ross tells WW.
“Hopefully you will lift your waterslide ban on Brooklyn Park,” Montag wrote in his email to the parks bureau last week. “On Friday, moms, dads and kids asked if the slide would be out that day. ‘I’m not sure’ was my answer.”
