It’s the kind of event park advocates and politicians celebrate, but like an archaeological dig, the groundbreaking for the new playground at the southeast corner of Van Cortlandt Park revealed layers of complexity below the excitement and ceremonial ritual.

The advocates were present, and some even shoveled dirt and smiled for the camera, but several of those present actively worked for many years to make sure this day would not come under these circumstances.

The $2.3 million renovation of the southeast corner of Van Cortlandt Park, to be known as Sachkerah Woods Playground, would probably not have happened at this time were it not for over $200 million in park improvement monies that were promised to Bronx politicians in return for the siting of a controversial water filtration plant a couple of hundred feet away. Seventy Bronx parks are getting makeovers as a result of that money. Some plant opponents have called it “blood money,” but the mayor and city officials insist it’s a godsend for Bronx parkland. Park and environmental groups sued the city on a variety of grounds but all the suits have now been dismissed.

Tensions surfaced just before the groundbreaking when Assemblyman Jeffery Dinowitz, a chief opponent of the plant, quietly confronted Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe about not being invited to attend, much less to speak — a routine courtesy at such events. Benepe later relented, giving Dinowitz a seat on the platform. When he spoke to the small crowd of PS 280 students and advocates, Dinowitz didn’t mince words. While he said it was “wonderful to see improvements take place” and that he was “not going to look a gift horse in the mouth,” he also pronounced the filtration plant a “monument to environmental racism [and] governmental incompetence.”

Less than a decade ago, the southeast corner of the park was virtually abandoned. Only vagrants and drug dealers ventured into the litter-strewn meadow of overgrown weeds. But then a group of residents led by DeKalb Avenue resident Ora Holloway cleaned it up, and that effort paved the way for Saturn of the Bronx to provide materials and labor for the corner’s first playground. (The Saturn Playground was destroyed in a fire over the summer, Parks officials say, though no official records of the incident seem to exist at the Parks Department or Fire Department.)

Asked a week after the event about her feelings, Holloway, who was very much against the filtration plant, began where the grass is greener.

“I am so happy, now that I see that something is being done,” Holloway said. “When I look at the fence around [the playground site], I know how huge it’s going to be, and how much the community is going to enjoy [it].”

But she added, “I still feel like they should have still never put the filtration plant here, because of all the people that are asthmatic.”

The impact of the blasting at the filtration plant site also worries her. “The whole building shakes,” said Holloway, who is on the board of the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park. “This community shakes.”

Lyn Pyle, a plant opponent who is co-founder of the COVE youth center just a block away from the park, also expressed mixed feelings.

“It was very hard to be there and yet we care about our park, and I wanted to have the COVE represented in that groundbreaking,” she said. Pyle, who sits on the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee (FMC) — the official body monitoring the plant construction —said she felt that Department of Environmental Protection chief Emily Lloyd, who was at the groundbreaking, has been more interested in hearing community concerns than previous commissioners. Pyle and other FMC members want the DEP to take quicker action on reducing pollution from trucks entering and leaving the site (see Op-Ed on p. 9).

The southeast corner will be known as Sachkerah Woods Playground, after an Algonquin name that has been loosely translated as “extended land,” according to the Parks Department. It will include a comfort station, play equipment, safety surfacing, benches, game tables and spray bollards.

Benepe acknowledged that the playground’s design reflected community input generated during a planning process three years ago 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.

Elizabeth Cooke, a board member of the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, was especially pleased that the plan so closely resembled the community’s vision. “The Parks Department plan for the park has adopted all of the essential design elements that the community requested, and this is a very gratifying experience,” she said.

Work on the new playground is scheduled for completion in one year, Benepe said.