Oakmont Park in Scranton gets big improvement

SCRANTON — From forlorn to inviting, Oakmont Park in East Mountain got a big improvement.

Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti held a ribbon cutting Thursday on a $447,500 upgrade of the park on Debbie Drive.

Formerly barren and uninviting, the recreation area now sports a new playground station, swings and apparatuses, a new gazebo pavilion, improved parking and walkways, and a refurbished basketball court.

“This is just such an exciting moment we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” Cognetti said.

The city had gotten input from residents on what they wanted to see at the recreation site that goes back at least 40 years, but that had become outdated and empty in more recent years, Oakmont Park Neighborhood Association President Jesse Rozelle said.

Now, he envisions that the park will become a focal point for the community. Along with hosting daily play by children, the park could become a popular spot for seasonal and holiday events, he said.

“We couldn’t ask for anything more,” Rozelle said.

The city used $215,296 in federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars to cover nearly half of the project cost of $447,496, with the rest coming from the city budget.

The park features a “poured-in-place” rubber surface under the main playground apparatus and a ‘tyke trail’ that looks like a mini two-lane road with a double-yellow line, said project manager and landscape architect Tom McLane.

The recycled rubber surface is designed to last as long as the playground set, around 20 to 25 years if it’s maintained, he said.

The tyke trail intuitively “teaches children about traffic,” McLane said. “So you get a kid on a Big Wheel here or learning how to ride a bicycle, it’s perfectly just to their scale.”

The park also got a few disabled-accessible parking spaces and sidewalks to the playground area. New swings and play pieces also accommodate disabled children.

Previously, Oakmont Park was primarily asphalt and had outdated, unsafe play equipment that had to be removed because it was in disrepair. A gazebo that had fallen into disrepair also was removed, making the park empty and uninviting.

Oakmont is the latest park in the city to be upgraded under a citywide parks assessment of October 2021 by Cognetti’s administration. The 300-page report evaluated conditions of the city’s 31 parks, proposed improvements and raised prospects of fundamental changes.

“With each park we’ve progressively learned and added amenities,” city Business Administrator Eileen Cipriani said.