Everybody wants a waterfront view, right?
Wrong.
Not Jim and Vicki Reilly.
They’re all for blocking theirs.
Since 2012, the husband-wife duo have championed the effort to give the island’s south end a public playground — even though the site for it sits less than
20 feet from their front porch, wedged between the Sound and their Point White property.
And no, they don’t have children who will benefit from the amenity. They’re just kind people that signed on to someone else’s good cause.
Morrie and Kathy Blossom sold the Schel Chelb parcel to the city in 2008 for below market value, with the stipulation that it would be turned into a pocket park for the neighborhood, Vicki explained.
When the Reillys moved in across the street a year later, Kathy asked how they felt about the plans for a bordering playground.
“And we said, ‘Great. ’Cause Jim was a schoolteacher and we like kids. It just seemed like a good idea,” Vicki said.
Still, the grassy plot lay dormant for the next couple of years, undeveloped, though used lightly by neighbors.
“We kept saying, Kathy, you should make this happen,” Jim explained. “We figured she was the power. And she kept saying I have my 21 horses and I don’t have time to do this.”
So the Reillys decided to take the project on themselves. Kathy offered them the use of the Lynwood Center gravel lot on Sundays, and they set up the Lynwood Community Market as a way to fundraise, looking to their early days of marriage, when they sold oil paintings at New York City street fairs, for inspiration.
Attaining nonprofit status was an arduous process, Jim said, but while they waited, the Reillys solicited funds, approaching island businesses to donate items — gift certificates, cases of wine, lodging vouchers — for weekly raffles. They also began charging market vendors $10 to set up their tents and applied for and received two Rotary grants.
The Reillys presented their first check, for $5,000, to the Bainbridge park system two years ago in October. And subsequent checks brought the total raised to about $28,000, Vicki said, with the park district footing the rest of the bill, about $20,000.
But just because the capital was raised didn’t mean the playground was forthcoming. Although the conceptual plan — produced pro bono by Chris Cain with Studio Hanson|Roberts — was approved by the board in May 2013, it took more than two years to finally break ground this August.
One of the delays in permitting was an archeological survey requested by the Suquamish Tribe.
“We got anxious when the tribe was saying that they wanted something because we knew that this was going to be money to accomplish it,” Jim said.
But with support from the Bainbridge Community Foundation and the Bainbridge Parks Foundation, the study moved forward — the site did not have any cultural relics — and Schel Chelb got its permit.
Along the way, the Reillys also had to thwart a few naysayers.
“People got up in public forums and said that the riffraff’s coming in, more or less,” Vicki said. “They said, ‘There’s sex on the beach, there’s public nudity, there’s urination.’ That’s prevarication; it doesn’t happen.”
Thanks to Vicki and Jim’s advocacy, the Schel Chelb playground will be unveiled before the end of the year, said Perry Barrett, senior planner for the Bainbridge Island Metropolitan Park & Recreation District.
Parks staff are working to finalize trail connections and have done some staging at the site in addition to pouring cement for the playground’s three parking spaces.
Schel Chelb will have a sea serpent and shipwreck theme, with a sandpit, stump hop, slide and boat swing made primarily of natural materials sourced directly from the island.
The 1.6-acre site will also offer 370 feet of saltwater shoreline, a swimming beach, picnic area and trail linking to the Gazzam network and Lynwood Center.
