How a Milwaukee, Wisconsin community center rebuilt around a splash pad replacing its 50-year-old wading pool
A composite parks-department case study of a half-century-old neighborhood community center that decommissioned its aging wading pool and rebuilt around a modern splash pad, refreshed multipurpose programming, and improved accessibility.
Summary
A half-century-old neighborhood community center in Milwaukee decommissioned its 1974 wading pool — beloved but increasingly unsafe and operationally costly — and rebuilt around a $1.1M modern splash pad as the centerpiece of a coordinated $3.4M community-center rebuild. Funded through a combination of municipal capital, a state community-development block grant, and a regional foundation contribution, the project preserved the center's neighborhood-anchor identity while modernizing its core water amenity. First-summer attendance reached approximately 68,000 visits — substantially exceeding the prior wading pool's typical utilization — and operating costs fell roughly 58% relative to the prior wading-pool operating budget.
Key metrics
Background: a beloved wading pool reaching the end of its operational life
The Sherman Park Community Center had served its working-class Milwaukee neighborhood since 1974, anchored by an in-ground wading pool that had hosted three generations of neighborhood families across its half-century of operation. By the early 2020s the wading pool had become a parks-department operational liability. Annual maintenance costs had risen to roughly $156,000 reflecting aging mechanical equipment, deferred capital repairs, and increasingly stringent water-quality compliance requirements that the original 1974 design did not accommodate. Safety incidents had risen modestly — slip-and-falls on the pool's aging concrete deck, scrapes from worn surface materials, and water-clarity issues during peak utilization — and the city's risk-management office had flagged the facility as elevated-risk in three consecutive annual assessments. A capital-planning study commissioned in 2022 evaluated three options: invest $1.8M to fully restore the wading pool to modern compliance standards, decommission the pool and replace with a modern splash pad, or decommission with no replacement amenity. The middle path emerged as the strongly preferred option through a six-month community-engagement process, with the splash-pad replacement framed as preserving the community center's neighborhood-anchor identity while modernizing its core water amenity.
Community engagement and the legacy-amenity transition challenge
The community-engagement process surfaced significant emotional attachment to the existing wading pool that the city's parks department had to navigate carefully. Generations of neighborhood families had taught children to wade in the pool, hosted birthday celebrations on the pool deck, and built community memory around the facility. A straightforward technical decommissioning announcement risked alienating exactly the community that the rebuild was meant to serve. Parks-department staff conducted six neighborhood meetings, a community-survey distribution that drew roughly 1,400 responses, and individual-stakeholder consultations with long-standing community-center users. The engagement process produced an emotional through-line that became the project's narrative anchor: the new splash pad would honor the wading pool's legacy by extending the community center's water-amenity identity into the next generation rather than abandoning it. A small interpretive panel at the new pad's edge memorializes the prior wading pool with photographs and dates, and the community-center's interior corridors include a more substantial photographic history of the pool. The narrative framing has materially supported political durability for the project and has been a frequently-cited reference for other communities navigating analogous legacy-amenity transitions.
Funding stack and the capital-replacement framing
The $1.1M splash-pad budget came from a three-source funding stack within the broader $3.4M community-center rebuild. The largest contribution, $480,000, came from the city's parks-and-recreation capital fund, structured explicitly as capital-replacement funding rather than new-amenity funding (an important distinction for political messaging, given the wading pool's emotional resonance). A second $390,000 came from a state Community Development Block Grant program funded through federal Department of Housing and Urban Development pass-through, awarded specifically because the community center serves a low-and-moderate-income neighborhood meeting CDBG eligibility criteria. The remaining $230,000 came from a regional foundation interested in working-class neighborhood community-center investment as a placemaking strategy. The funding mix preserved the project's character as capital-replacement infrastructure rather than discretionary new-amenity investment, an important framing distinction that has affected both political durability and the broader community-center rebuild's narrative arc. The community-center rebuild's broader $2.3M (excluding pad) drew from additional municipal capital, foundation contributions, and a focused capital campaign run through the community-center's friends-organization.
Design choices honoring the prior wading pool's footprint
The design firm worked from a brief that the new splash pad should honor the prior wading pool's footprint and orientation, supporting the legacy-honoring narrative that the community-engagement process had established. The 2,400-square-foot pad sits on the same approximate footprint as the prior wading pool, with the surrounding deck, shaded seating, and circulation patterns substantially preserving the prior facility's geometry. Twenty-four features include a mix of low-spray ground jets oriented toward the youngest users (matching the wading pool's primary historical demographic), a moderate-spray feature cluster for ages 5 to 10, and one signature kinetic feature that the design firm developed in conversation with long-standing community-center users to evoke (without literally replicating) memorable elements of the prior pool's experience. Shaded perimeter seating accommodates roughly 90 caregivers at peak. The pad's mechanical building doubles as a small interior community-center amenity (changing rooms, storage), supporting integration with the rebuilt community-center building rather than functioning as a standalone outdoor utility structure. The footprint-honoring design choice materially supported community acceptance of the transition and has been one of the most-cited replicability lessons of the project.
Operating-cost economics and the wading-pool-to-pad transition
Operating-cost economics drove much of the original capital-replacement decision and have substantially validated the choice. The prior wading pool had been costing roughly $156,000 annually in operating expenses across labor, water, chemical treatment, capital maintenance, and risk-management overhead. The new splash pad operates at roughly $66,000 annually — a 58% reduction reflecting modern mechanical efficiency, recirculation reducing water consumption, simplified water-quality compliance under splash-pad regulations rather than pool-water regulations, and reduced lifeguard-staffing requirements (a splash pad requires attendant supervision but not lifeguard certification). The annual operating savings of roughly $90,000 produces an effective payback period for the capital-replacement investment well under a decade, before considering the broader community-center rebuild's other benefits. The operating-cost differential between aging wading pools and modern splash pads has become a widely-referenced data point in similar community-center capital-planning conversations across the country, and the Sherman Park composite is among the most-cited specific examples.
First-summer outcomes and the broader community-center revitalization
First-summer attendance at the new splash pad reached approximately 68,000 visits across a 100-day operating season — substantially exceeding the prior wading pool's typical utilization, which had averaged roughly 22,000 visits across recent operating seasons before the decommissioning. The attendance lift reflected both the pad's broader feature appeal and the broader community-center rebuild's success at refreshing the facility's overall identity. The community-center's interior programming also benefited: indoor afterschool-program enrollment rose 34% year-over-year, summer-camp registrations rose 28%, and senior-programming attendance rose modestly as well. The broader community-center revitalization demonstrated that the splash-pad capital replacement was not an isolated amenity upgrade but rather the centerpiece of a coordinated facility renewal that has substantially deepened the community center's neighborhood-anchor identity. The project has been cited in multiple regional and national community-center planning publications as a reference for coordinated legacy-facility renewal anchored by water-amenity replacement.
Replicability across aging community-center facilities
The Sherman Park model is replicable across the country's many aging community-center facilities, of which an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 still operate decades-old wading pools approaching similar capital-decision thresholds. Several conditions affect replication success. First, community-engagement capacity must be substantial — the legacy-amenity transition requires careful narrative framing that staff capacity must support across multiple meetings and survey processes. Second, capital-replacement-funding pathways must be available, including parks-department capital, CDBG grants, and foundation contributions willing to support working-class-neighborhood community-center investment. Third, the splash-pad design must intentionally honor the prior wading pool's legacy through footprint, geometry, and interpretive elements rather than presenting as a pure-replacement amenity. Fourth, the broader community-center facility renewal benefits from being coordinated with the splash-pad replacement rather than sequenced separately, allowing a single coherent facility-revitalization narrative. Fifth, operating-cost economics typically favor splash-pad replacement materially relative to wading-pool restoration — typically 50% to 65% operating-cost reduction is achievable. Where these conditions converge, the legacy-amenity transition pattern has produced strong outcomes for both facility users and parks-department long-term operating economics.
Voices from the project
“I learned to swim in that wading pool when I was four. My kids learned to wade there. The decommissioning was hard. But the new pad honors what the pool was, and now my grandkids have somewhere to play that is safer and better.”
“We could have spent $1.8M restoring the wading pool to modern compliance and faced the same operating-cost problem in fifteen years. The splash-pad replacement gave us a modern facility at lower capital cost and 58% lower operating cost. The economics were not close.”
“Community-engagement work was the entire project. If we had announced the decommissioning without the listening sessions and the legacy-honoring narrative, we would have lost the neighborhood. With them, we built something that the neighborhood owns.”
Lessons learned
- Frame splash-pad replacement of aging wading pools as capital-replacement infrastructure rather than discretionary new-amenity investment.
- Invest substantial community-engagement capacity in the legacy-amenity transition — narrative framing materially affects political durability.
- Honor the prior wading pool's footprint, geometry, and memory through interpretive elements at the new pad — community acceptance benefits significantly.
- Coordinate splash-pad replacement with broader community-center facility renewal for a coherent revitalization narrative.
- Tap CDBG funding pathways for working-class-neighborhood community-center investments — eligibility criteria typically align well.
- Track operating-cost economics carefully — modern splash-pad operations typically run 50% to 65% below aging-wading-pool operating budgets.
- Coordinate splash-pad indoor mechanical-room footprint with the broader community-center building for integrated facility operations rather than standalone outdoor utility.
FAQ
Is replacing a wading pool with a splash pad always the right capital-replacement choice?
Not always — some wading pools serve user populations or programming needs that splash pads cannot replicate (lap-swim instruction, deep-water programming, certain therapeutic uses). For purely recreational wading-and-cooling use, splash-pad replacement typically offers superior operating economics and modern compliance, but the user-need analysis must precede the capital decision.
How do CDBG grants apply to community-center splash-pad projects?
Community Development Block Grant funding administered through HUD pass-throughs to states and cities can fund community-facility capital improvements in low-and-moderate-income neighborhoods meeting CDBG eligibility criteria. The Sherman Park composite drew $390,000 from this pathway, and many similar working-class-neighborhood community centers qualify.
How long does the operating-cost payback typically take?
Operating-cost savings from wading-pool-to-splash-pad transitions typically produce payback periods of seven to twelve years on the incremental capital-replacement investment. The Sherman Park composite's $90,000 annual operating savings against $1.1M capital cost produces a payback under twelve years before considering attendance, demographic, or facility-revitalization benefits.
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