Epic Win: Metal Slides
Submitted by D DeRonde
Remember when you’d wait in line to play on these in the summer (while wearing shorts) and you’d risk third-degree burns just to land in an unsafe pile of who-knows-what? The slide at my playground had nothing but cement, cigarette butts, and maybe even broken glass awaiting me at the end of my journey. Like this:
Survival of the fittest, baby! We learned to avoid some nasty stuff.
Nowadays, playgrounds have safety features. WTF? This is one of them, and it’s called rubber mulch, or “playgrass.”
Boooooooo!!!! Where’s the injury potential if you slide into a pile of this? Oh, right.
Metal slides have evolved as well:
I like how the roasting of one’s thighs on a hot day doesn’t hit until the very end, thus proving that you can’t make a slide totally safe. If I didn’t think I’d get my adult self seriously somebody-call-the-fire-department stuck, I’d totally try it.
Living in Southern California meant plenty of times getting burned at the end of the slide! Good times . . .
That made it all the more fun to get down from one.
Kids today won’t build enough character and resistance with these safe slides. I know I ripped myself open enough never to get tetanus.
Seriously, these modern playgrounds are for chumps. Where are the slivers? What about getting blistered palms from going down the fire pole on a hot day? And, of course, the excruciating butt burns from slides that are actually, you know, fun.
These plastic, swingless, merry-go-roundless, rubber mulched safety traps are not only no fun, but they deprive children of valuable lessons. How did I learn not to play on precarious places? I broke my arm on the monkey bars! I did I learn not to jump off of moving things? I knocked the wind out of myself jumping from a swing!
My point, long story short, is this. Danger = fun, pain = learning. Long live the metal slide!
Ahh the fire pole… Im 14 used to play on it when I was like 4… One day I went to the park to see it… It was gone
Apparently some kid broken some bones from falling….
I was usually a carefull person but when I got older I did the opposite of what you were supposed to do… Shame we didn’t have the metal slide..
lol, love the narration on this one
Going down facefirst into the mystery at the end was always awesome. Burnt, skin torn thighs also awesome. Also awesome were the metal curly slides, especially the one at the softball fields where family played ball cause at the bottom, the sand had eroded so much that there was a 4′ between bottom of slide and dirt. The dirt line was even below the bottom of the metal supports for the slide and about a foot of the concrete footer was bare.
Ah, such painful fun we had.
I would definitely go as far to say that this is exactly what’s ruining the rising generation, ala where’s the element of death?!? Gosh, the only thing kids have to worry about now are child predators. We had that, AND the 3rd degree burns from the slide! And 10 feet of snow, uphill both ways to school, too.
Oh man!! Too true!! I can remember getting charred ass from these things when I was young. We hadda land on the dang dirt, too, not any wimpy safety stuff!! Ahh, good times.
I’ve been to parties where we spent hours telling “playground war wound” stories. I think the topper was the chick who had imbedded black rubber in her skin from a tire monkey climb accident.
I think George Carlin or Dennis Leary called it the “Pu$^@#$ification” of America’s kids today. Playgrounds taught you survival skills man!!!
we had a slide at our playground when I was five. SO tall. incredibly tall. and the sprinkler would it hit just right that it was a FAST wet ride down. I went down so fast once I went flying, hit the ground so hard I knocked the wind out of myself.
good times.
LOL that was always so much fun. it was your own personal water park!
NICE illustration! I haven’t seen a metal slide in forever, but then again I haven’t gone to a playground in a while.
One way I would remedy the burning aspect of a slide was to just slide down on only my butt, you go much faster that way, too.
I remember in the summertime, sliding down on the thing and not only baking your rear, but the trademark *SQUEAAAAAAAAAAAAAK* as your skin was sloughed off. You’d hit the dirt on your ass and blink back black spots as you decided what hurt more– the skin ripping off, the burning sheet metal or the fact that you just flew off the dang slide at 60mph and landed square on your rear which knocked the wind out of you. But you never had time to decided before you had to jump out of the way as the next unsuspecting victim came barreling your way.
omg this is SOOOOO true XD. very time i walk a dog i walk past a park where they have a metal slide. i wanna go on it SOOOOO badly!! im only 17. i wonder if ill get weird looks O_o
ahhh i was just mentioning this to a friend the other day. i wish parents werent so afraid of everything these days. i dont know anyone who doesnt look back at metal slides in a bad way. kids are really missing out. lol
I don;’t think it’s that parents these days think negatively about the old, dangerous equipment (well, not most of them). I think it’s because parents/people will take any injury as excuse to sue those who own wherever they got hurt for ridiculous amounts of money. Ex. A guy literally tried to sue Six Flaggs because he got struck by lightning in the parking lot and there was no warning sign posted about lightning.
We had one of these tall, curly metal slides at my elementary school, with an added bonus: at the top was a bar that went over your head when sitting. So you could take a hold of that thing and start swinging like on the monkey bars, then hurl yourself down the slide at a high rate of speed. One kid ended up flinging himself off the slide altogether and broke his arm, but was right back up there after it was healed.
We had these slides at my elem. school too! Oh, and don’t forget the waxed paper!
Exactly! My Mom never did figure out why she was always running out of wax paper.
I wish I had thought to use waxed paper when I was little!
Not only did the metal slides teach us to be tough it also taught us creativity
One summer my mother-in-law went down her neighborhood slide so much she wore out the seat of her swimsuit. My husband was a “waxed paper” kid. My family just used fistfuls of sand from the sandbox…that was sooo fast & it reduced friction a bit, too. My kids? Poor deprived things had to wait for winter & hit the fiberglass/plastic/vinyl thing in snowsuits after a blizzard. Cool…all the speed, no burned backsides!
Those slides are in San Francisco
Indeed they are. My adult self had the pleasure of sliding down them at night. Who needs third degree burns? Also, I found out that polyester works as a spiffy turbo-boost. I FLEW out of there! Skirts work great too!
It’s amazing what Playgrounds have turned into. There are now complete handicap accessible playgrounds in my local area.
I know it’s absolutely pointless information, but the slides being in tubes aren’t to prevent burns actually. I’m not sure about other states, but in california, any form of stairs, ramp etc, needs to have some sort of protective railing beyond a certain height so you can’t fall off.
I’m curious how all of us survived all these years without those rules?
Learning from our own mistakes. When we fall four feet and it hurts like heck, we know to be very, very careful when climbing eight feet.
And parents who were willing to rinse off a small wound, put a Band-Aid on it, and send us back out instead of threatening to sue somebody.
Oh man, we had one of those gigantic slides in my grandmothers backyard. Us kids had a blast and and since I grew up in Houston I’ve got some permanent burn marks on my legs
Does anyone remember the merry go rounds? You know the ones where a couple of people would sit down on it and another kid would run round and round before finally jumping on and everyone would get so dizzy they would get sick?
those were awesome. some little kid always ended up getting thrown 20 feet onto the jungle gym or some other piece of unpadded metal. we learned to hold on for the duration of the ride.
Yes. I loved merry go rounds. I remember this once when maybe six or seven of us kids were running to get it to go extra fast. My feet slipped out from under me and I got dragged through the sand for five or six rotations. I got trampled a little too.
Picking sand out of your knee in an unclean public park bathroom. Good times.
theres one here in mass at purgatory -yes i know- chasm where it has rope on it. but tis sitll pretty fun even though the awesoem old ones still are the best. i was on the rope one and i was sitting by the exit thingy and there was a JACKED guy who spun it hard and fast. i fell out and climbed on the side and said” DO IT AGAIN!!!!!”
Despite not being old enough to appreciate most of the nostalgia on this site, I distinctly remember dangerous playgrounds with metal slides, merry-go-rounds, and the old-style seesaws. I have not encountered a more fun slide than that butt-burning piece of danger in a reclusive park, along with splintery wooden seesaws and the metal merry-go-round which I fell off and injured myself more times than I can count. When I visited that park again recently, it was replaced with all that plastic crap and I felt like crying.
All these little kids think they’re badass, but I just wanna throw them onto a metal slide and then see their opinion.
((All these little kids think they’re badass, but I just wanna throw them onto a metal slide and then see their opinion.))
LOL! LOL! LOL!
Think about what our parents had! My mother tells me in Brooklyn NY in the 50’s, they had CEMENT bucket swings! She said kids were always getting hit in the head by those things!!!
my town still has the old ass metal see-saws.
My ass hurts from looking at this image…
Summers over here were 110 degrees +.
Phoenix kid too? what part of town?
I went down one of these slides while sitting on a toy truck once in grade school. I went sooo fast and got launched at the end, wound up landing on the concrete barrier around the sandbox right on my tailbone. I ended up in the chiropractor’s office because I actually managed to put my back out of place, lol
What was even better than these were the metal merry-go-rounds. One time a kid got stuck under one at the park next to my house…
hm, metal tunnel….
that must be about 400 degrees on a hot day.
You left out the used condoms at the bottom
That looks exactly like the tall “humped back” slide at my elementary school in AZ!!! I loved that slide! Even though it ate my new dress when I was in first grade–a broken weld at the top on the handlebar caught the hem of my dress and it ripped all the way down…Oh, was my mom mad! But that slide, and the swings and the teeter-totter (wooden) and the merry-go-round were the best! We learned how to be safe. (This ultra-safe stuff is sad and no fun. Just ask my young grandkids–they are bored after about 10 minutes of no challenge.) We used to put “powder dirt” on the slide to make it go faster and eliminate the “squeak” as was mentioned earlier. Of course, running up the slide was great, too.
***So where is this slide located so we can make a pilgrimage and have some fun? Anyone have one still in existence near where they live?****
Try a less-than-affluent suburb. Fewer “my precious darling” yuppies and municipal budgets too small for frou-frou gentrification.
I do!!! -flails arms in the air-
and look at those swings in the background! Those are the extra tall ones and when you get going it feels like it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to go back and forth. Jumping from these was extra daring — yup, you really could break something.
There is a campground in WA that has all of this (we call it the land of the exiled playground equipment) including the merry-go-round that you push yourself. Our kids love going there.
Those swings are the trifecta of pain…the hard rubber would be ass-scorchingly hot, the action was always good enough that you could swing up REEEAAAAALY high and break and arm, leg or tailbone os slough off a good quantity of skin when jumping off at the peak of the swing and then of course there was the inevitable ass-beating that mom or dad would apply to remind us how stupid it was to be jumping off…but goddamn it, the temptation to go soaring off was the same for us as kids as the porch-lights were for the moths
Oh, yes! The metal slide complete with hump! I tried to ride my bike down one of these once when I was eight. Key word here: Once.
Oh, the lesson I learned that day.I’m not sure which hurt worse, the hard landing or the beating I got from my dad afterward.
Ah, metal slides. I remember them well. How many times did I burn my ass?
And the swings in the background! running though those, getting kicked to the ground… Now THAT is youth.
I miss metal slides. I hate the plastic ones, they always cause so much damn static!
YES. I f*ckin’ HATED the static of plastic slides as a kid. So much so that I would start crying and refuse to play in McD’s play land because that place was static city. Burns are way less painful than the static shock.
i fell off the top of one wheni i was six, and i just sat up and laughed lol, i miss the metal slides, the burn potential made it more fun lol
You know, I think everyone is right in that the best way to learn about danger when you were a kid was to actually have something happen to you. For instance, you now know that fire is hot and you shouldn’t touch it because at one point or another you stuck you hand on the stove or played with the campfire a little too much.
But, as a kid, everything was temporary so you just got up if you fell down, dusted yourself off and ran back to go down the slide again. We are made to learn by experience.
That’s why nothing in my house was padded. One good crash into the cabinet & they take the corner a bit slower from then on.
You guys brought up what should be another epic win. Merry-go-rounds.
Those things were a freaking blast. Especially when you knew an adult that was like a big kid and would spin the thing as fast as he could.
When I was a kid, we’absolutely fill the thing up with kids and have some of the bigger guys get it spinning. We’d all let go at the same time at it’s top speed.
Back in my very blurry post-college days a bunch of us got really wasted and found a park with one dead center of the playground…we took turns lying flat in the middle of the wheel while everyone else spun it horrifically fast…I totally understand the old Cheech and Chong reference about playing Black Sabbath at 78-speed as a result
I’ll go ahead and echo the sentiment that the static on plastic slides is a nightmare. I slid down plenty of metal slides that you could have baked cookies on and loved them. The intrusion of plastic slides began when I was around 8 or so, and I refused to slide on them.
Did anyone else go to an elementary school that had a metal slide that seemed like it was 100 ft. tall? My first elementary school had this slide that was tall enough to see other continents from if you stood on top of it. Was that a fluke, or did anyone else have one of those?
My grade school had a slide like that. Thing’s still freakishly huge, and I’m 26!
One day some guy in 8th grade went over that thing with car wax. I swear I broke the sound barrier on the way down!
At my school there was a retarded girl who would pee all the way down the slide the first time she went down it. Every day.
I miss how my local playground used to be, sure it was somewhat dangerous but it was fun. Now it’s all plastic and rubber tarmac. (Which hurts more when you land on it than what they used to have) sad thing is they started getting rid off all the fun wooden and metal stuff when I was about eight. But that was also when I was getting a bit to tall to play in there. Weird. I miss the old seasaws, the weird sand and woodchip stuff we used to have and the proper swings, oh and the fact the playground had this fun wooden ‘guard tower’ and a wooden slide. The slide I think it one of the only old pieces of equipment still in there.
I miss the old playgrounds. And I never knew anybody who was maimed from them, either. Skinned knees happened all the damn time, and every once in a great while somebody would break a bone doing something stupid, but everybody lived to tell the tale. And we learned a very important lesson on the slides: cover your butt. Literally; make sure your shorts are long enough that you won’t get a burned bottom.
The playground that my youngest sib grew up near reminds me of McDonalds Playland, only bigger. It was mostly wood and rubber but apparently it wasn’t safe enough so now it’s mostly plastic. Pathetic.
Worst things that I remember happening was someone (my friend’s sister) falling off the monkey bars and I think doing something to her shoulder or collar bone. And the time I fell through the rungs on some sort of climbing ladder and got stuck and ended up with a nice big bruise on my side. But I swear when they got rid of the sand stuff and put in the rubber tarmac I came home with a lot more scrapes than I ever had before.
Summer in Phoenix was a lot like winter in places that actually have winter…daunting to anyone who wanted to play outside… and in a neighborhood not really built for swimming pools, who the hell wants to go to the park when it’s 112 F outside…as a result, many of us grew up largely nocturnal (or crepuscular at least)…going down the metal slide in shorts was not undertaken without the spatula and can of PAM
Yes! I grew up in Australia, and the park down the road from us had the ass burning slides, the wooden see saw, the merry go round and this AWESOME old wooden castle thing, 2 stories tall with ropes to climb up, those wooden slated bridges…so much fun. The council tore it all down years back for being unsafe
Sure my brothers and I got hurt, but whatever, it was fun!!
(also gotta mention the used needles in the sand, the bottles, the stubbed out ciggarettes and the condoms- just leave your shoes on and don’t touch anything)
Do you live in Canberra? I remember that castle! The asses!
Also what about the monkey bars made of the same metal? They’d burn your hands AND give you blisters and feel like your arms are getting pulled out the sockets
We still have this slide, the extra-looong swings, AND the merry-go-round at our church! They were donated from a church member who owned a drive-in theater in the ’60’s. They used to be at the front, right under the screen. We all loved the slide when we were little, but now as an adult, I’m terrified of it for some reason. The height! The speed! Our carousel is rusty but still works great.
I may just be 16, But I miss these things. Yes, I still go to playgrounds (Granted I don’t use them the way they’re intented, more of a mix of Parkour and copying that show Sasuke (Ninja Warrior in the US), Ironicly enough the only new Metal Slide I’ve ever seen is the Flying Chute obstacle on that show http://www.majhost.com/gallery/manaleader/Avatar3/flyingchute.jpg ). And I can’t find these things anymore, slides are just plastic and no matter what or how you do they have no damn friction. But yesterday, I found a playground with a Metal Slide, Metal Monkey Bars still in tact (Granted the ones where its metal bars where some bars have fallen off and some are lose in the structure so they roll in their place have their own fun possibilities). AND a Merry-Go-Round. Thats the first time in ages I’ve used a playground how its supposed to be used, then after that I went back to my normal way.
Does anyone remember the 50 ft high metal chain swings? You could spend a half-hour trying to get reallyreally super-duper high and get your fingers pinched and your butt all chafed, and accidentally kick 4756456 kids in the head when thye get within a 100-ft radius of the swing and fall off and not-quite kill yourself. Aaah, these kids and thier safety-swings with the three foot chain have NO idea what fun is.
i used to play on those “evolved” slides when i was little and lived there.
san francisco. there was an ice rink to the right of it.
Anyone else notice the “Childsafe Advocacy” ad that pops-up beside this story once in awhile? The irony isn’t lost…
Try sliding into a pit of serrated pine chips (in Aus)! Can’t believe they banned that stuff here because kids used to throw it at each other. ^_-
Well Australians are like posessed with safety.
When I went to school in Australia, it was always safety this, ban that… Hell it was almost like brainwashing.
what safety playgrounds do, is that it takes away the independance the child needs, and also some VERY valuable life lessons.
so, I can conclude that:
Safety playgrounds + lack of independance – life lessons = Jackass lookalikes on Youtube.
It’s good that the schools and kindergartens here (Denmark) ain’t so hellbent on safety…. Well, at least WE have some metal death traps that can still kill you
So, I went down on one of these metal slies on my feet in the winter with ice when I was 8. Knocked out a tooth and pushed some others back, now at 21 I have braces from the slide o’ death. Good times.
Whatta bunch of wussies. Get an old waxed potato chip sack, ride down a coupla times sitting on it — greasy side down. The slide will become so fast you’ll never notice that it’s hotter than a pancake griddle.
My old school had metal slides (still does). They get hotter than hell and at the bottom is a painful pit of woodchips. Great memories…./sarcasm
I agree…I hate those new safeish type material playgrounds for that very reason. Kids used to get tough by burning their rears on a slide of falling off something. Shake it up and keep going.
I have very few soap boxes. This is one of em.
I loved those metal slides. The school I went to for K to 2nd grade was built in the 50’s or 60’s and had all the original playground equipment. 12′ chain swings, 15′ metal slide with wooden siderails, and then there was the climbing equipment. A 20′ wall of concrete 15′ wide, 3″ thick that looked like swiss cheese. Holes everywhere, painted bright yellow. You could see the entire town from the top of that thing. The monkeybar cage. This was a 20′ high diamond of monkey bars spaced 1′ apart. The only way to swing on that was to climb to the top of the diamond where the two sides came back together. And at the bottom, none of that shredded rubber/safety foam. We had honest to god rock. The stuff kids are supposed to play on. If you have never had a shoe so full of pebbles you couldn’t pick your foot up you had a horrible childhood.
Sadly, everything was torn down in the mid-90’s when they built the new elementary school. Everything was plastic. Nothing was over 5′ from the ground. Kids would stand by the bottom of the slide and zap people as they came down.
When was fun outlawed? Ought to be unconstitutional.
OMG my old elementary school playground still has the slide of fiery hot death, the crazy carousel whose top speed is 20 miles over the speed of light, the splinter filled teeter totter, the crazy high swings, and the painful painful woodchips. I’m 23 and still play on it every once in a while!
My elementary school had a metal slide too. The thing about the fire when you go down the slide is so true.
Oh man, my school had those. They were awesome. I live in Canada and they STILL burned all the way down. Sadly, they tore it down when I was in grade 7. Worst September ever. All stupid and plastic. And wood chips! Don’t even get me started on those. I miss fortifying sand walls with ziploc bags of those rocks. And the swings, oh the joy of burning black rubber on a 40′ chain. One kid would always do backflips and one day he tried to do two, he did it , such an epic win, had to make it into an epic fail though, gets some big kids to help (rockets baby) and he just went flying, broke a collarbone and an arm. Oh man you guys from the hot parts of the US never knew the joys of winter, and the inevitable ice luge we’d make on the hill. God kids today are pansies. Sigh, I miss grades 1-5
We had “playgrass” in basic training. A whole football field of it. It was affectionately named “Goodyear Field.” It was where we learned combatives and, if you were unlucky enough, got to low crawl for hour on end. That stuff is soft enough that it didn’t cause rug burn until the first hour was over. Today’s kids are spoiled! Even my generation was spoiled with wood chips as playground padding. Where’s the blacktop?
these things are the reason that I started my thing which carries over to now of only wearing pants not shorts
Too bad the person who submitted this used my photo without my permission. I find it ironic that a photo I took as a band across the bottom with your website on it. That’s called FAIL. Please remove the unauthorized use of this photo. Thanks!
I’m so glad to live in a small town where they actually still keep the old slide, just bring in new crappy equipment.. I can remember riding down the slide standing up and then getting a paddling from the teacher because she called and asked my mom if she could. I was 10 then, and I miss it. I also miss going so high on the tire swing that the chain snapped and it knocked the air out of me and then got up and 1)cried 2) laughed and cursed a bit. Good times. I feel bad for the kids of today. It’s safety this and that.. >.>
I actually remember that happening to me once or twice. No sir I didn’t like it.
I’m terrified of tube slides of all sorts for some reason. Especially plastic ones. I’m a weirdo…
That rubber mulch stuff isn’t as safe as it looks, I ripped most of the skin off my elbow with it when I was 9 or 10. Although it did leave an awesome scar.
I remember the first time I finally got the guts to climb the ladder of one of these things, I chickened out and climbed down. When I finally slid down the slide one day, my kindergarten teacher wrote my mom a letter about it, I even still have that letter! Those things were a blast. When I was finally growing out of the age of play ground fun, they stared replacing these with those stupid plastic ones when everyone knows you can’t slide as fast on a plastic one as you could on a metal one.
I don’t know if anyone else ever did this, but at the summer day care i use to go to when I was 5-10 years old use to give up wax paper to go down the metal slides with. It made you slide down super fast. You basically flew off the end, it was so fun. Lol.
Ah, memories. My elementary school used pea rock everywhere around our playground equipment, I remember having to constantly take my shoes off just so I could dump it out and kids were always getting it stuck under their skin. And all the equipment was metal, with pieces of paint missing and chipping off everywhere, and we had two of the giant swing sets. I used to try and swing myself high enough to see over the top bar every recess. Good times.
My school used to have those rocks… I still have one in my arm!
Anyone remember the domes made of steel bars you could climb up on and hang from your knees at the top? Man, my foot would slip off one of the bars and I’d rack myself between the legs. Even being a girl, the agony was enough to give me some sympathy for the boys.
Heh, I was such a baby when I was younger. We had these corkscrew slides at the playground and I remember being terrified to the point of tears at actually going down.
I hate that new safety crap. Also, a playground a few blocks from my house used to have a metal slide, it was always fun. But the summer made it almost impossible to even touch the slide. But the school decided to change the playground and get rid of it…
Ahhh Fried Fanny! Good times, good times. I actually have a metal slide in my backyard for my kids to play on. Why should my husband and I have all the fun?
I also recall that metal open air slides were ridiculously high…almost 10 feet off the groundm..the metal spiral slides at least 20 feet! *sniffle* I miss it all.
we used to have a metal slide at my playground at school it wasnt the that high and they used this weird lubricated stuff that made it cooler but it helped us go faster
This is all epic win. Those slides are still the best ones out there if you can find them. Merry-go-rounds were way scarrier in my opinion. We’d hold onto the bars on the sides and let inertia take our feet out from under us so they would be flinging out behind us, just dangling. We’d hang on for OUR VERY LIVES! and then we’d be flung at top speed when we let go. The point of the game was to LAND SAFELY and not kill ourselves. That was the game. haha. Oh and does anyone remember pulling up picnic tables behind those huge swings and start swinging from standing position on the picnic table tops? Dang we got creative!
there was a playground completely made of wood, including the slide(woo Ass Splinters) somewhere in england, cant remember where though
metal slides, huh? okay, never thought about it much…
Plastic slide + kid willing to go upside down on it = somewhat more fun!
i nevere lived there but i have lived in places that are like that and i think that it is a good idea to show people what there doing to this world im about to have a baby and i would not want my kid around that it is sad we live in a bad place but where move but no matter where you go it will be like that i think it is sad