YOUTH : HUNTINGTON BEACH : Adventure Awaits Kids in Central Park

Tucked away in a small corner of Central Park not far from the Central Library is Adventure Playground, a place where youngsters build forts, ride rafts over an 18-inch-deep pond and slide down a hill into a mud pit.

There are no Ninja Turtles, organized sports or computers--just lots of opportunities to be creative and get dirty.

Kids who can’t think of the proper name call it Huck Finn Park or Mud Park.

As many as 15,000 youngsters, mostly between the ages of 8 and 12, take part in the Adventure Playground program every summer, some coming from as far away as Los Angeles and Riverside to try their hand at being modern-day Huck Finns, Tom Sawyers and Becky Thatchers.

Adventure Playground, a byproduct of World War II, was first located in an abandoned Huntington Beach sand quarry in June of 1974. Because of flooding in 1979, it was moved to a temporary site. In 1981, a permanent 1.5-acre location was staked out in the 280-acre Huntington Central Park.

The Adventure Playground concept was started by C.T. Sorensen, a Danish landscape architect who noted that children in Copenhagen after World War II did not play in the designed playgrounds but rather in vacant lots and bombed-out construction sites.

His concept resulted in the establishment of hundreds of Adventure Playgrounds in Europe before they started showing up in the United States.

Local officials say the present-day version of the playground in Huntington Beach looks pretty much like a junkyard. But it won a California Parks & Recreation Award of Excellence in 1984 as well as other awards. It has been featured in National Geographic, Sunset magazine and other publications.

“Kids come in and they go wild,” said Senior Recreation Supervisor Bob Werth. “They don’t have much opportunity to be creative because there’s not much open space anymore. All of it is fenced off and developed.”

This summer, Adventure Playground will open on June 21 and close Aug. 27.