The Handprint Wall Comes Down: Gulf Shores Rebuilds Its Playgrounds This Year

Kendall Phillips was six years old when she pressed her hand into wet paint and left it on a wall at Johnnie Sims Park. That was 1996, the year 1,500 volunteers, including her father, built the wooden Kids Park in six days flat. Thirty years later, Phillips showed up at a public input meeting at the Bodenhamer Center with three kids of her own, watching the city plan to tear that same playground down and start over.

"We were raised in this park, and now we get to raise our kids here."

That line, more than any press release, explains what's actually happening in Gulf Shores this year. The city is rebuilding the small, personal, homemade version of play at the same time the state park three miles down Canal Road is scaling up for a different kind of crowd entirely. Both projects are finishing within months of each other, and neither is waiting for the other.

What's coming down at Sims Park

The Gulf Shores City Council approved the Kids Park rebuild in late March, setting aside up to $940,000 for the project. About $40,000 of that went to a design phase that ran through April and May, with the remaining roughly $900,000 earmarked for construction. Leathers & Associates, the same firm that built the original playground in 1996, is back to lead the redesign, and the process has been deliberately community-driven: first through third graders drew their own versions of a "Reimagined Kids Park," and residents filled out surveys through the city's online town hall.

Construction is set to start in September, with the city targeting a grand opening in November. The plan preserves what people actually cared about, including a new handprint wall to continue the tradition Phillips's father started, along with climbing structures and the nostalgic wooden aesthetic. It also adds something the 1996 version never had: full ADA accessibility built into every part of the design, not bolted on afterward.

For anyone who's walked past the fenced-off construction site this summer, that's the short version of why it's closed and what's replacing it.

Three miles away, a different kind of scale

While the city was collecting crayon drawings from second graders, Gulf State Park was finishing something built for a much bigger audience. In May, the park held a ribbon-cutting for an expanded RV resort that added 103 new campsites, bringing the total to 607. That makes it the largest state park-operated RV campground in the country, according to state officials, built on what used to be the park's golf course.

The new resort includes a clubhouse, a saltwater pool, a splash pad, pickleball courts, updated bathhouses with private family suites, a putting green nodding to the old course, and four pavilions for gatherings. The whole thing was funded through Alabama's $85 million state parks investment package, which voters approved back in 2022. Officials have said the original campground ran at close to full occupancy nearly year-round, which is the practical reason the state kept building instead of stopping at a smaller expansion.

Here's the contrast worth sitting with: the city set aside under a million dollars to rebuild a wooden playground that means something to the people who grew up on it, while the state added the equivalent of a small subdivision's worth of RV sites to serve visitors who mostly won't be here past a week. Same summer, same stretch of coastline, two very different definitions of what a park is for.

What hasn't changed, and why that matters

If you want the thread that connects the handmade playground to the RV mega-resort, it's the Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail. The paved, 28-plus mile trail system runs through both worlds, threading from neighborhoods near Sims Park out through the state park's 6,150 acres and its nine distinct ecosystems, all the way to Orange Beach. USA Today has ranked it the best recreational trail in the country for three years running. Neither the playground rebuild nor the campground construction has touched it. It's the one piece of the system that didn't need reinventing because it was already working.

The Gulf State Park Pier tells a similar story, just with fewer accolades and better fried food. It offers 2,448 feet of fishing space along its rails, wheelchair-accessible sections, and a bar at the end of it, ByWater Beachside Beach Bar & Grill, that runs karaoke nights most weeks. The pier, along with the Beach Pavilion and Romar Beach Access, got quiet refreshes as part of the park's broader upgrades, but it never closed the way the playgrounds did. It's been the steady middle ground the whole time: not as personal as a handprint wall, not as large as 607 RV hookups, just consistently there.

What this actually means if you live here

None of this changes property values or school zones or any of the things that matter if you're evaluating the town from the outside. It changes what your Saturday looks like for the rest of the year. If you've been driving past the fenced-off Kids Park wondering when it reopens, the honest answer is not before late fall. If you're trying to book a site at the state park and wondering why the campground feels bigger than you remember, it is, by more than a hundred sites. And if you've been avoiding the pier because you assumed it was still roped off from past storm repairs, it's open, with Spanish mackerel showing up in the reports through the passes and along the rails most of the summer.

The city and the state park are pulling in different directions this year, one toward intimacy and memory, the other toward volume and capacity, and somehow neither has broken the parts of Gulf Shores that were already working. That's a more interesting story than either project would be on its own.

If you're curious how any of this ties into what's happening with property nearby, or you just want to talk about the trail, the pier, or where to grab a good seat for karaoke night at ByWater, Gerald Tipton is always glad to catch up. Let's Connect.