Let The Sunshine In

A fire turned into an opportunity to remake Edgewood Park’s Coogan Pavilion into a brighter, more colorful public space with more rooms for kids to have fun.

Mayor Toni Harp (pictured with parks chief Rebecca Bombero, deputy Bill Dixon, and kids attending a school-vacation camp) announced completion of approximately $240,000 worth of renovations at the pavilion Tuesday morning.

A two-alarm electrical fire ripped through the pavilion in October 2012 …

… demolishing an outdoor storage wing attached to the main four-decade old A‑frame building. The city condemned the wing, and it came down. The rest of the building, which used to support an outdoor skating rink, was deemed salvageable.

City architect Bill MacMullen got to work, putting together a design to bring the pavilion into the modern age. The resulting renovation cost about $420,000 he said, close to $120,000 of it paid for by insurance, the rest from the parks department budget, according to MacMullen.

The results were on display Tuesday. First noticeable change: All that glass letting light in. The previous fortress, pictured above …

… gave way to huge windows on the entrance wall …

… as well as on the wall facing out onto the skateboard park. Before the renovation, that wall had only one row of windows along the bottom.

White paint replaced dark colors on the walls. New cooling (the blue pipe) and heating (red) systems will support winter and summer indoor programs for kids.

Since the Coogan rink hasn’t had ice-skating for decades, the city realized it no longer needed all that storage space for ice-rink equipment. So in rebuilding the destroyed storage wing, the city used most of the space for an enclosed rec room, filled with pool and ping-pong and foosball tables. ​“This is found space,” MacMullen remarked. During a graffiti-art day at the pavilion last October, Dave Thomas decorated one wall (in the top photo of this story) with a black-and-white mural made all with thumbprints. Meanwhile, the old skate-sharpening room has become a community room.

A rubber floor went on top of the vinyl in part of the main room to accommodate exercise programs. ​“They blow air into it so it foams up a little bit, so it has a little give,” MacMullen said. And the games began.