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Playground Design of Yesteryear and Its Much Prettier Modern Counterparts
Search for it in a map program and view it from above or check the website.
It will redefine your definition of outrageously fantastic.
As a father of two I highly recommend taking hand sanitizer, a flashlight and walkie talkies.
Oh...you'll be there all day.
I loved those old playgrounds in Chicago that went away in the late 80's. Pea gravel, welded and ground bars that were rusty but smooth from decades of hands polishing them. I remember the smell my hands had after being on the monkey bars, and what it felt like to fall off (it hurt, but we got back up and went back at it).
Today's kids are just like these softy new playgrounds - thanks to their overprotective parents.
And now? Now they took away the ladders and monkey bars entirely, replaced them all with stairs and walkways.
See-saws are gone. Carousels are gone. Swings are becoming rare, especially the kind with chains. Tires, if they're at all allowed, have to be filled with foam and plugged up.
How long before playgrounds are nothing but a collection of soft foam sculptures, too floppy to climb or play on?
This is the fault of designers. Yeah, we as a group solved a bunch of problems really damn well. Only, they were the wrong problems. We caved in to the demands of yuppie helicopter parents, and have built a society designed to smother children, make them obese, and stamp out their imaginations.
I'd rather have a plain set of steel tubes as a playground, because that's a blank canvas for children to build upon. Adult aesthetic sensibilities are secondary to that. I'd rather risk cuts, concussions, and broken bones, because in the long run, eliminating that risk will do much more harm.
There has to be a limit on kid-friendliness. We need to stop shielding out kids from all injury, we need to stop Disneyfying all our grimmer fairy tales, we need to let fist fights happen, we need to stop disinfecting everything or applying antimicrobial coatings everywhere, and we need to let kids out into the world unsupervised. Nearly ever danger to kids people are seeking to address is overblown, and the cure is worse than the disease.
Besides, as the parents out there will know, kids will find a way to injure themselves on anything!