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Park’s Emerald Palace playground getting makeover
In a normal summer at Robe-Ann Park, Mallary Meyer and Gillian Monnett would have been lathering on sunscreen and getting ready to climb into their chairs to help guard the city pool Thursday.
But this, of course, is no normal summer. So the would-be Greencastle Aquatic Center lifeguards find themselves on ladders all right -- not destined for a guard chair, mind you -- putting their artistic abilities to work on a mural on the north side of the Emerald Palace playground.
“We were supposed to be the pool managers,” Meyer lamented of another loss to the summer of Covid.
While you think it would be easy for someone with a last name that smacks of Monet to turn a faded wooden canvas into a landscape, Gillian and Mallary were resorting to using their hands -- fingerpainting, if you will -- in putting the finishing touches on a sunset overlooking a mountain scene to complement the rocky scene at the bottom of the mural.
“I asked our young people to come up with a mural that we can add to this portion of the Emerald Palace,” Park Director Rod Weinschenk said. “It tends to be a victim of graffiti, so we thought we would try our hand at preventing it by adding a mural. Park personnel and Park Board volunteers are completing the painting.”
The Emerald Palace, of course, has been a fixture at the park since a community build spearheaded by the Greencastle Civic League created the structure in October 2001.
To the left of the mural, Meyer and Monnett -- now part of the park summer maintenance crew -- have turned vertical boards into a tree with the lower portion painted brown for the tree trunk and the upper area green for leaves.
“We’re thinking of letting the SPARK kids put handprints (for individual leaves) on it next year,” offered Park Board member Cathy Merrell, who was painting the rocket ship adjacent to the right of the mural.
It was Merrell who noted at the July Park Board meeting that the Emerald Palace was getting a makeover and how the boat at the west end of the structure looked “new and shiny and crisp” after the repainting.
“You can see that boat all over the park,” she added.
Meanwhile, when Park Maintenance Director David Bault pointed out Merrell’s volunteer painting efforts, he raised eyebrows in saying she was painting a rocket ship.
The structure is accented by a pointed tip like a rocket, fiery exhaust painted at the bottom and an American flag on the side.
“Nobody knew it was a rocket ship,” Bault said.
Meanwhile, a couple of young spectators popped their heads over a sidewall to see what was going on Thursday morning.
Bault asked if they knew what the bottom of the mural represented.
“It’s a rock wall, see it?,” one boy said in response, poking his blond crew-cut buddy and pointing to the wall.
The boys took a couple seconds to absorb the upper section of the mural before one of them asked the girls, “Why don’t you use spray paint?”
“We did,” Meyer replied, holding up her mauve-colored, paint-covered palms, “but we don’t have this color.”
Monnett and Meyer painted other pieces of the playground structure last week, including the boat, train, truck, jeep and even the prince and princess feature where you can stick your head through a painted wooden picture to become the prince or the princess.
Merrell was especially excited that while she and the young women worked on their painting project, youngsters were still climbing on and crawling through other portions of the palace.
“It’s one of the things kids can still do right now,” she said, pointing out that the mural site was once adorned with kids’ handprints. “It was that way when we moved here.”
In recent years, however, it was a target for vandals, including plenty of profanity.
Even, as Merrell said, “the worst of all words.”