Hours after the final layer of concrete was poured at the new Rotary Youth Park at McCulley-Robertson Sports Complex on Thursday night, vandals spray-painted various areas of the park, leaving trash and broken beer bottles in their wake.

But within a couple of days, the writing on the skaters’ bowl was removed by local teenagers who didn’t want graffiti in their park.

“I’m very impressed,” said park co-chair Jeff Carter of the pride the teenagers have taken in the park. “Just out of the blue some kids showed up and cleaned it off.”

On Friday, after examining the mess left behind by the vandals, Carter had said he was extremely disappointed.

“Four years of planning to get this open and have something going for the kids. We just get there, and it’s been perfect up until this point, and now somebody’s got to get out here and scrub this stuff off,” he said.

The unusual markings left on the park included numerous railings and metal edges being spray painted blue and gold. In the large bowl of the park, the words “Keep it locked. Key clothing” were drawn.

Carter said he believed that it was kids on bikes that had vandalized the park, as tire marks could be seen all over the freshly-dried concrete.

On Sunday, about three youth showed up with cleaning supplies and scrubbed the writing off the skaters’ bowl.

Carter said he didn’t know who they were, adding that one local resident spoke to them at the time and got the sense “they didn’t want to have their names publicized or anything like that.”

Friday was the first day that the park itself had been completed, with only landscaping and accent work left to do, including a deck that will sit off to one side of the skater’s bowl.

“The kids have been very respectful of the park and they’ve stayed off when we asked them to stay off and we’re getting very close to opening it to the public,” said Carter on Friday. “We’ve got a great grand opening planned for May 31 and it (was) just really disheartening (to see the graffiti).”

Huntsville mayor Claude Doughty said he too was extremely disappointed when he heard about the vandalism.

“It’s an affront to the efforts of the Rotary Club and all the people who worked for years to get this project up and going and it doesn’t even get opened and it’s been defaced, so really unfortunate,” he told the Forester.

Doughty said in addition to the vandalism at the youth park, the soccer pitches at McCulley-Robertson were also damaged Thursday night.

He said the town’s community services director informed him that “a truck or car got onto the soccer pitch and did some extensive damage.”

The recent vandalism aside, Doughty said he has felt for some time that a video camera is needed at both the sports complex and the River Mill Park site.

“What I would like to look at is a system that would allow anybody to go on the web and monitor that camera and obviously the police could as well,” he said. “Parents could; for example, if your son or daughter’s out there you could go on and monitor what’s going on out there.”