With giggling, running children as a backdrop, as well as a crane hovering nearby over the mammoth crater that will eventually host a water filtration plant, the city cut the ribbon on a new playground for the southeast corner of Van Cortlandt Park on June 28.

Sachkerah Woods, named for an Algonquian saying roughly translated as “extended land,” is the first playground to be built with $200 million flowing from water bond sales – an arrangement that greased the political levers in the state legislature to secure lawmakers’ permission to build the controversial plant in the park at Mosholu Golf Course.

The $2.9 million playground can also be traced to the concern and activism of Ora Holloway and her neighbors in the vicinity of the park, who, more than a decade ago, would gather on Saturdays to plant flowers and remove litter from the weed-choked meadow, where only vagrants and drug dealers ventured. Holloway, who now sits on the board of the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, also lobbied the Parks Department to cut the weeds and maintain the area.

These efforts paved the way for a small playground to be built by the Saturn car company and local volunteers in a single day in 1996.

At the playground’s groundbreaking in 2005, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe acknowledged that the playground’s design reflected community input generated during a planning process in 2002 led by the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park and a Harvard School of Architecture student provided by New Yorkers for Parks. Youth from the COVE and the Mosholu Montefiore Community Center in Norwood participated in that process.

The playground includes an attractive comfort station built with Corinthian granite, play equipment, swings, benches, fencing, and new paths to improve access to the area. Honoring the Mosholu Golf Course, which has been reconfigured to make way for the plant construction, the playground incorporates a golf theme, with a spray shower in the form of a 19th hole flag, green concrete representing the putting green, and safety surfacing mimicking sand traps.

There are nine Bronx park projects currently in construction stemming from the filtration plant funding, including projects at Devoe and St. James parks.