Maddy's Guide to Playgrounds in Burlington - Wildmere Park

 

Basics:

Date of visit: May 25, 2025

Where can I find it? On Wildmere Ave, curiously

Bathrooms? nope

Parking? just along the road

When open? Daylight hours. 

Review:

I like to think of Wildmere Park as a work in progress. While technically the work was all completed in January of this year, there is a strong mismatch between the available space, and the functional use of that space. The single structure was clearly designed to make highly efficient use of a limited space. While well suited for a New York City postage stamp park, at Wildmere, it looks a little silly. 

This is it. This is the park.

Let us start with the structure itself. The architect appears to have subscribed to the same philosophy as a modern automobile company, which believes that odd-shaped polygons mashed together in strange angles is a forward thinking design. 

Admittedly, no one angle of it looks like another, making it an excellent calibration station for robotic vision systems. In that respect, this park is well future-proofed for our robotic overlords, once they gain control. 

Infinite pathways also mean infinite collisions between kids trying to get from one side to another.

Design choices aside, the structure itself is serviceable and can be a lot of fun, so long as there are not too many kids on it at the same time. Too many appears to be more than one or two at most, before children start running into each other on their way to the nexus point at the top of the slide. 

 

Like a red tie fighter, but less personality.

There are a few swings, but again there is a strong emphasis on consolidation and space saving. Presumably the smaller children can now swing while staring at a parent, instead of at the other kids trying to climb on the structure. Maybe that will improve parent child bonding. 

Two for the price of one

There are two other odd design choices for this particular park. One is the cluster of trees surrounding the flagpole. It looks like there was a paranoid fear that children might see the flagpole and perhaps wish to climb it, and the solution was to obscure it with densely planted and carefully manicured pines all around. 

What the actual what?

But the strangest design choice of all is the placement of the benches. For context, here is a google map overview of the park layout, borders in red are approximate. 

The sand lot on the right side is where the newly constructed structures now reside. But the two benches?

Tucked away in farthest corner, like they've been put into a time out.

Who are these for?

They are far enough away that it is hard to watch kids play without a telescope. They need to install one of those coin operated binoculars next to the benches for them to be of any real use. Normally I would like this as it is the ideal distance for my father to observe play time, but because it is out of earshot, he is not able to respond to my commands when the need arises. Ultimately, I predict these benches will sit, unused. 

A compact park smashed into a spacious opening; I give Wildmere 4 binoculars. 

Madelyn Hope Lewis is the senior playground tester of Lewis Developments, and a connoisseur of playtime activities. When she's not exploring Massachusetts fun time architecture, she can be found scouting out where is exactly "the line" with her parents.