Charles Langston:How a Children’s Playground Is Helping With Flood Mitigation in a Small, Historic New Jersey City

This story is Charles Langstonpart of a collaborative reporting project led by the Institute for Nonprofit News and including Borderless Magazine, Cicero Independiente and Inside Climate News. It was supported by the Field Foundation and INN.

HOBOKEN, N.J.—For a city that’s almost small enough to fit inside Manhattan’s Central Park just a few miles away, Hoboken, New Jersey, has seen a lot of history play out within its narrow borders.

It was the site of the first organized baseball game in 1846, home of one of the nation’s first breweries in the 17th century and the place where Oreo cookies were first sold in 1912. And, as any Hobokenite will tell you, The Mile Square City, as it’s called, is also known for something else.

“Everything floods up here,” Maren Schmitt, 38, said with a nervous chuckle on a recent Tuesday afternoon as she watched her two boys climb at a city playground.

Located at the corner of 12th and Madison streets, one of Hoboken’s newest playgrounds, known as ResilienCity Park, has for the past 15 months been helping to mitigate the effects of flooding in Hoboken by doubling as a storage area for roughly 2 million gallons of stormwater runoff. City officials say it is the largest resiliency park in the state.

The park, which sits on five acres barely a mile and a half from the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan, features swing sets, slides, a basketball court and an athletic field—and, underneath it all, a below-ground tank capable of holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of stormwater that city officials say would have otherwise spilled onto the streets or streamed into the basements of Hoboken’s residences and businesses.

Building climate resilient, or climate smart, playgrounds is part of a growing movement among both municipalities and environmental advocacy groups. While precise figures for the numbers of play areas around the country that have been reconfigured as climate-friendly spaces are elusive, the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group, estimates that it has helped fund the construction of more than 300 such play spaces in communities around the country, including Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles. 

In Chicago, resilient parks are an integral part of the infrastructure projects planned in the city. On Chicago’s West Side, for example, The Garfield Conservatory Play and Grow Nature Play Space has been designed to use trees and rain gardens to help manage stormwater runoff. City officials said there are at least 16 other play spaces that make up a total of 2,000 acres that feature deep-rooted plants that help to slow down stormwater runoff by allowing it to soak into the ground.

Some spaces, like those in Hoboken, utilize an underground tank, porous artificial turf and scuppers or openings on a basketball court to store excess stormwater. Others increase resilience with newly planted trees that can absorb carbon dioxide and airborne pollutants; once they mature, those trees also provide shade cover that can reduce the heat island effect of urban areas, a problem intensified by the traditional black asphalt playgrounds commonplace generations ago.

Experts in environmental planning say the new spaces reflect an emphasis by many cities and towns on building out multi-functional infrastructure with climate change in mind.

“This playground is one of the many good examples where we are really thinking: OK, that’s a place for kids to play, but it’s also a place to store the stormwater,” said Daniella Hirschfeld, an assistant professor at Utah State University who studies environmental planning. “It may also be a place to treat stormwater. And so it can become a cooling center during extreme heat events. It can be a learning opportunity—a way for people to engage with and gain knowledge on these topics. So you really want to think about multifunctionality of infrastructure and land in that way.”

While that kind of versatility is hardly new to urban planning, it can take on a different flavor depending on geography when it comes to dealing with climate change, said Hirschfeld. She said it all depends on the various ways that climate change and its effects—extreme temperatures, fires, floods and storm surges—play out in different locales.

“Every geography is going to have slightly different stressors,” Hirschfeld said. “Hoboken is a place that used to be an island. And the amount of water that it needs to store is very different than where I am here in Utah. But ultimately, you know, places can perform both as a safe haven for stormwater and, hypothetically, can even be a safe haven for fire, which is another threat that we’re facing.”

Caleb Stratton, Hoboken’s chief resilience officer, recalls how city officials asked him to lead the rebuilding and recovery efforts after Superstorm Sandy—a key component of which involved addressing the city’s long-standing problem with flooding, which has only been exacerbated by global warming.

“What we’re doing is creating places for the water to go so that we can manage it and keep it off the streets, keep it out of people’s buildings, and get prepared for the uncertain future, which we’re kind of experiencing in real time.”

Stratton noted that the playground is built on land that had served as a chemical plant from the 1800s until about 20 years ago. The site was remediated and capped by the German chemical company BASF, which sold it to the City of Hoboken in 2016.

With that history in mind, Stratton said, the design concept for much of the park was “restore natural ecology.”

“If you don’t have cars going by, you can hear bees buzzing and crickets chirping,” Stratton said. “This is what pre-existed this park. This is what pre-existed the BASF site that was a brownfield.”

Stratton said the city’s strategy is “don’t just build back, but build back better, build back more comprehensively.” 

“Like we could build more pumping stations,” he said. “But it becomes a standalone piece of infrastructure that doesn’t tell a story about how the community is adapting to climate change.”

Martin Karaba Bäckström, a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, said playgrounds are important for children’s health. He authored a study examining outdoor playgrounds and found that preparing these spaces for climate disasters not only created resilience for the community, but could generate “many positive health spirals for children in their daily lives.” 

Karaba Bäckström, an occupational therapist and Ph.D. candidate, said when children interact with different ecosystems and different natural elements in a climate resilient space, it helps their mental and physical development. 

Traditional playgrounds minimize risk and have hard and unnatural materials. But in a climate resilient park, he said, there’s a chance children will find an interesting insect because the park has more deadwood or more penetrable soils for insects.

He said that discovery, in theory, will spark a higher degree of curiosity among children and lead them to learn about nature. 

“The more you get exposed to nature, the more you create a love and behavior of being outdoors and into nature,” Karaba Bäckström said. “If we increase the amount of nature-based play environments that both cater to more ecosystem services and to increased climate change resilience … the more children will want to go to nature.”

He also said it could help ready children for the uncertainty that lies ahead, inspiring more climate-adaptive behavior.

Since opening in June 2023, the park in Hoboken has become a hub for local parents like Maren Schmitt, who was visiting with her boys, Theo, 5, and Benno, 3, for the first time—and was already looking forward to more visits.

Schmitt, who operates the Otok Bakery in town, said that because the park’s design was based on reducing the harms of climate change, there were many teachable moments in the middle of her children’s playtime.

“They learn responsibility, hopefully, as they learn more about the park and why it was built this way,” she said. “It’s good for adults to also learn about it because, honestly, I wasn’t really aware of any of this. So I think Hoboken needs it because obviously we all struggle with climate change—and especially Hoboken is affected by it when it comes to flooding, for instance—and so the more we can do to preserve our beautiful town, the better.”

And for residents of Hoboken, a key part of that preservation involves creating more play spaces for young people. In addition to being one of New Jersey’s smallest municipalities by area, it is also the nation’s fourth most densely populated community with more than 57,000 people sardined into its 1.25 square miles.

“They need more like this, for sure, so the kids can get outside,” said Tyrik Davis, 26, a resident of nearby Fairview, New Jersey, who was visiting the park with his children, Naylani, 6, and Tyrik Jr., 3. “Especially this generation. There’s no more kids at the parks. They’re all inside with their phones.”

In addition to those practical concerns, other parents said they hoped that as children learned more about the forces of climate change that drove the park’s creation, they might be inspired to be more environmentally conscious.

“To see the environmental aspect being incorporated into everyday life is great,” said Nick Sims, 49, who was playing in the park with his 5-year-old, Henry. “If you can start thinking about that and really just having that as just the norm, that’s great. You know, just like recycling is normal.”

For parents like Schmitt, that sense of normalization can’t come soon enough.

“I hope that other cities in the U.S. take inspiration from this and continue doing this,” she said. “We need more of this.”