Friends call this one Rat Park because of, well, you can guess.

The water feature is constantly flooding into the street and my kid once tried to join a group of dudes smoking a joint here. That said, it’s a super-convenient neighborhood favorite that’s typically crowded with after-school kids and families.

It has some fun unique features like a honeycomb-style climbing rope apparatus and a ⅛ mile running track for little ones, and the astroturf field has a lot of space for free play when it’s not being used for soccer practice.

We visit this playground regularly, but also we can hear the rats rummaging in the greenery. 

This is a pretty basic playground, but it was a good place to learn how to use playground equipment. The toddler section is nice and compact. The equipment for slightly older children though is not really that great. 

There's a lot of emphasis on quirky equipment that the kids don't really play on. The bigger slide is impossible for younger children to access, but guess what, our toddler still wants to slide down so guess who gets to lift him up to the top every time. "Again, again!" I can skip arm day at the gym. 

Since this is a newer playground, there were some good sensory pieces added to it. Unfortunately, most of these are now broken just three years after reopening. The parks department hasn't made any effort to repair them either, and probably will remain broken for another 30 years until they remake the whole park. 

The splash pad is irritatingly right in the center of the park with no crowd control. That means lots of times our kid is running between play areas right through the water. And the shoddy construction of this park means the guy who was responsible for leveling the drainage area really screwed up. Any time the water feature is on, there is a river running down the sloped out into the street. And guess who likes to splash in that river? Toddlers. Unless we're committed to getting wet, we've started avoiding this playground when the water is on. 

There is an area with artificial turf that is good for running around. A lot of times there are organized sports that take over this area. What's cool about organized sports using this area is it usually means other users can't – but here's the thing – that turf field isn't meant for organized sports and nobody can get a permit for it. https://www.nycgovparks.org/permits/field-and-court/map

There's also a really agro dad who comes here to play baseball with his kid who isn't that interested and definitely is not going to be an MLB star. But good job yelling really loud at your kid in the park. 

At certain times people do use this playground as a cut through between Scholes and Meserole Street, which can be annoying when they leave the wide gates open. Also we once saw an SUV jump the curb and run into one of the gates because of road rage, but I'm sure with all the good police work in our city, the driver of that car is probably not a danger to pedestrians anymore. 

We come to this playground a lot despite the rats, which haven't been as bad lately because I haven't seen them run into the playground as much, but I do still hear them.

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Named for Coenradt Ten Eyck, a Dutch settler. The first playground opened on the site in 1959. It recently underwent a renovation, although the construction is of poor quality. A sink hole in the artificial turf has left a gaping hole, and the splash bad water drain is not correctly leveled so water flows through the park out to the sidewalk. The renovation opened in 2020.