Sunnyside School Park

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Here's a photo from SE Portland's Sunnyside School Park, which is attached to its eponymous tree-hugging grade school. The land's actually part of the school grounds and owned by the school district, but it has the standard city parks sign outside, and it shows up that way on maps of the city, and it's included on the city parks website. Possibly the city gets to claim it as a park because they're chipping in to pay for maintenance or something. I'm not entirely sure what the terms of the arrangement are; I suspect it was created as a way for the city to legally toss some money over to the school district during one of the district's endless financial crises. In any case, school use still takes priority over other park uses, and in a 2010 decision, the city limited public access to the park during school hours. In years past residents of the neighborhood had gotten used to the grounds being open and park-like, and weren't pleased about the change. Still, it is a school, first and foremost, and keeping strange adults off school grounds during school hours seems like a reasonable sort of rule to have.

The city parks website mentions something about there being art here, which is the reason I dropped by. The city's info page for the park didn't give any clues about what to look for, though, so I walked by to see if anything obviously art-like leaped out at me. Nothing really did; the only thing I noticed was a line of boulders marking off the NE corner of the park. I honestly don't know whether this is the art or not. There wasn't a sign next to it, and it might be something else entirely, or it's possible the website refers to something that's gone now, or something inside the school building, or it never existed and it's just an error on their part, I'm not sure. The neighborhood association says the corner of the park marked off by the boulders remains open to the public all the time, despite So maybe that's what they're there for. Or maybe they're just decoration. I dunno. Anyway, I took a quick photo of the boulders just in case they're significant somehow, and here it is.