LOCKPORT, N.Y. — At 9:47 a.m. Tuesday, the same three retirees who arrive every weekday at 9:30 had already claimed the shaded bench under the pavilion at Outwater Park’s two-year-old splash pad, opened their thermoses, and assumed the formation that municipal staff have come to refer to, off the record, as ‘the morning shift.’
The town’s $340,000 recreational water feature, dedicated in May 2023 with a ribbon-cutting attended by the mayor and seven schoolchildren, has, over the course of twenty-six months, evolved into something nobody planned for and nobody is willing to be the person to address: a fully operational senior gathering space that happens to have toddlers running through it.
‘It’s not a senior center. It’s a splash pad,’ said Dale Hennig, assistant director of Lockport Parks and Recreation, choosing his words with the care of a man who has thought about this a great deal. ‘But also, increasingly, yes.’
A folding card table appeared in late June. By the second week of July, somebody had brought a battery-powered box fan. On Mondays, Marcia DeLuca, 71, runs what she insists is not a coffee circle out of a Coleman cooler labeled, in Sharpie, ‘NOT A COFFEE CIRCLE.’ The pad’s mister wall — engineered to provide a fine cooling spray for children running beneath it — is now considered prime real estate at 11 a.m. for what regulars have begun calling ‘a free facial.’
An informal schedule has emerged without anyone agreeing to it. From 9 to 10:30 is the morning regulars. From 10:30 to noon is the regulars who don’t mind kids. After noon is everyone, with the understanding that the cribbage table, once seated, does not move.
‘Look, I’m not going to be the one,’ said Erin Talarico, 34, watching her four-year-old weave between two seated men deep in a hand. ‘Half of them know my mother. One of them is my mother.’
Hennig confirmed that the department has discussed, at three separate staff meetings, whether any kind of formal accommodation should be made — additional benches, a posted notice, perhaps a designated quiet area — and that all three meetings ended without a decision. ‘The minute you put up a sign that says Seniors Welcome, you’ve admitted something,’ he said. ‘And the minute you put up a sign that says Seniors Please Use the Pavilion Across the Lot, you’ve admitted something worse.’
The pavilion across the lot, regulars note, does not have the misters.
The town’s only formal complaint to date came from an eight-year-old who wrote, in pencil, on a comment card left at the parks office, ‘There are too many grandpas.’ The card was reviewed by staff, photographed for the file, and quietly placed in a folder marked ‘ongoing.’