By Elizabeth Ladzinski
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
HELL'S KITCHEN — Hell's Kitchen Park is one of the few open areas where neighborhood kids have enough space to play kickball, handball, soccer and other games. But parents here say a pair of hazardous volleyball poles that haven't seen a net in almost a year are threatening to endanger that.
The poles at the park on Tenth Avenue between West 47th and West 48th streets have been bare ever since the latest net fell into such disrepair that the Parks Department stripped them permanently.
Parks officials are slated to replace the net this summer, but parents say they want the volleyball poles — and net — gone for good, and they've started up a petition to try to make that happen.
"I know of at least 100 families who want the poles gone," said Megan Kelly, a co-founder of the community parenting group Hell's Kitchen Babies who started up the petition along with fellow group co-founder Carolyne Trufelman.
Trufelman, 44, said her 8-year-old son was playing kickball in the park on Sunday when he lost his balance and fell against one of the poles.
He scraped his arm so deeply on a jagged piece of the pole that he ended up in the hospital with two stitches, she said.
She said she and other parents had just discussed the dangers at a Community Board 4 meeting days earlier, "and lo and behold, my own kid, it happens to on Sunday," Trufelman said.
Critics say they worry about the volleyball poles and net, not only because of the injuries they have caused, but also because they feel that the court attracts adult volleyball leagues from outside of the neighborhood that impede on the park's usage by local residents.
The net was put up in 2002 after renovations were made to the playground. Over the years, the net slowly deteriorated due to weather and wear from children pulling and hanging on it, until last summer when it was removed, parents said. Since then, the open space has turned from a volleyball court into a group play area, and parents want to keep it that way.
Opponents said they initially tried to compromise with the Parks Department to put the volleyball net up on a limited schedule to allow shared space between the volleyball players and the kids, but said the department didn't agree to the terms.
"The Parks Department just didn't want that, they said it just can't really happen," Trufelman said.
The Parks Department did not return requests for comment.
But at a recent meeting, Parks Dept. staffer Elliott Sykes, who manages the parks in Hell's Kitchen, said he doesn't have the manpower to constantly lift and lower the net. He added that he's gotten nine letters of complaint from disgruntled volleyball players since the net came down.
"When we purchase another net it will have to stay up for the duration as intended for that space in the park," Sykes wrote in an email to opponents obtained by DNAinfo. "It may be more appropriate to educate and instruct those kids who are destroying Parks property by constantly damaging the net."
At Sykes' suggestion, the parents offered to buy a net and control and schedule its use, locking it up in the park during the kids' free-play hours, but said they haven't heard back from the Parks Department.
"We don't want to make it a big deal, we just want to change the usage of the park, but nobody can seem to tell us how to do that," Kelly said.
"So we feel like we're being pushed to this because we have no other choice."
