About 30 years ago, I noticed that a lot of familiar things from my youth that I took for granted and thought would always be . . . started disappearing. One day I decided to take a walk through my old elementary school playground, and I came upon the sight above. Yes, they were scrapping all the old playground equipment that I knew so well and that I had played on with my classmates so many times. This stuff was built to last forever–why were they doing this?
You can do an internet search of 1950s playground equipment and you will find many fascinating examples of these whimsical designs–rockets, dinosaurs, geodesic domes–but I wanted to just focus on my particular recollections of playgrounds I had visited. You can share with us the very special examples that you so fondly remember.
A few blocks from my house was Malapardis Park, which had a small playground. They had one of these, and remember climbing up and through it. Not a lot of room to maneuver in there.
Here are the plans, which I’ve never seen before.
Malapardis Pond would freeze over in winter and everyone would come to skate.
On the edge of the pond was a stone outdoor fireplace like this one. It was nice to get warm, and dry off hats and gloves by the fire. One day the town demolished the fireplace with no explanation.
In summer we’d go to Bee Meadow Pool. They had a high dive and two low diving boards. That’s me on the high dive (top photo). The high dive was scary–looking down into the deep water it felt like you were about 3 or 4 stories up when you were about to jump!
Recent view shows the high dive has been taken down. There are now blue plastic water slides and one low diving board (with a warning sign). Wooden Adirondack chairs are now gone.
In Millburn, New Jersey where my grandparents lived was Taylor Park. They had a really tall slide like this one flanked by two shorter ones. It was considered a really big thrill to slide down the tall one. The shiny metal surface would reach at least 451 degrees Fahrenheit in the hot sun!
This is what the steps looked like.
View from the top!
Mountview also had one of these Funnel Ball things. It was hard to keep score in your head.
These “ducks on a spring” were, like, indestructible. There were other animals like seahorses, dolphins, bunnies, turtles.
Odd ducks. These are really old or weird.
On trips to other parks I was excited to see these very ’50s-looking Space Age rocket designs.
Speaking of rockets, this 1957 Oldsmobile commercial was shot at the Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey, California. They had some spectacular stuff at that park. I wonder if any of it still survives (see 2:22 to 4:54)
Classic “monkey bars” a.k.a. “jungle gym”. Mountview had these too.
Then there was “The Pipe”. Maybe when the school was built they had this concrete pipe left over and somebody said, “Hey, just leave it here and let the little brats play on that!” It sat next to the swings, and you could crawl through it (which wasn’t such a pleasant experience). You could yell into it and hear a weird echo. Or you could push a Hot Wheels car through (you’d have to first clean out the sand and pebbles and icky bugs that would collect on the bottom). Eventually somebody punched a hole in the top and broke pieces off the edges, and that was the beginning of the end for The Pipe. It was not replaced with another one.
No, not “Beavis & Butthead” but my brother and I at the Morris Museum with exotic birds made of discarded automobile parts, 1979.
Christmas was always a special time. The central square in Morristown was decked out with lights, Santa’s cottage, and a miniature train. Here I am riding a graceful reindeer, Christmas 1969.
All of the playground equipment I remember from childhood is now gone. When I visit other parks or schools, I look for surviving mid-century examples. I seldom, if ever, see any. What’s forcing all this destruction and replacement? The insurance companies? It’s not because it’s “worn out”; it never seems to wear out–just maybe needs a new coat of paint every couple of decades.
There’s this mentality that everything old must be destroyed and replaced, even if it’s in good condition and crafted with love. Certain inherent, irreplaceable values that old things have are seldom considered. For instance, a grandparent can never say on a visit to a park or schoolyard with a grandchild, “I once played on that too!” And of course a lot of the older designs are interesting, artistic, and educational in their own right.
Am I just being sentimental, or are we losing something here?
It would not surprise me if liability and insurance issues had something to do with it. People were pretty stoic about injuries back then but that has changed a lot. Once one kid gets hurt on the thing (however it happened) the playground owner is deemed to know that such an injury can happen, so if it happens again, liability is nearly assured. But even the fear of that kind of liability can cause insurance premiums to jump unless the playgrounds are either eliminated or updated.
My grade school (which opened in the fall of 1965) never had playground equipment until someone arranged for three big concrete pipe pieces to be put in a play area, probably around 1968 or 69. “The tiles” were hugely popular, so that in short order we had to alternate for boys days and girls days on them.
Those ducks/animals on springs always looked more fun than they actually were.
Indeed it is sad to see these mementos of childhood lost. I remember it was a treat to go to a park near my grandparents house in Lomita, CA. This being in the Los Angeles harbor area, the coolest and my favorite climbing structure was what turned out to be surplus submarine netting strung vertically between some telephone poles. As a kid I didn’t know what it was beyond fun to climb on and different from anything at school or any other park where we lived.
Wow Stephen! So many connections to my own childhood here. Since I think we’re about the same age, many of the pieces of playground equipment you cover were features of my youth as well.
I’ll let others go on about insurance pressures that arguably have changed how playgrounds look, but I just wanted to share a pic of my most awesome yet feared piece of playground equipment…the “Climbing Frame”. This thing (some were a bit taller than the one I found a picture of) was the go-to amusement device on my 2nd – 3rd grade elementary school playground in Maryland. Ours wasn’t painted, so it was abundantly clear that it was simply made of 1.5″ galvanized pipe, connected by plumbing flanges/connectors. The game every day we were out there (which was pretty much any day when it wasn’t raining…hard) was for about a dozen kids to climb into the thing and to stand inside the cubes. Then, another couple of kids would stand outside the structure, on the ground, and hurl with all their 3rd-grader might those big red rubber kickball balls into the structure…with the goal of dislodging the kids inside. Dislodging meant falling OUT of the structure. It was basically 3-dimensional dodgeball. Played on the asphalt playground. I still have a scar from gashing my knee open on the rough pavement at the base of one of the places where the pipes were buried in the surface.
The amazing thing…that nearly everyone in our generation has lived to tell about…is how the goal of so much playground equipment back then was for the kids to actually fall off or down from it. That was the fun. You can see that in the video you linked to about the Dennis the Menace Playground.
It’s also why those “cartoon animals on springs” were I think generally considered “for babies” or otherwise just incredibly lame. They wobbled…but there really was no danger involved in their use. Where’s the fun in THAT?? I recall seeing those things off to the side, generally unused and rusting, in many public playgrounds….and frankly, they are often the only survivors of old school playground equipment still standing. Still, generally, unused.
Great article!!
Whoops, here’s the picture…
We had one of those on our elementary school playground. It was extremely basic and solid, and one seemed way up there, when the top was reached. Either wobbling or falling down generally involved whacking the “funny bone” in one’s elbow, and it could hurt and tingle for days after the occurrence.
Loved these. I am 64 and we had these on concrete playgrounds. We played a “jail” game and it was like chase/tag and whoever lost got stuck in the middle of this structure. Lol Great memories. We also had the very tall slides that went straight down and we would go down on our stomachs during recess at school. No teachers present either. Lol After lunch all the kids went on the playground even during snowy weather. In the heat of Oklahoma these slides were beyond hot. I remember burning my legs on them because girls were not allowed to wear pants then…only dresses! I went down on the slide once when I was in 1st grade on my stomach. I didn’t stop and I ended up with horrible pavement burns from my nose down to my knees. It was beyond painful but it was like a rite of passage if you lived through it! Lol FUN times!!
And we all lived to tell the tale 🙂
Yep, that old playground equipment sure was indestructible. Brings to mind the time that I was playing on one of those steel merry go rounds. I got so dizzy that I jumped off, lost my balance, fell back into it and got bashed in the head by one of the steel bars.
But I guess those things happened to everyone and most of us survived.
My traumatic experience on an old steel merry go round like that was I had somehow got my jacket caught in the steel bars after I flung myself off trying to get the thing spinning as fast as I could and got dragged around the ground until it slowly came to a stop. I had some gnarly looking cuts and scrapes, but it didn’t kill me and my parents didn’t sue the park.
+1
I remember trying to stand up in the middle while the thing was spinning, for as long as you could until you got dizzy, fell down and got flung off if you couldn’t grab one of the bars as you went by it. I don’t remember getting hurt too badly.
When my kids were of playground age, about a decade ago, there was one park near us that still had old-style playground equipment. Amusingly, this became my girls’ favorite park.
The picture is below is from 2010 where they were playing on the things-mounted-on-a-spring. They enjoyed these more than the giant plastic blobs that served the same purpose in most other playgrounds. In this picture’s background, you can see one of the metal play structures. And this park also had the old metal slides, which were way more fun (so I’ve been told) than the typical plastic slide. Oh, except in the summer sun.
Shortly after my kids aged out of playgrounds like this, the Parks Department replaced this with more modern equipment. Too bad.
I haven’t kept up much on playground equipment, but I think that the pendulum might now be swinging back the other way, since folks have started to realize just how sedentary little kids have become, and that playground equipment should be more enticing to kids’ sense of adventure. I hope that’s true.
Incidentally, for several years we sent our kids to a church summer camp where the playground was made up of old tires and random discarded things. The kids never wanted to leave that place and kept coming up with imaginative ways to have fun. Kudos to the camp people there for doing that!
And regarding your concrete pipe, I don’t remember pipes in playgrounds of my own youth, but I used to love playing in a drainage culvert pipe that ran under the road near our house. I still am amazed that mom let me spend summer afternoons sitting in a drainage pipe.
I very much hope that’s true as well. And perhaps with modern technologies – in this case something called “pervious rubber pavement” https://sustainablesurfacing.com/ – kids can get the joy of falling off of stuff without the same risk of injury that was the case back in the day.
This rubber pavement, fwiw, is finding increasing use on regular sidewalks. I’ve discovered it cropping up all over certain cities (e.g., Cambridge MA…Our Fair City). I’m guessing it’s expensive, but it sure is freaky to find yourself walking on it unexpectedly.
yep, being born in 1965, I played on a lot of these 50s and 60s playsets at the park. Lots of fun and good memories. Looking back at them now, I bet several of them would be considered too dangerous for kids to play on by the modern nanny state we have! But we did it and survived just fine. Just like we rode bikes and skated on the sidewalks without wearing helmets!
“On the edge of the pond was a stone outdoor fireplace like this one. It was nice to get warm, and dry off hats and gloves by the fire. One day the town demolished the fireplace with no explanation.”
From its location in the woods, I’d say that had something to do with it.
When I was growing up in early ’60s West Ham (a Borough in the East of London, UK) the local park had really traditional playground equipment, a lot of it built by Wicksteed, who were firm based in Kettering in the Midlands. Slides, swings, roundabouts, see-saws, swinging horses, most of it cast iron and hard (oak?) wood. Later they added a wooden ‘adventure’ set-up with rubber tyres on rope swings, but that was additional rather than replacement. Don’t know what they have there now though.
The roundabout was just like this:
https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/images-o.jpimedia.uk/imagefetch/http://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/webimage/Prestige.Item.1.101086586!image/image.jpg?quality=65&smart&width=990
In retrospect the swings were probably the scariest when you got high enough to make the chains go slack…
There was one of those really tall slides at our local city park. We’d ask our moms for a piece of waxed paper to sit on to enhance our speed down the slide. It’s a wonder any of us survived childhood.
There’s another Dennis The menace park in Downy, Ca. just South of the i5 freeway .
Jeff, that picture you posted is what most folks used to call a Jungle Gym and I always thought they were deadly, kids breaking their legs was the serious injury I remember .
Jumping off things and discovering it might hurt was a large part of many childhoods .
My grand kids loved those duck on a spring things, yes they were designed with babies in mind, what’s wrong with that ? .
Kids are amazingly resilient, bones still flex more than break at that age .
I too remember those Concrete sewer pipes in most playgrounds, once in a while in ‘rich’ neighborhoods they’d even be painted pastel colors .
-Nate
I have a shot of my boy, about 10 years ago, in front of the sign at the Monterey DTM playground. It needed some maintenance, but still looked pretty original.
Great article! Brought back a lot of memories from my childhood…
My kids loved what was left of the old fashioned playground equipment as much as I did as a kid. There was still a very tall slide, merry-go-round and some nice tall swings at one just a few blocks from our house until a couple of years ago, but they’re gone now.
Our elementary school had a nice big jungle gym structure like Jeff showed, and I remember a few kids getting hurt. The teachers apparently all got a bit of first aid training. 🙂
I grew up in the 90s but there was a lot of this weathered old equipment left in our region that I played on, I distinctly remember similar rocket shaped bar jungle gyms, that space station thing(never knew that’s what it was emulating) and even had a not great experience on the ducks(not sure they were ducks in my case) on a spring, which weren’t so indestructible, the rusted out coil spring broke while I was on it! Didn’t fling me off into oblivion or anything dramatic, it just sort of popped and the coil collapsed down onto itself several inches, and no, I wasn’t a fat kid lol
Some of the shapes of these things were really weird and creepy looking, the serpent one looks like something from a childhood nightmare. I’ll also say this, as (mostly) indestructible as this equipment was they definitely needed maintenance that’s simply wasn’t done, when I played on this type of equipment I didn’t know they old because the designs looked out of date, I knew they were old because there was barely any paint left on them from decades of wear, weathering and sun that made them look bad, I didn’t quite appreciate “patina” as a kid so there wasn’t a lot of charm to it. I imagine much of the justification for replacing this equipment besides safety concerns was simply that they needed too much work to ever look shiny and new again vs the cost of just buying new equipment
The CC Effect knows no bounds. My wife and I were literally talking about the old playground equipment of our youth just this past weekend!
She recalls being very good at the uneven parallel bars in school. And she got that way by the nonadjustable metal set that was on her school’s playground, NOT the real kind you see in a gym. I doubt, due to our litigious society nowadays, that those are even allowed in a school’s gym anymore.
At our elementary school playground, we had one of those metal merry-go-round things that DougD and XR7Matt mentioned above. Sure we occasionally got hurt, but you just sucked it up and got back on for more fun!
We also had what I called Monkey Bars, although that may’ve not been the correct term. Basically, it looked like a big metal ladder (laid horizontally about eight feet or so in the air) that you climbed up onto and walked across with your hands (like you see in Army Boot Camp videos). We would all try to get up on top of it and jump off to the sand below. At least we had sand and not asphalt in that area of the playground. You know, to avoid injuries!
I am pretty sure that the aforementioned metal merry-go-round was on the asphalt part of the playground though. It may’ve been on the grass.
To this day, the only lingering injury that I have is where I was running up a hill (at recess to get to this playground) and fell, bending my left thumb back. To this day, I can still dislocate the joint and click it backwards. So it was the hill itself that injured me, and not the playground equipment. You can’t sue the ground, nor should you. 😉
Regarding the monkey bars, my daughters’ elementary school had those (same thing as what you described… I’m also not sure that’s the correct term but that’s what we called them)… the ground underneath was mulch.
Kids had fun on them, but one day a kid got hurt. Then the rules came. And kids could now only play on the monkey bars if a staff member was directly supervising. The rules were: only one kid at a time; kids could only use the bars in one direction; kids couldn’t “skip bars” since they might fall off and get hurt; and kids couldn’t swing their legs too much). Any kid in violation of the rules was banned from the monkey bars, either for the day, or if a repeat for longer. I’m not joking… this really happened.
Naturally, the kids who’d formerly played on the monkey bars lost interest. I have no idea if it’s still on the school’s playground now or not.
I would argue that’s an unenforceably—nay, unconstitutionally!—vague requirement.
Wait, no, that’s not quite right; I said that wrong. I’ll adjust my tone and have another go:
NO FAIR!
The merry go round I had my incident with was on asphalt, I had road rash from it!
I used to climb on top of the monkey bars too, in fact I climbed on top of everything you weren’t supposed to as a kid, like enclosed tube slides and the roofs of the jungle gyms. I was very good at tag, I wasn’t the fastest on the ground but few dared to follow me up there!
I and nobody else got hurt doing this stuff on this sort of equipment, I don’t know if it was lack of supervision or what but nobody stopped us either. Frankly the most dicey playground activity I can recall was actually at the swingset. My elementary school had really tall ones (or at least seemed that way at the time), and we’d swing sideways into each other like we were jousting, jump off at the highest we could get and attempted to defy physics using several of us to push each other to the maximum height above the top bar, which resulted in a terrifying but exhilarating jolt when the chains slacked. My friend got the wind knocked out of him jumping off at a point where the still moving the chair had enough momentum to loop over the top bar after he was off, we all got in trouble for that, he had to visit the nurse.
Here’s Village Heights Elementary School in all its midmod glory, shortly after its completion in 1962. Those butterfly rooves are impressive but impractical; the school was less than 20 years old when I started kindergarten there, and I thought it was just normal for there to be buckets and trash barrels all over the place to collect the steady drips.
Out back was a giant playground. At least two acres, maybe three. It had to be, to accommodate the enormous size and variety of equipment. There was a climbing tower-bridge structure big enough to be seen from space, at one end of which was a slide—metal, of course—so tall its platform was sometimes shrouded with clouds. The first time we went out for recess, I couldn’t stomach the climb way up there; they had to get a big kid to go with me, but only that once; the second time I fairly levitated back onto the structure and skipped across the bridge headlong toward the steps, songsinging “I’m not afrai-yaid; I’m not afrai-yaid!”.
Under the bridge was a high-yield gravel mine; one could spend all recess pawing for the little red ones or whatever other special sort of the day. A few hours’ walk from there was a pyramidal stack of huge tractor tires. Between those two points there was all manner of fun stuff: a bowl set in a bearing at about a 45° angle, diameter just about right for a gradeschooler to wedge their feet and wrap their fingers on the rim and get spun round. There were gate-shaped things rotating about vertical poles, too, and with assistance from a classmate or two one could get up a good head of angular momentum. Or foot of it, depending on whether one gripped the gate with their head outboard or inboard.
There were sections of concrete culvert to hide and echo in. There were swings, those blue strap-type ones. There were monkey bars, of course, but eh, who cared about boring ol’ monkey bars. There was a playhouse with an upstairs and a downstairs, very old and lovingly maintained.
The school district sold Village Heights Elementary to some church during my second-grade year. The next school year, they consolidated us with Cherry Hills, the snotty rich kids’ elementary about a mile away. Cherry Hills was levelled and a new, woefully-undersized version of it erected and named Cherry Hills Village. CHV had a small playground with cautious, unimaginative 1980s equipment. Certainly nothing like that three-mile-tall slide or anything. They did move the playhouse over from Village Heights, but eventually demolished it as unsafe. Not that it mattered much, anyhow; the school was bounded on one side by very busy South University Boulevard, and the playground was closed on Denver’s many bad-air days.
On a visit home from college in the mid 1990s, I made the error of driving over to the church that had been Village Heights—some of the original building was still there—and swinging round the back to take a look at the playground. It was an awful gutpunch: what remained of the equipment took a jagged knife to my memory of the grand scale of the place. Everything’s bigger when you’re five and six and seven.
But I can still smell the sunbaked, handworn galvanised pipeworks and handrails…!
If you’re interested in mid century play structures, visit the Nogochi Playscape in Piedmont Park in Atlanta. It’s recently been restored and is still one of the best playgrounds around.
The amount of fun even an adult can have on that concrete hemisphere alone is amazing. We never really grow up.
Eclectic articles like these are one of the things I really enjoy about this site!
As a child of the early ’60s most of this stuff is very familiar to me. The playground down the street from my Grandparents home had a lot of this stuff and I did actually play on the same stuff in the ’60s that my Mom, Aunt and Uncle did in the ’40s and ’50s. The last time I saw the park about 10 years ago it was a drug infested bio-hazard with a homeless camp….
I do recall that playground injuries at recess were not uncommon, it was almost a right of passage for us boys to have gotten stitches at the emerg, and there was the odd broken bone. At the time it was part of growing up. Almost as popular for playing were houses under construction, and that would never fly today!
I do think something has been lost, but when I take my god-grandson to the playground down the street he and the other kids seem to be having just as much fun on the modern equipment as we ever did on the old. Maybe someday he’ll be nostalgic for molded plastic and rubber safety matting!
As a child of the 90s I actually am nostalgic for molded plastic and rubber safety matting! That was Leaps and Bounds and Discovery Zone era, so while the equipment was pretty safe the elaborate labyrinth of tunnels, huge tall slides, ball pits etc was an experience I cherish. All those places seemed to disappear by 2000 too, so I feel bad that kids since never got to experience that!
As others have said, the decline of traditional playground equipment is due to a combination of safety concerns and the misguided notion that “dated” things should be done away with.
Mitchell Park, built in 1957 in Palo Alto, California, was a mid-century masterpiece whose play area included little garages, pedal cars, and the “service station” pictured. I can personally attest to how memorable it was from a child’s point of view.
The park still retains many of its original features but the cars and service station have been gone for decades. I’m sure anything seen as promoting auto usage would be anathema to this now-politically-correct community …
When the kids were little, we’d flip the car’s carpeted floor mats over and fly down the big steel slide.
Fun in the fall when we could pile up leaves at the end of the slide too.
Those shredded-rubber tire bases were awesome. You could land on your butt and it was landing on a mattress.
Good times.
The Mitchell Park playground incidentally featured plenty of pipes too.
The church where I was organist ages ago has a school connected with it. They used to have one of those funnel ball things; I never saw it being used. Not once. I don’t know if that thing is still there.
When I was a kid in grade school, the playground was mostly the church parking lot. There was a tree-shaded area behind a workshop building, with (I think) a couple of merry-go-rounds. In the parking lot there was a swing set. There were monkey bars, too, somewhere. There was a big dirt lot, too, that served as a playing field. Eventually the school closed, that big dirt lot was sold off and developed, another area that had become a new sports field was sold off, and all the playground equipment went away.
Great post, very interesting!
I have an 8-year old, so I’ve had to frequent playgrounds a lot these past few years. The playground equipment in Japan seems to be pretty much stuck in the 60s – except it’s usually not rusty. But the stuff shown in this post is very much akin to what can be found here today. European playgrounds don’t look anything like this.
Tokyo is the last city in this country where there are kids is pretty high numbers, so they maintain and even create new kids areas here. Things are very different out in the sticks, and you do find playgrounds that look like a post-apocalyptic movie scene.
That’s very interesting. I’ve got to admit, I’ve never thought much about other countries’ playgrounds.
Insurance and fearful parents both made the “dangerous” stuff of your go away. As a kid in the 70s Timberform wood structures were the thing but have disappeared form a mix of splinters and falls. There’s some stuff still around though. When my kids were younger we used to go to the park in Metzger Oregon that still had 60s vintage stuff including a carousel so our kid could spin off and crash just like we did. Durham City Park had a home made wood structure with slide that was super sketchy too. The odd one was the discovery that rain and rain pants made fo ra high speed ride when our toddler caught air off of a slide.
The Minneapolis parks board decided to have a local artist reinvigorate rather than teardown this rocket. I don’t know if kids can play on it but it sure makes for a great landmark. The added guy wires greatly accentuate its takeoff contrails.
You must be talking about Brackett Field:
SAD they closed it off to children ! .
-Nate
Our local park has a rocket AND some kind of a moon lander, with a hilltop city view, no less! It got a refresh in the mid-90s. (They added sheet metal and cyclone fence to close up some not-up-to-code gaps.)
Thanks to S Pellegrino for the article. It’s a subject that has long been of interest to me.
My mom let me have a Honda Trail 70. It was more fun to come home and ride than hang out at schools playground. And probably safer, truth be told.
I just remembered–Mountview also had one of these. You climbed up and then slid down the poles–like in a firehouse:
The 50s-60s stuff was so tame compared to the torture devices . . . uh, playground equipment of earlier decades. Good for training future house painters and skyscraper builders:
https://clickamericana.com/topics/family-parenting/life-for-kids/dangerous-old-playgrounds-our-great-grandparents-somehow-survived
Some of those are like the ones I remember; 14, 16, 17, 18 & 42 in particular.
The playground at my elementary school was paved, which seemed unsafe even then (early 70s). There were sturdily anchored swings, with high horizontal bars for extra thrills, a tall metal slide guaranteed to burn your legs on a sunny day, and a loosely mounted splintery seesaw. Our town park had a rusty metal wheel of death, guaranteed to send dizzy victims tumbling off into hard-packed stony soil. Perhaps playground equipment primed us to accept the safety hazards of vehicles of that era.
When my son was young (early 2000s) I took him to any old-looking playgrounds I could find. He got some joy out of high swings, a decrepit merry-go-round, and springy rocket ships. Because none were near home, and he visited them with me, they weren’t a big part of his life, and he never experienced the thrills of unknowingly risking one’s life on dangerous equipment with daredevil youngsters.
My efforts to encourage unsafe behaviors were in apparently vain, though, as was evidenced by the fact that he didn’t feel safe riding in my old truck until I installed functional seatbelts in it.
FE203 :
There’s a HUGE difference between seat belts and play grounds ~
The human body is normally able to withstand any impact you can provide by running full tilt at / into something .
Obviously getting thrown into the dashboard / steering wheel is far worse than playground mishaps .
-Nate
Catching up late with CC today, but the SP locomotive is still at Dennis the Menace Park in Monterey, but fenced off and inaccessible to kids. I played on it as a kid, not until a few years after the 1957 Olds was new, though my older sister may have been in that film. I seem to recall that the locomotive was still open for playing when our kids were young 25 years ago. In general, I remember that old locomotives, or faux locomotives made from tubing and rolled sheet metal, were very popular playground equipment back in my childhood. Lots of hard sharp edges and trip hazards.
This concrete slide was a few blocks from my house when I was a kid; it’s still there and has even become YouTube star. It took a lot of runs to get a new piece of cardboard slick enough to be faster than the seat of your pants. I think the concrete might have been re-done in the last 60 years, roughened up and slower, as I recall the surface then was polished like marble.
https://youtu.be/4J9iQNd5pog
There were a few of the rocket ones in Queensland, though by the time I returned to Australia as a teen I wasn’t interested in them.
The “Jungle Gym” was a popular item in my primary school play ground in New Guinea. We also had a “kid powered’ merry-go-round. Rumour had it that once, it had been spun so fast it came off its pole.
We tried mightily to equal this legendary, nay, mythical feat, and failed.
The swings were slabs of hard wood, often with splinters, and a blow from them hurt. I can see why they were replaced.
Old road rollers and steam locomotives are long gone, too dangerous, and asbestos laden,
If I had to guess, its probably because the schools are getting too much funding, they’ve already bought all the Chromebooks and printers they can handle, now they need to think about expanding the school building.
I’ve noticed worn out old footbridges that were hand made with wood and stone being replaced by a prebuilt steel bridge that can be dropped in place with a crane.
I typed all this and never hit Post, now no one will read it.
We’re reading , to bad you LIED about proper funding of public schools .
-Nate
Ian, I’m curious; will you tell me what colour the sky is and how many suns there are on the planet where these schools are getting overfunded?
The elementary school I attended for grades 1-4 had a tall metal slide like the one featured by Stephen in Taylor Park, Millburn, NJ. That was loads of fun.
Next to the slide was a large set of swings, with the seats made of solid wood (quite unlike the rubber strips used on modern swings). One fine fall afternoon when the bell rang announcing the end of recess, I jumped from that swing without waiting for it to stop. I was karate-chopped in the back of the head and rendered unconscious. It took quite some time, including a trip to the oncall doctor for the school, before I regained full consciousness.
A good mate of mine was knocked out and lost his front teeth in a similar manner.
Not surprised at all based on what happened to me.
The City of Pleasnat Hill CA actually has a really nice playground with loys of stuff to climb on, swing on, or slide down. My son loved the place from the ages of 5-10 before he thought it was somewhat uncool and computer games were more cool. Lots of places for kids to fall off into the sand but in all my days there never saw that happen.
The Soviet take in a recent book
https://www.zupagrafika.com/shop/soviet-playgrounds
It’s nice to see some cheer in children’s areas .
At least one of the rocket things is just like some I know of in South Central Los Angeles .
Some of those apartment blocks remind me of the projects outside Boston in the 1960’s .
-Nate
I have a Vintage Playground Equipment page on Facebook. Scroll through and enjoy it.!
Image screenshot included here
Its for all ages, and its the largest collection on Facebook.