On the morning of August 11, kids were already climbing the new play structure before Town Council Chair Suzanne Phillips finished cutting the ribbon. By afternoon, the splash pad next to Gorham High School was doing exactly what four years of town meetings had argued it should do: giving Gorham families a place to go on an ordinary Tuesday that isn't a school field and isn't someone's backyard.
If you've already heard about the new playground at Robie Park, you've probably heard the short version. New rubber surface. New splash pad. New swing set. Ribbon cutting, kids happy, done.
Here's what that short version leaves out: this is Phase One of a plan the town has already said will take ten years to finish, and the park's 100th birthday, in 2035, is the actual deadline everyone is working toward. What opened this August isn't the project. It's the first phase of it, built on top of a fight the town almost lost in 2022.
The park almost lost its trees, and its future, in 2022
Robie Park sits on 6.7 acres wedged between Gorham High School's access road off Morrill Avenue and Ball Park Road, which runs down to the Municipal Center parking lot. It's been there since 1915, named for Martha Robie, widow of Maine Governor Frederick Robie.
Three years before anyone talked about splash pads, the park's future was genuinely in doubt. The Gorham School Department, with Town Council approval, removed a grove of pine trees near the softball field after an arborist called them unsafe. Neighbors weren't convinced the decision had been made with enough care. Save Robie Park signs went up on lawns around the corner of Morrill Avenue and Ball Park Road, and a grassroots campaign pushed the town to slow down and think about the whole park, not just the trees.
That pressure is the reason a steering committee exists at all. The town hired a landscape architect, held public meetings, and spent roughly a year building an actual master plan for the park before anyone broke ground. The Town Council approved that plan, and only then did Phase One construction get authorized.
That sequence matters. The splash pad didn't happen because a department had budget to spend. It happened because residents forced a slower, more deliberate process after watching the town make a call they didn't trust.
How the first million dollars actually got spent
Public projects rarely get paid for in one lump sum, and Robie Park is a clean example of how the pieces fit together. The full Phase One price tag came in at just over $1 million, and it was stitched together from three different sources:
| Funding source | Amount | What it covered |
|---|---|---|
| American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds | $464,917 | Purchase of new playground equipment |
| Recreational impact fees | $469,263 | Site work and construction |
| Tax increment financing (TIF) | $96,000 | Site work and construction |
The construction contract itself is worth a second look too. Nickerson Earthwork and Yard Maintenance won the bid at $565,000, beating out a competing proposal from R.J. Grondin & Sons at $716,330, a difference of more than $150,000 on the same scope of work. Municipal bids don't usually make it into a splash pad conversation, but the gap between those two numbers is a decent reminder that even small-town park projects go through the same competitive scrutiny as anything else the town builds.
What's actually open right now, and what still isn't
If you're planning a trip out to Ball Park Road this fall, it helps to know exactly what you're walking into.
Open as of August 11:
- New ADA-approved playground equipment
- Rubberized play surface
- Splash pad
- New swing set
- A circulation path connecting the high school side of the park to the town office side
Not there yet:
- Restrooms
- The basketball court, which was removed as part of Phase One and won't be rebuilt until Phase Two
- Picnic areas, benches, and the planned park gateway with historical signage
- The walking trail around the park's perimeter
The old playground equipment didn't disappear. It's being relocated to Little Falls Recreation Area and the Little Falls Activity Center, so if the Robie Park version feels crowded on a Saturday, that equipment is still around town, just a short drive away.
Gorham Parks and Recreation Director Cindy Hazelton put the purpose of the new space plainly when the park opened:
"We don't have a place you can go to by day, so that you're not fighting recesses and everything else, so this is that place and it has really, really come together. We're very proud of it."
That's a specific gap she's describing. Gorham had playgrounds attached to schools, where daytime access competes with recess, and it had sports fields, which serve a different crowd entirely. Robie Park's daytime opening now fills the space between those two, a place a parent can bring toddlers on a weekday morning without working around a bell schedule.
Why the town keeps calling this "Phase One"
The reason nobody at the ribbon cutting called this project finished is that it isn't. The full Robie Park master plan, the one the Town Council approved after that year of committee meetings, includes a list of features well beyond what opened in August: a park gateway with signage describing the park's history, restrooms, a picnic area, a walking trail, benches, new trees and plantings, cafe seating, raised garden beds, and the relocated basketball court.
Hazelton has said the entire plan is aimed at completion by 2035, timed to the park's 100th anniversary. That's not a soft aspiration. It's the frame the town has been building toward since the steering committee first sat down with a landscape architect.
For residents, that timeline is useful information, not just trivia. It means the basketball court you might be missing this fall isn't gone for good, it's scheduled for a later phase. It means the restrooms and picnic tables that would make a full afternoon at the park more comfortable are coming, just not yet. And it means the park you're looking at right now is going to keep changing in stages over the next several years, the same way Little Falls Recreation Area and the rest of Gorham's public spaces have evolved piece by piece rather than all at once.
The season ahead
Robie Park in September looks like what it is: a brand-new splash pad and playground doing double duty as a proof of concept for a decade-long plan. The families showing up on weekday afternoons this fall are testing exactly the gap Hazelton described, a daytime spot that isn't tied to a school schedule.
If you're weighing where to take the kids between now and the first hard frost, Robie Park now belongs in that weekday rotation alongside Little Falls, at least until the restrooms and picnic areas show up in a later phase. Worth packing your own water and planning bathroom stops accordingly until then.
Gorham keeps building these small, hard-won public spaces one committee meeting at a time, and Robie Park is the latest proof that the process, however slow it looked from a lawn sign in 2022, tends to get somewhere worth showing up for.
If you're curious what else is changing in Gorham this season, or you're weighing what life actually looks like in this town beyond the headlines, the Scoville Foley Team is always glad to talk through it. Contact Us anytime.
