Central Park — Attraction in Santa Clara

I've been visiting this park my entire life. The previous library was my childhood library and I made use of the updated one every day through high school. I played regularly at the playground on the Kiely side, my sister took me to the International Swim Center to teach me to swim, my father and I used to play at the tennis courts, and I took myriad classes through the rec center. I still attend the Art & Wine Festival and the Independence Day fireworks every year and this is the best place nearby to play Pokemon Go, boasting at least four gyms and I couldn't tell you how many PokeStops. Unfortunately, this also means that I've been around for the last thirty years to watch the epic decline of the park's focal point - the pond and fountains. I am absolutely ashamed of the level of care this (sizable and important) portion of the park receives. I firmly believe that Central Park is the highlight of Santa Clara and I would love to give it five stars, but until the city does something about the water and walkways, I cannot and will not rate higher than one. The water used to be clear enough to see mosquito fish and large goldfish (possibly koi) swimming in the water. Turtles sunbathed on the rocks. There have always been ducks, but the walkway running around the pond was clean. I think the tipping point was when some Canada geese, passing through, decided that this would be a good place to call home. I couldn't tell you how to get rid of geese, but there must be a way to do it, even if it means physically capturing and relocating them all very far away. I wish the city would do something about them, at any rate. The geese sometimes hiss at people in passing, but the most unpleasant thing about them is that they leave an incredible mess everywhere. Geese are not like ducks. They drop turds the size of wine corks. Walking around the pond without stepping in something is now impossible and the sloping lawns surrounding the water are just as bad. You can rule out sitting in the grass or bringing small children to this part of the park entirely. Everything between the amphitheater and the baseball field is a bathroom. The pond water is now green and opaque. There are signposts informing residents of a new filtration and algae control system that was installed several years back, which included the addition of aquatic plants. Unfortunately, it would seem that they also added fertilizers, causing a massive and ongoing algae problem and rendering the signs an embarrassment. The water is also stagnant. There is no visible flow, the surface sometimes exhibits a sudsy-looking film, and the only indication of a filtration system is the occasional PVC pipe jutting out of the water and appearing to do nothing. I doubt VERY much that there are any plants or animals still living in those murky depths. The pond now constitutes nothing short of a health risk. If one of my sister's kids were to fall in, I wouldn't even begin to know what to tell the doctor they had been exposed to. Actual swimming aside, the pond today features three fountains, all continually firing sizable spouts of visibly filthy water into the air so that passersby can be gently misted. This comes just short of biological warfare. This pond needs to be drained, pressure washed, and re-planted and the physical filtration system revamped. The geese have got to go. It's...

I want to start off this review by saying that this is a lovely park. It is beautifully designed and I love the atmosphere that it has. I’m always here with friends enjoying company and I always see family and children always getting along. It’s so nice to see community gathering together at a public space. I do want to declare a warning to parents of young children. My last visit to this park I as well as my friends noticed a very strange man. This encounter with this man started with the walk up to the playground area. He passed me and my friends, and he was walking at a rather quick pace. He was an older white gentleman balding with white hair. He was wearing clothes suited for the colder weather than it was that day. However, he entered the children’s playground and me, and my friends immediately had a feeling in our gut that something was wrong. We began to watch from a distance as he made his way through the playground area and he began to move his head side to side as if he was scanning the area. And mind you an older man alone walking through a children’s playground, kind of sets off a feeling in your mind. So he makes around in the playground, walks up to some younger children, but then walks past them and then as he’s leaving the playground area, he shakes his head and we never see him again. I wanna remind parents to always be vigilant and to keep their kids within their eyesight. There were many children playing around with parents, not looking or paying attention. To some people who might think that he was simply enjoying the time in the park, I wanna know that me and my friends were visibly following him and he knew that too. And there’s no evidence to support that he was using the walking trail because the walking trail goes around the gated playground and he physically chose to go through the gate walk around and exit that same gate. Be wary and...

Dont reserve a group site here unless your comfortable being policed and harassed. The whole time our group was here we were harassed by County of Santa Clara Parks and Rec initially to show ID for our reservation, then wanted time conformation on theirs and our copies of the Amplified Sound Permit to ensure the times on the permit matched, the group site was not cordoned off and visitors from the park were able to enter the areas we had reserved where we had to approach and tell people the site had been reserved and overpaid for. $846. Caterers need to be on the Parks and Rec Approved Vendor list, a month long reservation and we learn this as our caterer on the day of the event arrived. There were no carts available and I had many heavy items to take back to my car and didn't have my car inside the park for more than 10 minutes and was demanded by a very criminal looking character, tattoos all over arms and neck and driving a Parks and Rec truck and was very authoritative in telling me to move my car now and then proceeded to record my license plate with his phone although I was not told who he was reporting the details of my car to and would not provide his name when asked. Another parks and rec guy Brian returned with clipboard before we left to inspect the site of which we had already cleaned and inspected ourselves. It was a bit cumbersome trying to facilitate an event and pay them attention and answer all of their questions. 3 years in a row we have came here. No problems, after this experience we won't...