Burning Community

We recently took my son to his favorite local park - McKinley Park. It’s not our closest park, but it is the best park. It has a large, interesting, and very unique community-built playground structure next to a pond with lots of ducks and geese so it obviously has lots to entertain the kids. So we took my son to the “duck park” and as he started playing we noticed a large portion of the playground was missing - completely gone. What happened? Max Ehrenfreund, writing for the Sacramento Bee, has the story:

One of McKinley Park’s most popular attractions – the beloved playground – was destroyed Saturday by an early-morning fire in what Sacramento firefighters are calling a case of arson. […] Neighbors in east Sacramento and midtown built and maintained the playground, with diminishing help from the city as parks budgets shrank. It was constructed in 1994 with donations and city funds, neighbors recalled, with 2,500 volunteers erecting it in just four days.

It is disgusting and shameful that someone would so senselessly destroy such a community icon, particularly a beloved kids playground. Terrible. Just terrible.