The $150,000 renovations to Mary Soo Hoo Park in Chinatown were completed earlier this month by The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.

The park, located at the corner of Hudson Street and Beach Street, has been updated with an emphasis on playable space for young children and community safety.

Enhancements to the park include an updated fence for the enclosure, two stationary xylophone instruments, a low-height balance beam with safety surfacing and additional seating and greenery.

Prior to the new installations, there was no play equipment in Chinatown that accommodated young children, said Rex Tzen , the Conservancy’s lead for the park enhancement project. Other parks in the area featured climbable equipment more amenable to children of 9 years or older.

“If you're a small child, you're not gonna be able to get on it because there's so much climbing involved,” Tzen said. “These pieces of equipment that we selected, children can walk to without having to worry about falling and getting hurt, or can be accessed by a wheelchair.”

The emphasis on playable equipment for toddler age children was one of three concepts presented to the community as part of a two part survey that aimed for the renovations to adapt to the community’s needs and wants. The playground concept was chosen over concepts for additional natural features like plants and rocks and a design focused on open space for community programing.

To come up with the designs, Tzen first gathered input from two online community surveys, paying close attention to demographics of responders. Then used that information to present the three concepts at a public event where the playground was selected.

Tzen said that in addition to the desire for playground equipment, the community was at a consensus for improving the safety of the park, expressing concerns over drug use, squatting and public urination.

“The way that Mary Soo Hoo is situated in Chinatown, it’s really in the corner, which is one of the reasons why it attracted adverse activity,” Tzen said.

The now-fenced-in area of the park contains signage indicating that adults in the area must be accompanied by children, and new plants were strategically situated to create a windscreen against areas where cigarette use is more prevalent. The park will also see an uptick in ranger and night security surveillance. Greenway park rangers will visit the park twice a day and existing night security has been asked to give the park extra attention.

The Conservancy is paying close attention to usage of Mary Soo Hoo Park to monitor the success of the renovations. Tzen says within the next three to five years, the Massachusetts Department of Transporation has plans to remediate the parks’ prominent highway tunnel vent stack structure, which is wrapped in a 14th century Chinese landscape painting from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ collection. So, the new renovations are all removeable.

“The test is really now for us to see whether or not kids occupy the space, and that will count as a success,” Tzen said. “We're trying to get really solid data points over the next two to five years to inform a more permanent, and a more fully fleshed out design intervention in the future.