Today’s park adventure leads us to West Hollywood’s Plummer Park. Plummer Park is located at 7377 Santa Monica Blvd (at Santa Monica and Martel). Just so that it is perfectly clear, the park gets its’ name from the Plummer family home—the oldest house in West Hollywood (it’s been moved since and not longer resides here). The name does not come from “Plumber's Crack”. (I made that mistake—it can be very confusing.) It’s a nice little park with a large play area covered in wood chips and a smaller toddler area covered in wood chips, dirty sand and cigarette butts.

The local crowd is primarily dominated by Russian immigrants. The parents and young adults who frequent the grassy lawns love to speak Russian and smoke cigarettes. I had to run to catch Oliver from picking up a lit butt that someone through on the ground and didn’t step on. The Kid loves to pick up trash in all the parks we go to, and this park had more cigarette butts and used tissue than any other we have visited.

There is a large tube slide in the middle of the play area that seemed fun until I took a look inside the tunnel to see what was up and, well, lets just say other things happen in that tunnel besides kids crawling. There was some graffiti inside the tunnel too. At least we can be thankful that the Russian teenagers need to work on their spelling.

Aside from the dirty sand, and thuggish people, the park itself has a lot of potential. The large grassy lawns and big shade trees to cover the afternoon sun very nicely on these long summer days. Oliver loved to chase the dogs around and for the most part the people were very friendly. The older people playing chess and dominos loved to watch Oliver run around the trees. Oliver met some nice women who let him pet their dogs, and he was especially taken with the teenagers who were playing basketball on the full court adjacent to the playground.

There is a large new community center too. This community center is a community gathering area for Seniors, locals and various gay and lesbian organizations. When Oliver was younger we were here once for a Pop Luck Club gathering (See the link on the side for more on Pop Luck Club.)

This is not a terrible park, but it’s not the cleanest either. We like the location and the fact that it’s cooler than the valley parks this time of year. Who knows, maybe The Kid will pick up a little Russian too. We give it two stars out of four.