Article content continued

Forty-six hundred square metres is very large for a playground but it’s still not that big: the size of about three hockey rinks, for instance, or a bit smaller than a football field. That’s total area. The structures sit in the middle of the playground, so most of the 4,600 square metres will be sand or wood chips or rubber.

The work is in conjunction with the city’s parks department, which managed to screw up a splash pad at Lansdowne. It was off all this past glorious weekend, when all the others in town opened. The city couldn’t explain why on Tuesday. Confidence grows.

In 2014, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board put together an inventory of its school playgrounds, including their surface areas and what it would cost to replace them. Take just about any school playground you might know. Scale it up, multiply the cost to match, and building something like it at Mooney’s Bay size would cost between $1.8 million and $1.85 million, using the board’s figures.

The figures are amazingly consistent and clear: You can’t build something on the scale of Sinking Ship’s plans, at the price they’re talking about, and get quality or innovation much beyond what you’d find at a primary school.

Let’s go at the math another way. Sinking Ship’s conceptual sketch of its Mooney’s Bay idea — you can’t put a lot of stock in these things, but this is what we have — shows about 25 large play structures, surrounded by a bunch of minor ones. Catalogue prices from major vendors vary a lot depending on what you want, but anything decent starts at $75,000. Seventy-five thousand times 25 is $1.875 million. That’s nearly the whole budget spoken for and we’re still just buying ordinary stuff, not climbers in the shape of a moose.