All Ages Recreation
Grace Dixon and Eden Hall
3561-A Mt Diablo Blvd ~ info@allagesplay.org
“A Little Community Center in the Center of our Community”
- All Ages Recreation Downtown Lafayette
Are you a parent or grandparent who would love a place to play with your children in between running errands? Do you have junior high or teenage kids who need a place to “hang out” and play board games, shoot pool or play ping pong? Wouldn’t it be lovely if this place were:
Inviting
Free
Open without reservations
No membership required
Available to everyone and stocked with the kind of fun you remember from bygone years when all of society wasn’t staring at their phones all day
Shockingly, we have that in downtown Lafayette because of the vision and passion of a mother/daughter duo who have brought to life a dream that makes Lafayette the model for the future of play in urban centers all over the country. It’s a small space, packed with fun!
Wander downtown and you will find a small storefront half way between Postino and The Roundup Saloon (3561-A Mt. Diablo Blvd). On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 11:00 am – 7:00 pm, there will be a placard out in front inviting you to come and play. The sidewalk will be strewn with tables offering a game of chess, Jenga, or a big bin of beads for stringing. The inside space will greet you with a pleasant place to sit, pool and ping pong tables and a row of train and dinosaur play stations. There are books, blocks, magnets, and (of course) Grace Dixon and Eden Hall.
Grace Dixon is a pillar in our community for a number of reasons. First, she owned a pre-school for 18-years. Second, she is spearheading an initiative in downtown Lafayette to get two outdoor parks built – at 3425 Mt. Diablo Blvd (where the Gazebo is) and on the corner of 4th and Moraga. These two projects, while still on the “books” for the future, have been waylaid as funds were diverted to the formal remodel of the larger Lafayette Community Center in Burton Valley. Impatient to get things going for kids of all ages in downtown Lafayette, Grace “thought outside the box” and opened All Ages Recreation (“The Den”) with the help of her incredibly talented daughter.
Eden Hall, an Acalanes graduate and a rising Junior at Princeton University (ROTC), is majoring in architecture with a focus on urban design. She grew up in the preschool with her mom and spent her summers arranging “pop up” parks in underused spaces in downtown Lafayette. You may have seen her in the Plaza by Sideboard or at the Taste of Lafayette. There have been 155 “play events” in Lafayette sponsored by these two incredible women from 2023-2025.
Eden has spent a lot of time contemplating why “play” has fallen out of fashion in her generation. Sure, the pandemic had a lot to do with it. Yes, cell phones are “amusing us to death” in corners all by ourselves. But Eden takes it deeper than that. She sees that “we have failed as a community to create infrastructures that promote connectedness.” She wants to create those infrastructures.
A little boy entered the Den while I was there. He touched Eden’s arm and said, expectantly, “Can Iplay here?” Eden looked sweetly in his beaming face and said, “Yes, come and play.”
All Ages Recreation is an evolving space. The walls are covered with art – soon the California Watercolor Association will have an installation there and students involved in LPIE (Lafayette Partners in Education) will have gallery space. There is an all-ages dance class and open mahjong lessons/play on Wednesdays currently (and every Monday in the summer). Yes, everything is free. Yes, you can come! Sign upto stay in the know about the ever-widening calendar of events.
This jewel in our town would not be possible without the widespread support of great organizations like the Community Foundation of Lafayette, the Lafayette Juniors, Lafayette Rotary, Princeton University, and many other organizations who care.
Come, and play!