Noah Cutter was never able to play by himself at the playground.
He couldn’t sit up on his own. He could barely even roll over by last December, when he died at age 2. Now his family is working to make sure his short life will be remembered.
With more than $130,000 already raised, they are working to turn Lawson Park, at Sheridan Road and Clinton Place, into Evanston’s first public park for special-needs children.
Noah’s mother, Evanston resident Julie Cutter, said he was diagnosed with several neurological disorders before he was born, but doctors were unsure how severe the problems would be.
“It became pretty apparent when we took him at two months for an MRI that the architecture of his brain just wasn’t doing what it should be doing,” Cutter said. “He got older and he wasn’t rolling over, wasn’t really looking around and wasn’t really smiling.”
Despite Noah’s difficulties, doctors didn’t think his condition was life-threatening.
“Overall he was pretty healthy,” Cutter said. “If you looked at him, he didn’t look like a sick baby. It was always just going to be really hard.”
But on the morning of Dec. 24, 2005, Noah didn’t wake up.
“Our explanation was that it just was too hard for him – there was no real medical reason for him to die,” Cutter said. “It was a terrible shock – we had a lot of bad case scenarios that we had adjusted to and him not being around wasn’t one of them.”
About six weeks after Noah died, Cutter said her sister-in-law came up with the idea for the playground and presented it to the city.
Doug Gaynor, the director of Evanston’s parks, forestry and recreation department, said the city renovates three or four parks each year.
“Lawson was one of the parks which had not been attended to in quite a few years,” Gaynor said. “The Cutters looked at Lawson after the staff told them which parks were up for renovation, and they fell in love with it.”
The city has proposed $400,000 to improve the park, which would come from the 2007-2008 Capital Improvement Fund, Gaynor said. The Cutters are working to raise the other $300,000 needed to make it a special-needs park. Planning for the park will begin after the City Council approves the capital fund.
Family, friends and neighbors all pitched in by contributing to the fund, dubbed “Noah’s Playground for Everyone,” and organizing events. Cutter added that they have a Web site, www.noahsplayground.org.
Two girls who live near the park ran a lemonade stand after their mother saw a flyer about the cause. They raised more than $1,500.
“It’s really been a few hundred dollars at a time,” Cutter said. “The vast majority of the money has been a check here and a check there. We’ve seen some wonderful gestures.”
Cutter said once the group has raised the money needed, it will work on the playground design with Noah’s therapists and organizations that have built special-needs playgrounds across the United States.
The park will be designed to engage children who have physical, visual, hearing and other disabilities. Cutter hopes to have ramps and rubberized surfaces for wheelchair access, brightly colored surfaces for visual stimulation and tunnels for children who need a break from the excitement of the park.
“One thing we’d like to put in is a suspended sandbox,” Cutter said. “Instead of having to climb into a sandbox, they can wheel up to it or stand up and play, so the sandbox is kind of like a table at their lap.”
If built, the park would be the city’s second playground for special-needs children. Park School, 828 Main St., has a similar playground that is only open to the school’s students.
“Their playground isn’t old but it’s not new either,” Cutter said. “Ours will be public and much larger, but we’ll be seeking a lot of different opinions so we can serve as many as possible. We just want it to be as perfect as it can be.”
Reach Laura Olson at [email protected].
