Glendale's Two New Playgrounds Are Not Jungle Gyms. They're a 12-Foot Owl and a Truck.

For 21 years, the playground at Mayor's Bicentennial Park in Verdugo Woodlands was a wood-chip surface and a fading structure that any parent in the neighborhood could describe from memory. That version is gone. What replaced it, as of July 29, is a single sculptural piece: a 12-foot-tall owl with slide-tail, climbable wings, and unblinking eyes that face down Loma Vista Drive.

Six miles south, at Adams Square Mini Park in Adams Hill, a crew broke ground on July 20 for the second half of the same summer. That one, targeted for an August 31 opening, is a custom truck. Same designer, same funding source, same idea. Glendale is not restocking jungle gyms. It is commissioning objects.

Why the city stopped ordering jungle gyms

The two projects share a designer and a funding stream, but the more interesting shared trait is how the shapes got picked. In fall 2024, the Community Services & Parks Department ran a two-round public process: site visits with the park planner in October, then a survey window that ran September 19 through October 25, 2024. The Parks, Recreation, and Community Services Commission then recommended the finalists to City Council in December. The owl and the truck are not catalogue selections. They came out of survey preferences from the residents whose kids would use them.

That matters because it changes what a Glendale playground is for. The updated designs include poured-in-place rubber safety surfacing replacing the old wood chips, integrated shade structures over the play zones, and elements chosen for accessibility and sensory play rather than raw climbing height. Parks Commission president Zareh Amirian said the prior structure at Bicentennial was last replaced 21 years ago, was outdated, lacked features to play with, and had a wood-chipped surface, and that the new playground is what the community wants. Read that as a shift from generic to specific, and from durable to legible. A child who has grown up in Verdugo Woodlands will remember the owl the way an earlier generation remembers the Brand Library reading room.

The Owl on Loma Vista

Mayor's Bicentennial Park sits on land Glendale bought from Caltrans in 1982 and rebuilt into a neighborhood park by 1991. The name commemorates the 200-year anniversary of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and honors former Glendale mayors. It is the kind of civic footnote that only registers when a ribbon gets cut, and on July 29, one did. Mayor Ardy Kassakhian did the honors, and children swarmed the structure before the speeches were fully over.

The owl itself is the first of its kind in Southern California, according to Community Services & Parks staff at the opening. That is a specific claim worth stating plainly: Kompan has installed owl-form structures elsewhere, but this configuration, at this scale, in this region, is new. The grand opening also included lawn games, face painting, balloon animals, and complimentary lemonade and churros, which is the kind of detail that tells you the department treated this as a neighborhood moment rather than a maintenance line item.

"This playground was last replaced 21 years ago. It was outdated, lacked features to play with, and had a wood chipped surface. This new playground is completely different, and this is what the community wants." — Zareh Amirian, President, Parks, Recreation, and Community Services Commission

For families in the Verdugo Woodlands pocket bounded roughly by Verdugo Road, Cañada Boulevard, and the 2 Freeway, the practical change is simple. The nearest walkable playground has been upgraded from a structure their older kid outgrew years ago to something a toddler and a nine-year-old can share on the same visit. Shade is built in, which in an August afternoon on Loma Vista is not a small feature.

The Truck coming to Palmer Avenue

Adams Square Mini Park is the smaller of the two sites, a pocket park inside the Adams Hill neighborhood grid where Palmer Avenue meets the older streetcar-era commercial cluster around Palmer and Adams. The custom truck design was approved in the same December 2024 commission meeting as the owl, but construction started later. Ground broke on July 20, 2026, and the city is targeting completion by August 31.

Two things about Adams Square make the truck the right call for that block. First, the park is small, which favors a single high-impact object over a sprawling multi-structure layout. Second, Adams Hill is one of the few Glendale neighborhoods where you can walk from a 1920s Spanish Revival or Craftsman bungalow to a corner coffee shop to the park in under ten minutes, and the park is already the de facto backyard for families whose lots are tight. A distinctive truck structure gives that walk a destination.

The Adams Square project also includes furniture and fixture replacement that the Bicentennial site did not require. If you have used the benches at Adams Square in the last few years, you know why.

What Measure A actually paid for

Both projects are funded through Los Angeles County's Measure A, the parcel tax voters approved in 2016 for parks and recreation facilities, administered through the Regional Park and Open Space District. The budgets are worth pausing on because they read low next to the sticker shock of most civic construction:

• $702,000 for the Mayor's Bicentennial Owl, design through completion
• $545,000 for the Adams Square Custom Truck, including furniture and fixtures
• Poured-in-place rubber safety surfacing at both sites, replacing wood chips
• Integrated shade structures built into the play footprint rather than added later
• Accessibility and sensory-play elements specified during the design phase, not retrofitted

For context, $702,000 is roughly what a modest three-bedroom fixer trades for in parts of the Glendale market. The city got a landmark structure, a resurfaced site, shade, and inclusive design elements for the price of a single house. Whether that reads as thrifty or as evidence of how far Measure A dollars stretch when a department commits to a design rather than a change order, the outcome is visible from the sidewalk.

The Glendale Open Space and Parks Foundation, whose president George Balteria helped build the original Bicentennial site, was on hand for the July 29 opening. That kind of continuity, from the people who broke ground in the late 1980s to the ones cutting the ribbon in 2026, is easier to point to than to manufacture.

A short summer plan for families already here

If you live in one of the Foothill or older-Glendale neighborhoods and you have not been by either park recently, the next four weeks are the window. Mayor's Bicentennial is open now, and the surface is still new enough that the rubber has that faint clean smell that will be gone by October. Adams Square is fenced through late August. When it opens, the pairing gives Glendale families a real choice: a hillside park with an owl on the Verdugo Woodlands side, and a walkable pocket park with a truck in the middle of Adams Hill.

Two visits, two neighborhoods, one summer. That is the pattern the parks department seems to be settling into, and it is a better pattern than the one that produced the wood-chip surface everyone tolerated for two decades.

At Chris Cragnotti and G&C Properties, we pay attention to these details because they are the texture of what it means to live in a specific Glendale block rather than a generic zip code. If you own a character home in Verdugo Woodlands, Adams Hill, or any of the Foothill neighborhoods and you are thinking about your next move, let's make it personal. Contact us to discuss your character home.