Epic Win: Dangerous Playground Equipment
Submitted and Written by Janine P
I miss the old days when playgrounds weren’t all made of plastic. There were so many good pieces… the searing hot metal slides, the puke-inducing merry-go-rounds, the deathly “witches hat”, and any number of variations of Really Tall Metal Thing (usually welded into cute animal shapes) that kids could (and did) frequently fall off of.
At my primary school there was one particular contraption that injured more children than average. I dont know what it was called but it looked something like a Mayflower pole. A tall metal pole with a spinning circle at the top. Attached to the circle was about six chains with smaller metal rings at the bottom. The point was to get your friends hanging onto the small rings, everybody runs real fast in the same direction around the pole, and wheeeeeee! let yourself fly! Obviously this game was less dangerous in the winter when, if you accidentally let go, you could fly off into a relatively soft snowbank instead of the gravel. Yes, gravel, none of this “rubber chips” crap that playground have today.
first!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FIRST REPLYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
that would be a maypole. they’re more fun w/ different colored cloth instead of chains. (Medieval contraption)
Maypole…great phallic symbol toteach kids penis worship once every year on May 1st. Ahh…the good old days.just like the dangerous 15 ft high slide we went down when I was just 4yrs old. My brother fell off the thing and landed on his head. He’s 55 yrs old now.
Did he fall through a time warp?
yay penis
I just have to say that i, for one, am glad that playground equipment is made of plastic now instead of metal or heavier materials. I know that kids will be kids, but taking steps to minimize injury is a must.
My best friend in second grade died infront of me, after a faulty piece of plaground equipment fell on her, splitting her skull. It was a very large, heavy, wooden ladder. It had probably been there for years, and administration only instructed the grounds keepers to put a paper sign on it saying “do not touch”. On a blustery day, that paper blew off, and my friend paid the price.
Her death changed the lives of many. Her family (both parents worked at the school), her friends, and everyone in the community.
Take care of your playground equipment.
That’s awful! I am not opposed to safer playground equipment – some of the contraptions we had were poorly build and not well looked after, but it has gotten silly in some aspects. Build it well, build it safely, but let kids be kids. My job is to supervise children, and believe me, I do – but sometimes it seems as though the fun has been taken out of the toys for fear of injury. Slides are only a few feet high now in most schoolyards, whereas when I was little, we had some plastic slides that ran more than 200 feet down the side of a hill. The steep parts were covered, and there were “landings” every 25 feet so that you didn’t pick up too much speed, but it still allowed for a lot more fun than a 5 foot slide on a 25 degree angle from the ground.
I certainly wouldn’t condone unsafe playground equipment! I just think sometimes we get a little too concerned over the possibility of a scraped knee or bruised elbow.
here, here. And let me climb up a slide without getting a ruler slapped across my knuckles for god’s sake.
yea, it’s just that people are overly concerned about what happens to their kids. Don’t get me wrong, I thinks it’s terrible when somebody gets seriously injured. I never got a chance to play with metal equipment. I got a play set that was metal coated in rubber plastic, with a curly slide, a fireman’s pole, monkey bars, and a giant net. I thought it was great. But modern play sets now are just these little plastic things with one slide, a bridge, and about 18 different kinds of stairs. And no one is allowed to play with it for an hour if somebody scrapes their elbow. Me and my friends had a club that you had to jump from the top of one of those metal structures. it wasn’t that high, impossible to get hurt on , but it seemed high at the top. The teachers didn’t mind, since it was so short. but today you aren’t even allowed to go to the top.
I am so sorry for you and your friend
You cant say it was the equipment’ fault, it was the Maintenance crew fault. Even on plastic playground, without maintenance they can become dangerous.
Ha! You had gravel? Lucky. The first few years of school I had metel playground equipment sunk into concrete. I’m not even joking. When we did get a new playground (I was about 2nd grade) it was the molded plastic kind, but the ground was rocks. As in, those golf ball sized ones you use for landscaping. It was fun to look through them for pretty ones, but not so fun to land on when you jumped off the swing going as high as you can.
I remember gravel under the equipment. I once was throwing gravel mindlessly and hit a boy in the eye. I was sent to the Principals office. I’m still a bad (or good) shot today!!
I remember we had this metal octogon contraption…well it was 6 octogons welded together (2 high, 3 wide) and the rocks had washed away so you were climing above concrete. One kid broke his arm but did they ban the octogon of death? No! It made it that much more exciting!! Who could climb to the top without falling? Oh the fun!!
My son’s school had the metal octogon thing, and on a 95 degree day, he reached for the top bar… it was red hot, so he let go and made a one point landing with his wrist. Of course it broke…
The teachers there told me many kids had been seriously injured on that thing, but it stayed…
when I was in 1st grade, we had a shapeless arrangement of welded metal poles to climb on. O_o i was climbing it one day, and i grabbed onto a bar, looked up, and saw a spider making a beeline for my hand. naturally, i let go. naturally, there was a bar right below me that my chin broke my fall with.
somehow, i’ve NEVER broken a bone. O_o
I had sand or gravel in the schools I went to. Small gravel at least, which was less painful than the big kind. Though field day, when they made you run barefoot through the playground equipment as an obstacle course on a hot day…
Ow. Not pleasant.
I particuarly liked the tire that was suspended horizontally on three metal chains. The fun part? Putting your friend on it and spinning them as fast as you can, to see if you could make them throw up.
That reminds me of something! The city where I used to live we had these ‘ultra-modern’ play areas at the beach, and the only fun things there were these… I’ll describe them the best way I can… a tiny platform only big enough for your two feet with a tall pole sticking up from the ground and through it for you to hang onto that spun around really fast. And I MEAN FAST. To make matters worse the poles were always ‘artisitically bent’ into theses weird angles, so you had a hard enough time hanging on… let alone stopping yourself being sick.
oh! I had one of those! We also had a play structure that to climb to the top, you had to got up a ladder that went at a 40 degree ange and slowly turned upside-down.
I’ve often wondered why it was decided that childhood should be painless. Oh, right…this litigious society where pain and suffering is a ticket for a quick pay day. In my day, we rode bikes without helmets. We broke our arms and collar bones.
Rotten kids!
The kids didn’t make the rules.
the adults that got to enjoy being hurt on this equipment do! stop ruining it for the future generations!
Darn right. I’m appalled at how many kids seem to call the shots instead of the parents. Ugh.
any1 haz replied to this comment is probably a 75 year old women/man.
kids shud hav the same rights as adults.
Right. Just as soon as they start paying taxes. And taking care of the mortgage. And stop picking their noses. Then they can enjoy all the same ‘luxuries’ adults do.
Every time someone buy anything you pay taxes, so stfu & die.
The 10 cents you pay for your candy isn’t keeping the local government afloat.
why do u say rotten kids? rnt u forgeting u were a kid once. and kids still ride bike without helmets. the reason they do on cartoons is cos over protective mothers will sue.
Perhaps you missed the irony?
Learn to spell.
exactly what i was thinking. i remember the burning metal slides landing into hot sand (with sand wasps that would nest in it. no joke. however they wouldn’t sting unless you made them sting you.). you fought the minor pain because it was the price of having fun. you didn’t even realize that fun had pain back then.
i was in the third grade when they started making safe playground equipment.
sand and gravel was replaced by bark (in my opinion bark was worse then any gravel, it tended to lead to mass spinters and smelled like cat pee) and rubber. metal became staticly charged plastic, which shocked you while attracting the yellowjackets that DID sting for no reason.
So true. That plastic is evil. I have a little brother now and play with him on these things. And they suck. The plastic slides have to much friction so you can’t go fast… (If you can actually manage to slide down them.) and I have been hurt more by those wood chips than by any gravel. Plus, they stick to your socks and shoes for a week.
Amen to the wood chips. I remember when they replaced the metal slides with plastic at my primary school (K-3). If you were the least bit sweaty, which everyone was in 80+ degree heat and 90+ degree humidity, you’d end up with either friction burns if you were lucky, or get stuck and slammed into by the next kid on the way down.
When I have a kid I fully intend to get some sheet metal to uh, improve upon what ever swing set slide I get for him or her.
We had a metal slide when I was growing up. I remember when I was little mom would give us sheets of wax paper to go down the slide on about once a month. Waxing the slide in this way made it all the more fun because you reduced friction. I think it also reduced the chance of rust.
my dad played king of the mountain on a hill of snow that was 15 feet high, that was made by a snowplow. If you weren’t king, you tumbled down to the road, hurt your arm, then scrambled right back up.
Wow. This is so true!
One of my earliest memories from going to the playground is falling off the giant metal slide into the sand/gravel. Ouch!
Not to mention the sizzle of your bare skin as it hits the metal slide in mid July.
We had a giant triangle shaped one that I managed to get a concussion from by sliding down on my stomach. Little did I know that when I dropped a good foot onto my knees on the gravel below that it was the perfect height for my forehead to bang into the edge of the slide. Ooooh and the rounded wooden 4×4’s with dips cut out that you could climb up steeply to the top of the tall slide – the one with the bumps!
you could climb up metal slides a lot easier, too… they’d stick and sizzle and you could look at your footprints to see what you’ve done. it was win.
Oh YES! We had a huge rocket ship that had a slide coming out of it. The bars were far enough apart that we could easily slip through and climb on the outside. It was SERIOUSLY dangerous! As in… if you climbed to the very top and fell you could easily break a bone. It was so much fun!
I miss my rocket ship slide! My kids never knew the joy!
I miss that stuff. We used to play Star Trek on one of our metal contraptions. The gravel (which was probably full of asbestos too) was usually something like the boiling hot lava surface of some planet & we couldn’t fall or we’d be dead & outta the game.
Though the boys wouldn’t ever let me be Spock because I was girl & Spock couldn’t possibly be played by a girl. I had to be Spock’s wife. Didn’t matter that Spock wasn’t married.
Remember, Spock could only mate once every seven years. So technically, you could have had the marriage annulled.
Live long and prosper?
Not necessarily the case.
Vulcans can mate any time they want to.
But it is imperative that they do every seven years, lest they face insanity and death.
It’s called Pon Farr, in case you didn’t know.
Live long and proper.
Any relation to Jaime Farr? I was more a MASH fan.
LLAP, back at ya!
Then I’m toast, because I’m way past my Pon Farr expiration date. (sigh)
It does give me a good not guilty by reason of insanity excuse, so I can go psycho and get away with it.
We played Star Trek on our jungle gym too with the hot lava rule.
I had my eye brow split open when I was 7 and my sister was rolling metal ball bearings down a tall slide. Then she threw one and it hit my brow. Had to get stitches.
My son got “scalped” on a merry go round. Took off a quarter size piece of his head. He got pushed and round up head down on the ground as it went around. Still has a pea sized bald spot from it. He’s 14 now, happened when he was 5.
I miss this stuff!!! I work in childcare now and can’t believe the stuff they can’t do. What happened to the learning by experience? I’m not advocating children being hurt, but really – we learned by doing – if you got hurt, you tried a different tactic next time!
I was in elementary school in the 80s, and they “started” thinking about safety, so when my one elementary school put in a new playground, they put woodchips underneath – not rubber chips. I can remember going home and pulling woodchips out of my clothes, and trying to get all of the splinters out of my body – it was awful.
Does anyone remember those “see-saw” swingset things that used to come out of the ground when you played on them – I watched Jeff Foxworthy do a sketch on one, and it really took me back – I’m pretty sure you were supposed to cement them in, but nobody ever did.
I also remember hanging upside down on the monkey bars and falling off one day because I couldn’t remember how to get back down – I landed on my neck. At age 8 I groaned and rubbed my neck when I hit the hard-packed sand, now I know I would break it.
Exactly, we had the woodchips too!
And we had the hollow metal pole, un-cemented swingset in the back yard too. With 2 swings, one of those seesaw things, and one of those double sided chair things. *ker-thud* *ker-Thud* *ker-THUD* Man, I’m surprised we never tipped that thing over.
I like the way Christopher Titus explains it, “Well, you won’t do that again, will ya? Stop being a wussy.”
What happened to the learning by experience? I’m not advocating children being hurt, but really – we learned by doing – if you got hurt, you tried a different tactic next time!
—————————–
Yeah, you pushed the obnoxious little effer from your class, that you hated, over the side first. That way you knew what to expect. Gravity does suck sometimes.
Please make shorter posts dumbass
wow – that was uncalled for
You call him/her a dumbass, yet you can’t read an entire paragraph?
The park near my house had a boat (a paddle-wheel boat) with a spiral slide in the middle and a chain boarding-ladder thingie. And one of those rickety-bridge things. The best part was that you could (so we did) jump from the boat to the roof of the “shops” (storefronts, like movie sets, kinda – just walls and roofs) and run around up there. And for a thrill we would climb onto the shade-thingie (kind of a pergola) and jump into the sand where they had the concrete turtle (for the little kids). Since then (hey, it’s been almost 40 years) they’ve taken away just about everything fun about it (no boarding ladder, no rickety bridge, no slide, no easy way to get to the roofs etc.). I think the turtle is still there, though (apparently no one has realized that a child could fall and bonk their head on it – although if that’s really a worry for them I suppose they’d have to dig up all the sidewalks in the world and replace them with something cushy).
And they wonder why there are so few kids playing outside? Answer: they took all the fun away! I too remember those burning hot slides and the metal merry go rounds that would go so fast you would slide of into the gravel. Those days where when being a kind was a fun, active and exiting thing. Now the closest thing to “deadly” fun is computer games and such.
When I was in kindergarten they had a castle made of wood with sand underneath and to get up in the “tower” you had to clime up a fireman’s pole. By doing that you had to stand on the rail. Those where fun times… =)
I think kids are meant to fall down and get hurt simply to know that doing somethings have a not-so-nice-outcome. Like jumping from high places can really hurt your legs. Going to fast in a go-cart and hit a wall will probably make you head hurt and so on. We need dangerous playgrounds back!
This is my 2-cents … or maybe it’s more like a dollar… ^_^
Wow! Are you talking about Serra Park in Sunnyvale? That was my park, too. I remember when it was being built. Best park ever. We would hide in the crawl space of the curly slide. Most of it is still there but the bridge and slide are now gone. Not nearly as fun. Oh, and we were all over the “roofs’ of the fake buildings.
I grew up on Cascade Dr and would walk over as often as I could. As long as I came home for dinner, Mom was ok with that. Little did she know we would play all over in those cherry orchards where Mary and Fremont are now. God knows how much trouble we could have gotten in!
PS-I went to Homestead HS
at one park we had that bug thing like in the picture! we would sit on the eye ball and pretend we were in star wars! in the town i grew up in they still have a play ground with the huge tall metal slides that burn your ass! its awseome, i take my kids there to experence the aweosmeness that is metal playground stuff. we had a huge dome like jungle gym thing that many a kid fell from and broke thier arm on. when i was around 10 they took it down. also a thing that had a pole and a square shape wood pland around it. i think you got as many kids on as possible and made it swing back and forth. also a arm, leg breaker. i was sad when they took it down. kids now a days have it to safe!
This is probably one of the reasons why the youth today are so out of control. No one can touch them and they’ve never had any serious injuries to set them in line.
When I was little, there was a 15′ metal slide in the playground. This was back in the day when little girls wore DRESSES to school… anyone old enough to remember that? My mother was so annoyed because my little underwear was covered with rust every day from that slide!
BEFORE this, playgrounds back in the old OLD days had pieces of wood and saws that you can cut out your own shapes. I saw it on a news report and there are some that still exist, but are REALLY rare
The argument was that kids can only learn stuff if they hurt themselves. I think this is true, too many kids nowadays stay indoors and their only sight of blood is on TV or video games and then they eventually grow up lacking a sense of reality.
AMEN! A little blood never hurt any one!
Right!! There’s no sense of reality, and that’s when they end up REALLY hurt, cause they never had a taste of it when they were younger.
Oh, my God, all you older-ish people were so lucky to get such lovely playground equipment. As a child of the nineties, my school’s playground didn’t have swings, and after a girl broke her arm, we lost the monkey bars. However, we used the school’s parallel bars as a replacement, which wasn’t that much fun.
That being said, I spent a month in Ecuador this summer, and went to school while I was there. I was envious of all the little kids at this K12 school because they had swings, monkey bars, see saws…the things I’d missed out on while I was growing up. Sadly, I was too old to go on the playground, and couldn’t make up for lost memories.
Does anyone have fun on the new, boring playgrounds? I heard that more injuries occur because kids are jumping off everything to actually have fun.
Psst,
Grab a six pack and drink it as the sun goes down. When it’s dark enough go jump on every piece of equipment you can.
You’ll have a great time, go home tired and sleep like a champ or they find your body in a crumpled heap -half buried in the sand – the next day before classes.
The police go effing crazy trying to figure out how you died, it’s gonna be suicide/accident or the nasty middle school kids that hang out there to smoke ciggies. Either way?
A noble departure!
lol!!! awsome idea!!!
There are variations on this theme.
Remember Quaaludes? ;
I actually broke bones falling off a slide. It had one of the bars on top you could grab and use to throw yourself down faster. After my little accident it was against the rules to use the bar for anything more than balance. Lame teachers. Oh, and be lucky you people had sand or gravel… I had wood chips that gave nasty splinters… it especially sucked since I lived in a city with nasty wind.
Oh! One of my other favorite contraptions was the spider web. We used to climb on that thing and hang upside down on it. Or play tag.. or whatever random game we thought of that day.
The big metal slides were a personal favorite of mine. I tried to ride my bike down one. Once. Lesson learned in the landing. Lesson reinforced with my dad’s belt when I got home with my broken bike.
How’d you get a bike up the slide ladder, and mount it on top without falling backward? Or is that what happened?
I don’t see how getting the bike up the ladder would be difficult, if a kid is determined enough.
Getting the bike up the ladder?
No problem.
You learn to read, to spell.
You learn to recognize the word ‘danger’ spell it, then live it, until you get smart!
Key words being “random game we thought of that day”. Kids today don’t have to use their imaginations. They plop in front of the video game, etc. and never go out and create games outside. Oh what they are missing.
We used to have this amazing rocket ship welded out of scraps at my local beach. It was welded out of long metal tubes into a giant tube of it’s own pointing almost straight up with sheet metal for the wings. My brother and I used to race up the tube (me being inside and him being ontop) and see who could go up and slide down either side of the wings fastest. Thankfully we had soft sand to land on, but it WAS dangerously close to the picnic area of the beach, so some unsuspecting tourist might have put their large coolers in the wrong places at the wrong times! XD
It got taken down a long time ago and was replaced with this corny plastic pirate ship. But thankfully the metal merry go round is still there in all its ass burning glory!
Why would they replace the merry go round? It’s not that dangerous. Still, that rocket ship sounds amazing. If they took it down because it was rusty, I can sort of understand why it needed to be taken away. But if everything was in perfect condition, they were just killjoys. And really, a pirate ship? Pirates can’t possibly beat aliens!
They replaced the merry go round at my park, because some kid, at another park, got trapped between the spinning part and the ground and was killed. So now it’s almost impossible to find them in Souther California.
-__-
This is just sad. But I’m sure that kid learned their lesson.
They haven’t replaced it (thankfully), but the old thing is starting to look its years and is sagging in some areas. Truthfully I hope they replace it with a newer merry go round before it eventually breaks, at least if they still make merry go rounds these days. I think the worst a kid could suffer on that thing is being thrown into either the wooden fence not five feet away or landing on something sharp.
I can see the pirate ship matching the beachy area, but the way it’s designed is way to puffy and safe for those of us experienced with metal play areas.
I remember me and my brother would take a rock, spin the marry-go-round as fast as we could jump on and take turns hiding the rock underneath the merry-go-round for the other to find. I always came home with sand in my hair from looking for it upside down. Now that I think about it, I’m surprised that we didn’t break our arms.
I use to love those big metal triangle shaped slides. Man those things in the summertime could give you a second degree burn if you touched it. But ‘wall’ running on them was loads of fun.
Ah, gravel! Still have wicked huge scars on my knees from the 2nd grade (1981) – the school nurse nearly fainted picking so many rocks out of my flesh. These days I would have gone to the hospital and got stitches. Good times. I also miss wooden climbing structures – splinters build character!
Nurses…peh, It’s better when they squeeze the rocks out, like little igneous pimples!
Did I just faint?
Especially fun was taking waxed paper to the big metal slide, sitting down on the paper and sliding a few times. Then, the next person would get a really slick ride – sometimes fast enough to send them off the end of the slide and onto their butt before they could get their feet under them. What fun! Plus, we used to climb up the metal leg poles on the swingset and hang by our knees from the top cross bar. And we had monkey rings in 2nd grade that would give you the best blisters on your palms.
Hoooraayy!!! I’ve been saying for years that playgrounds had lost all of the really cool stuff…. I used to get picked on for wearing long jeans all summer long, but I was the only one on the slide…lol and the gravel on our playground had broken glass and cigarette butts in it… ahh the good ol days…
We still have many of these at our local park. Though I’m too old to be allowed into that section. Unless you have a kid that wants to play inside. So once a week, I’ll borrow a some kid from the neighborhood and have fun ^_^;
Ummm… I know that doesn’t sound right but you know what I mean
I split open my chin on a metal firetruck structure on our playground and missed picture day going to to the doctor. My friend fell on a kid doing a “cherry drop” off a contraption made of metal pipes and had to spend a considerable amount of time in the hospital. We also climbed trees and dared each other to jump off of stuff. I am pretty sure kids today will still find ways to injure themselves.
My dad actually brought home condemned playground equipment for his children to play on. I love our big metal tree!!
Oh my! I SO remember the old playground equipment! Poor deprived children of today…..
And if I’m not mistaken, the piece of equipment referred to in the original post was called a “Giant Stride”. At least that’s what we called it in our neck of the woods. Would be interested to know if that rings true for anyone else.
My husband’s parents actually have a giant stride in their backyard. His mom jumped on it one Thanksgiving and we were joking about taking pictures of the day Grandma died so our future children would know what she looked like. Haha.
We called them a Giant Stride as well. We also had a Witches Hat. Both were anchored in the asphalt that covered our playground. I remember only one kid getting hurt the whole time I was in grade school and that’s because he jumped off the monkey bars.
Thank you grampc – I’ve been trying to find out for years what that death machine was called
)
(PS how stoked am I that my submission made it to the front page?! I’m glad I’m not alone out there in feeling that todays kids are missing out)
I came from an era where playground equipment was completely unsafe, but it taught kids to play safe. Nowadays parents are so insanely paranoid about wrapping their children in bubble-wrap to protect them, that the kids end up going elsewhere to find excitement. Often it means joining a gang, or committing some kind of crime. Those are really the only ‘exciting’ things left for kids to do nowadays, since playgrounds are boring and most sports complexes won’t even let you in without the proper safety equipment.
Thank the government and the lawyers for stepping in and saving the incompetent parents from having to raise their own kids for the mess we’re in now.
Litigious, over-protective, avaricious parents are part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that parents are so harsh toward other parents. Like, accusing people of neglect if they’re not attending every ballet class with their three-year-old. Parents these days are made to feel – by self-styled “experts” – that if they can keep their child from harm, they should; but that means kids spend all their time either electronically drugged or at structured and supervised activities selected by the parents. After all, the neighborhood kids might be juvenile pedophiles, or your child might get injured because you weren’t supervising her enough. That sort of thing. A friend of mine finally allowed her 10-year-old son to ride his bike a half mile to elementary school, and every day at least one parent would call and voice her concern about the “danger” this boy was in. What if he was kidnapped? What if he got run over? (On the sidewalk?) What if he got into bad company? What if he fell off his bike and he had no way to let her know? Paranoia, pure and simple, and all brought to you by the “helpful professions.”
weiner in your butt
Back when playgrounds were mini environments, where only the strong survived. If you made it to adolescense with your front teeth unchipped, and not having lost any fingers to gangrenous splinters, you were fit to carry on into adulthood. Anyone who disfigured themselves, or ran to mommy crying was cast out of the social circle, never to return. Because, really, if you couldn’t handle the playground, what chance did you have in the real world?
My god.
The outcasts became Democrats, lawyers or people that sold real estate.
Still waiting for the lawyers and Dems to get theirs!
I miss natural selection.
you sir just won.
My elementary school had this old rusty metal monstrosity. (Which, of course, was always filled with wasps! Kind of funny considering that our mascot was a Hornet.) It kind of reminded me of the one from Recess.
A few years after I left they redid the whole thing because the slide fell down in a storm. It was all big, chunky, safe, plastic. No wasps but no fun.
i’d take wasps over boredom any day
Anyone have those slides that were made of out metal tubes? Like, instead of a solid sheet of metal, it was rollers?
Oh, the torn clothes!
Oh, the broken fingers!
Oh I’ve been waiting for someone to mention this! My old elementary school (k-2nd) had that! We used to take little plastic buckets outside and haul the pea gravel up to the top of the slide then dump it down. It made a really cool noise and amused us for many a class recess. So many buttons off the seat of my pants lost!
Did you ever try to climb up one? Sometimes you could take a running start and make it without wiping out.
So sorry I’ve babbled on about this but that was my favorite piece of the playground!
Or you’d get so close to the top and slip at the last moment, raking your chin all the way down to the bottom!
Amen!
i know a modern playground that has one of these.. except rubber coated… but still pretty sweet!
oh dear god those things used to be made of win and awesome. child of the nineties here, and those things got put everywhere in Wisconsin after some kid got hurt bad climbing a slide. i used to go to a private school that advertised their engineering school out the ass. the flipside of going there as a kid was that the tube slide rollers had little to no friction on them (due to constant “repair work” by upperclassmen. and that thing was tall. by my estimate, kids go 20 down that thing to this day
I remember that one! We had to go to the super old playground to find the metal tubes slide. I’d get my hair caught in it along with pinching my fingers several times. Difficult to find such joy anywhere else in the world.
The “safe” playgrounds can be dangerous, too: our elementary school playground had one of those plastic spiral slides, and the cool way to slide down it was to sit on the outside edge. One day I leaned too far back and fell from the very top. ^^; I still don’t know how I didn’t break my spine…
Kids are rubber, they don’t break they bend and bounce. ^^
Plus, they have no idea what a deductible is!
I loved this stuff! We had the playground at school that was made of these giant metal contraptions and most of it was over concrete. There was a merry go round (puke) that was on a grassy knoll of sorts. My friend actually had this huge metal monkey bar contraption in her yard and I jumped from way up high and almost bit my tongue off. It bled forever. Classic!
I totally did the “OH MY GOD!” thing when I saw this picture. I remember this from my kindergarden days, and it makes me so happy to see it up on this page.
My school had an epic wooden fortress thing, complete with drawbridge. I mashed my toe in said drawbridge and it hurt like heckfire because I’d actually burned the same toe the night before ON A LIGHTBULB. Yes, I AM talented, thanks for asking!
The playground was just dirt, but there were a lot of roots that stuck up an inch or so, and I was hanging the toe of my shoe on one and faceplanting. Once I tripped on the root, skinned my knee, went inside for a bandaid, came back out, tripped over the same foot and skinned the same knee! Win!
The same ROOT, not FOOT. Not only am I clumsy, I’m also an idiot.
Not really, We all have problems with gravity.
All my friends are having kids now. Those kids will never know the joy of impending doom while falling several feet from a set of slightly rusted monkey bars, or the joy of sending your friends flying off a chains-and-tire swing.
When I got older, I used to joke about how these combination playground/death traps were adults’ way of weeding out the stupid kids. I believe it as a fact now. I really think that these playgrounds should be brought back. Y’know, getting rid of the real dummy kids before their parents get too attached.
I was from kind of a poor town and ever our dangerous equipment was even more dangerous than some. I remember we had these horses on giant springs and you would just sit on the horse and rock back and forth really hard. Then you were immediately taken in for a complementary tetanus shot. It was actually actually kind of lame, but some of the horses had tighter spring than others. The loose ones would bend backward and forward really far.
We also had this rusty old stage coach thing with bars. The bars were too far apart to be monkey bars. I still don’t understand the point except to sit in it or climb on top and fall to your doom.
I LOVED those horses on springs. Especially cheating an almost certain death by rocking sideways instead of forward and back.
My old school back in Chicago had metal playground equipment set in asphalt. I’d ruin at least two pairs of pants every month falling off monkey bars. They had to haul me off to the hospital once when I did a face plant off the swings. Ah, memories.
A wooden playground was built for the local elementary school by volunteers (my whole family worked on it) when I was in 1st grade. This past year, it was torn down due to arsenic used in pressure treating the wood.
There was so little arsenic in the wood that you would have to suck on it for 6 days straight to get enough to even make you sick, much less kill you.
They tore it down anyways, and built a stupid metal one that nobody likes.
lol, my old school had one of those playgrounds. i was born in the early nineties, so i’ve no idea if i’m on the same level as every one else here. but yeah, i remember all that wood and metal, and some kids drew on the interior of it, keeping an archive of names and couples and whatever profanity they learned. and i definitely remember burning my bum on the metal slide. one time, when i found the courage to try out the jungle gym and climb on the underside of it, one kid stepped on my fingers, and i faceplanted right on the woodchips. my teacher took me inside and cleaned me up inside the girl’s bathroom. crazy.
That’s one fo the reasons I was so sad to see mine go. Me and my friend Tom and both carved out names on topof one of the highest wooden peices.
My first school had an awesome concrete fort in gravel that must have caused a fair few scraps throughout the years (though I just liked sitting in the “window” for some reason). Sadly it was taken away just after I left.
The slightly bigger school had a huge metal thing on concrete that I seem to remember crawling across the top of (despite stories of my cousin breaking his arm on something similar), though that didn’t last very long either. But then my school at that time was getting very much against “dangerous” activities – I remember being sent to see the headmaster because we were playing ’stuck in the mud’ (basically ‘it’ but if you were caught you had to stand with your arms out and legs apart and someone would free you by crawling through your legs) and that was banned for being too dangerous.
How in the heck is “Tiggi-tunnel” dangerous? Unless you attempt to stand up whilst crawling under a boy… but that’s just a little painful, it’s not dangerous!
Why does this sound a little like page 24 of the Kama Sutra??
I watched the municipal workers building the playground in the mid 60’s. I think they ran the garbage trucks the rest of the time. I was intrigued that they were inserting the screws in the merry go round with a HAMMER. Not only did we have deadly equipment (monkey bars, chin up bars, scary climbing stuff, flesh searing slides) but we got to watch it all self-destruct before Nixon’s second term. By then, the playground smelled like pee and was full of dopers.
Oh my goddd…yeah we had a metal dinosaur built in our playground when I was in 3rd grade. We never thought it was dangerous. All you did was walk up the dinosaur’s tail on these thin metal bars, and once you got close to his head, you could jump off. When it was first built, there was a huge line of kids that stetched from the dinosaur in the soccer field all the wal to the wall. (You know, where you would stand if you were bad.)
Afterwards it wasn’t a big deal, and you could just sit on it all day, and no one would bug you. Still, I was sad when the school deemed it dangerous, and tore it down 5 years later. Our playground’s sand and mulch was also replaced by that wierd tire crap. I mean, what the hell?
Did you weird tire crap still have tiny bits of METAL in it? I’m sorry, I’d rather land on rocks than those evil stabby little bits of tire metal. ><
OH, come on! Steel wires are easier to pull out of young skin, you could do it yourself, hence more time on the playground and less time bawling with mom at your knees leaving broken splinters behind.
Love you mom, but the kids ARE waiting!
tire crap? their using tires to make it safer? HERESY! when i was in elementary school the tires WERE the play equipment (cut to reminiscing of crawling through a tire tunnel
My playground was a mixture of wood, plastic and metal. It wasn’t bad compared to playgrounds now, but there used to be better ones around. I remember climbing to the top of the big monkey bars and crawling across and then going down the big fireman’s pole; I always felt so brave, lol.
Another playground I went to all the time has this massive metal slide; it felt like it was fifty feet tall when I was little. We never went down it properly. We always would climb the slide and slide down one of the supporting poles. It was awesome.
and this other wooden playground… It was HUGE and had so many secret passageways and hidey-holes. Wonderful.
whuaaaaaa, are you talking about Loudonville???? cuz we had a metal dino too, “stanley stegosaurous” and thats how the line DID stretch…. MEMORIES!!!!!
i miss this so much. i remember having competitions with my friends to see who could stand barefoot on a metal slide in the middle of the day the longest. lol!
That made me laugh!
I remember that too… Fun times fun times…..
my favorite playground ever just got bulldozed today, it had those painful octagons of death (and fun) and it had a spinny-wheel thing (a merry go round whose bolts were so bad that it bounced) and tons of wooden things that could kil and maim you in seconds. Good times
it had those painful octagons of death (and fun)
—————————–
I went to a Catholic school and we didn’t have any cool playground equipment…. We didn’t have the Octagon of Death and Fun-so we had to go sit under the baseball bleachers to see the girl’s underwear.
If I ever date again, I am going to DEMAND my date wear the white or pink granny undies to the ball park.
I love football, but having the cheerleaders expose themselves willingly, ain’t no fun!
Remember on the swings when someone would push you so high that they would then run underneath you on the upswing? I miss the swings. Of course, we had gravel under the swings, and one time a friend jumped and gashed his arm open on a broken beer bottle. And my little second-grade self picked him up, applied direct pressure to the wound that was bigger than my hand, and dragged him over to the teacher. Then I got bawled out for touching his blood. Early nineties, fear of AIDS… That was one time I got fussed at by a teacher, and my mother who is a nurse just smiled and bought me ice cream. Not only did we learn how not to be pansies when we removed skin on monkey bars or slides, but we learned that if there wasn’t enough blood to make you stop playing, it wasn’t a big deal. Now, they get a splinter, and everyone expects you to call the paramedics.
Yeah, that was my mom’s safety policy, I broke my nose by slamming into a three while roller skating and no blood, no fuss, until a year later that my father asked the doctor why I had a weir scar bone thingy on my nose. lol, the memories. I also skinned my both my knes at my school’s playground, some kid trew sand on the asfalt and the rest is history. We had monkey bars at our school, and every year at least one kid was injured on them, and they still stand today. They only got the plastic stuff for the little kindergarten kids. I was growing up while parents were increasingly getting paranoid, including my mom. I would slamm into things, and nobody cared, my younger brother slammed into wall once and she took him to a neurologist. lol
I miss those days when being a kid ment climbing into trees, to the roof, jumping from the swings, burning yourself on the slide and getting blisters on the mokey bars…….
Before being sent off to military base schools in the very early eighties, I spent one year at a public school. They had a fort made into the dirt, with tunnels through out. I was always terrified of going into it, afraid it would collapse around me as there was at least four more feet of dirt above you in tiers. Also was the old ‘MadMax beyond Thunderdome’ contraption, lots of bars welded into triangles, and those triangles making a half sphere planted in the ground. Only the ‘cool’ kids got on that, and all the way at the top to drop rocks on the kids below. Wood chips were every where, but they were smushed into obidience and never gave a splinter to anyone. ahh the memories….
I remember being in elementary school 2nd grade in the early 90’s and the middle schoolers had this HUGE, tall metal slide with a large drop at the end to the hard ground underneath it. Us elementary kids weren’t allowed to be on it because of the danger, but i decided i wanted to try and i busted my butt on the drop and got detention for trying it
OMG, although my 3 year old can manage to fall from the “stuff”, I still wish he had some of the cool stuff we got to play on.
In a town nearby us (Morrinsville, NZ), they had an old fighter jet you could play on and in, we LOVED it. It got pretty hot in summer and had many number of jagged things on it, but you could pretend to fly, run along the wings, and was way better than anything else in the park.
We usually had grass to land on…but in the hot NZ summer that turned into concrete.
Kids will find a way to find danger whereever, I remember one kid at school climbing up a flag pole and sliding down…and leaving one testicle behind on the hool think to tie the cord…ouch
Poor dude wasn’t as nutty afterwards. eh?
I need to see if my old elementary school still has its dangerous equipment
Loved the Dangerous playground!!!!
There was a huge wood and mettle playground near my home.
My favorite part was the ~30ft tall rope “spider web” pyramid thing (central pole, ropes coming off it, cross ropes between them). It was terrifying and exhilarating to climb. I think I was 7ish when I reached the top for the first time. Proudest moment of my life! I cried when they tore that thing down
“There was a huge wood and mettle playground near my home.”
Most epic spelling fail of the month!
At least I am the best at something
Congratulations!
There were always 10 and 12 year olds on my playground.
I don’t see what attraction the plastic crap that is now common whould have for anyone over 5.
We had the pictured…thing…on our playground in elementary school. In 2nd grade, I remember being on it, towards the head, and some kid bumped me and I held onto those “antenna” and didn’t fall. I was wearing gloves with “leather” soles, and I remember thinking I would’ve fallen except for those gloves with the grip.
I loved the old see saws that you could get the ‘bumps’ on, this was what me and my friends called it when u got enough momentum going that when you went up your bum left the seat and you could only stay on my holding onto the bar for dear life, it always gave me the hiccups! One time I wasn’t holding the bar but had my legs wrapped round the see saw, I came off the seat and swiveled right round so my head was going towards the ground, if my friend hadn’t quickly jumped off I would have cracked my head open, I never did that again! The new see saws are designed so that u can’t really get any momentum going, boooo!
New equipment brings dangers too, when they put swings in with child bars I got in one and got stuck because I was far too big (think I was about 8), really panicked me and I hurt myself struggling out off it!
I got stuck on one too (I think I was about 8 aswell) I didn’t hurt myself getting my leggs out, but then I stood up and tried to step out. The damn thing turned backwards and I totally faceplanted into the gravel… ouch
my friend had one of those rusty metal teeter totters that was about 5 feet tall at the center pivot point, and was probably built around 1970 or something. It had really long bars on it, so you could probably go about 8 or 9 feet into the air. The seats were almost completely rusted through, so you had the opportunity to get not only massive head trauma from falling off, but also needing a tetanus shot on your ass from the rusty iron. None of this wimpy plastic or 4 foot lift maximum like there is today.
My primary school had a MASSIVE 3 story playground, that we called the Adventure playground, because every day was an Adventure.
Okay, it may have seemed Massive when you’re 8 years old. But serioulsy in my minds eye it was HUGE. It was wooden, underneath was not concrete, or woodchips, but Sand and Dirt. There was a sliding pole, a Giant slide which after many slides, a hole had a appeared in the dirt which after it rained would fill with water, Tyres all tied together to form a giant ladder. There were monkey bars, I think. Looking back I can hardly remember all the details. Because after I left the school, they tore it down, and replaced it with classrooms. They don’t have a playground at that school anymore. They only have the tennis courts and the field. They didn’t even replace it with a plastic playground. Looking at the school now, they replaced the small fences with a massively tall ones. It actually is starting to look like a correctional facility rather than a school for small children.
We had this thing called an “ocean wave”
it was a 20ft high upside down cone on a pole
you stood or sat around the bottom of the cone
then you ran in a circle and pumped and got it spinning and rocking
you could easily get 8 feet in the air…
it terrified me cause the bigger kids would crash it and try to throw the little ones off… but if you had a trustable group, it was better than any roller coaster….
I don’t think we ever killed anyone
I looked it up,
some people might call it a “Witches hat”
Big Toy ftw. The school I went to had an epic playground, but now it’s been replaced with one of those cheesy plastic ones.
LOL, I was a camp counselor at a local park for pre and kinder kids.
I had the cutest kid on the planet assigned to me and she was really fun to care for.
We were out on the playground and I was pushing her on the swings when
something made me look up at the buckle/chain link that held the swing to the cross pole. No sooner than I had done that, the effing thing broke and the kid did a faceplant in the sand.
She jumped up and ran to the head counselor – With me in pursuit- I thought she was really hurt, but, she was just bruised and scared. She said that I ‘pushed’ her, but thank god the chain broke.
I used to have a pedal car that had a wooden seat init. The seat had split and both pieces would move independently as I rode around in it.
One day I was wearing a pair of swim trunks, with the nylon mesh undies built in, while I was ‘riding dirty’.
During one mad dash, the crack splits just enough to pinch my scrote in the space between boards.
I could not get my feet to the ground to relieve the pressure on the wood so I could get loose. I managed to get a foot on the ground and pulled my pinched parts out of the way.
Now when I hear the stories about crazy women committing mayhem on sleeping male genitals, I tip my hat to them and remember my close enounter with Christine, the pinching pedal car!
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, when I was in elementary school, my favorite piece of playground equipment was a big metal rabbit swing. The rabbit had a saddle, and foot bars, and a metal pump bar. So you sat in the saddle and pumped until it felt like you were flying on your very own Falcor. I just googled it, and apparently this type of swing was recalled, not because kids were falling off and getting hurt, but because kids were colliding with the moving swings and losing. Hi – never walk along the target-end of an archery range, never walk into a big metal moving swing!
OMG, THis story is lore, not really related to any piece of playground equipment, but it did happen at the Jr. High/Middle School I went to.
It was funny until my sis dated the brother of the kid it happened to!
Above the double doors leading out from the boy’s gym was the ever present EXIT sign, one that was recessed flush into the wall. The cool thing to do when you walked out from the locker room was to jump up, slap the sign and go to the next class. I guess it’s is a type of game?
As time went on, the green plastic under the steel plate that had the EXIT letters cut into it was broken. That left the outline of the sign and a tangle of wires and the flourescent bulb inside.
One day this kid jumps up, hits the ‘X’ and the pointy part of the letter outline-
\ \/ /
/ /\ \ <right there -catches the ring he is wearing and rips it off!
That was the story that, to this day, is the story that kids tell to freak each other out. I heard later on they put a cage over the sign to keep it form happening again.
I am pretty tall and still avoid reaching up and slapping exit signs to this day!
It wouldn’t do any good, I still have a scar on my hand from jumping into a light cage in PE.
I was alwayes realy tall for my age and Queen of the Can You Jump and Slap This? game…. To this day I have a hard time walking through door ways with metal frames and not hopping to slapp it with my rings.
Natural Selection favors us tall folks.
We can see danger long before our shorter friends can. Like the stray Pit Bull that wandered onto the school playground during recess?
I remember in elementary school we seriously just had a huge metal tower. It was about a story and a half tall and mostly was used to jump straight off the top of. I’m surprised that no one ever died on the thing… I’m not surprised that they tore it down.
I swear, this site is killing me…..
I heard were some toy museum made ‘the stick’ as the best toy ever invented.
What about the rock fights around the equipment? Somehow you got the kids you didn’t like to be the ‘Germans’, You got to be GI Joe and then tried to hide behind the metal poles that held everything up while throwing ‘hand grenades’ at the enemy positions
I “grew up” during the VN war, so we had to couldn’t use the Viet Cong as the enemy. The stupid hippie movement would not let us.
My elementary school, for the first few years, had a playground made out of tires. YES. TIRES. You’d come off of playing on it, every part of you black and dirty…also, every swear word you could think of was written on the tires with white out by the fifth graders. Hornets used to build nests inside the tires, too! Fun.
The one later on was slightly safer, but not by much. No one was really allowed to play on it, either.
The playgrounds in the park were all made of wood. I miss sitting under one of those wood playgrounds with my Indian in the Cupboard books, woodchips getting up your scooter skirt…
The playground at the beachfront by my house was great, too. All metal, all peeling red and yellow paint…ironically, where this playground used to be just got closed off by the EPA for having high levels of lead. Which came first, the playground or the lead?
There was this thing at the my campground where the whole point was to run around the playform really fast whille holding the bars and jump on. The problem was that the playground was all sand so the platform was always sandy.
You’d jump on an either:
A) Slip off and scratch your body all over because of the sand before knocking your chin the last second.
B) Fly off at a hundred miles per hour and crash into a tree!
Sure, that stuff looks dangerous, but remember, we were driving around in cars fueled with leaded fuel, and going home to houses painted with lead paint. In school we’d play with mercury with our bare hands. Oh, and we fully expected to be incinerated by Russian nuclear missiles. We laughed in the face of danger, every day of our childhood. Dangerous playground equipment? Pah!
The only thing that really wasn’t dangerous was those effing Russian nukes. It was the POS delivery systems that kept them from working, That and the soldiers protecting the Fulda Gap.
Pu$$ies.
I agree. One of the hallmark experiences of being a child is getting hurt and learning that certain actions are dangerous and stupid. Why are we spending so much time and effort protecting children from being children? Let them scrape knees, I say! Let them break bones! Misfortune makes for good storytelling, and yet we seem to be fighting tooth and nail to bring up our children as unscathed, pristine, boring little milksops. Bring back the metal swirly slides!!!!!
(Spoken from an ex-school teacher).
…and then these sheltered kids grow up, get a videocamera and paste tapes of themselves all over YouTube doing stupid stunts everyone else learned NOT to do in grade school! ^^
Dude,
I LOVE THE shows where they have the skateboarders crack shin, leg, arm and head on concrete.
Here’s the deal. Steps, Rail, Steps, Rail……If you tuck your board under arm and walk down the steps you will not fall off the rail and put your teeth thru you lips, get that groovy titanium plate in you skull or have any of the reconstructive facial surgeries that make you look like you have had Botox injected.
LOL, now the stupid arse parents encourage the kids to do stupid shiat like that so they can make money on their careers as sno boarders, skaters and thrill seekers. Ask Jeremy Lusk’s parents.
Last point? What does a 30 year old ex-skatebaorder do for the next 45 years?
He becomes the capitalist that sells you kid a ‘deathboard’ and all the over priced apparel!
And we wonder why today’s children are obese, there wouldn’t be such an epidemic if kids had cool stuff like this to play on. Rusty metal equipment, wooden structures that wasps and bees made homes on, searing hot slides. Good times, good times.
Searing hot slides!
Would melt that Ass Fat off the chubby little bees turds!
Plus the cardio they would get running from pissed off insects?:0
The younger kids playground at my old elementary school was all metal. We had the tiny gravel rocks to land in. Best was if you fell off the merry-go-round you’d get like road burn from bouncing off the gravel and ultimately would end up in the nurse’s office with her tweezers picking pieces of rock out of your skinned knee. We had a monkey bar set with giant tires attached to the side that was always too overpopulated. I’m surprised that thing never fell over. a few kids fell off it and got seriously hurt but nothing was ever done.
The older kids playground at that same school had more metal swings and a metal slide with three bumps to go over that was actually taller than the school building. if you climbed up there on a windy day the thing actually swayed. That thing was what epic wins are made of. I recently moved back to the neighborhood and that playground is literally just plastic swings now. NOTHING on there. My heart breaks for those kids.
EVERYONE? Please tell me the truth.
When you are “doing the nasty” don’t you get into positions and look at the sections of your body, scarred years ago by playground accidents and tell yourself, “THAT REALLY HURT!”
Fun and kinky, in that S&M way!!!!
Nah… but I do make up wild stories about my playground scars. ^^
Chicks dig scars.
Not only were there stuff like this at my local playground when I was little, there was also glass all over the ground… I’m glad it’s been changed now.
At the country park near where I live in Kent we still have wood chips, monkey bars, big nets we can climb, huge slides and awesome basket swings
they have made adult sized play things it is awesome. The last time I went with friends we spent hours on these basket swings pushing so hard that we ended up perpendicular to the ground giggling like we were five when really we are all past twenty. They also have this awesome big wooden structure that is basically loads of logs fixed together which rises quite high above the ground we had a race to the top and my sister fell off half way.
vive la danger
Our elementary school had a tire swing that did not have enough space around it. It was an everyday occurance for 3 different kids to smack their heads on the metal support beams, and nobody ever batted an eye.
Our town had ALL the merry-go-rounds removed from the public schools the year I went off to middle school. Nothing happened there specifically, but probably the same fear from the kid being killed by one. (just as well, I remember doing some pretty ballsy tricks on that merry-go-round)
HEHEHE,
The Scary Go Round!!!!
Ballsy?
Like standing on the center post and daring your friends to get it going fast enough to knock you off? Or getting that emmeffer going while you lay down with your head hanging off the edge, just to see if you could drag your hair in the sand? Or timing a jump on to it while it spun at Mach 2?
Adrenaline, It’s not just for kids!
Our playground had real metal monkey bars. Also another metal thing like you might have in an army boot camp. You would climb up, hang from the bars and try to cross over. We also had a hill that was the perfect height and angle for playing king of the hill. That’s right. Little kids grabbing and throwing each other down a steep hill while one teacher placidly watched us do it. I never knew how awesome we had it.
OMG I remember this stuff! I had so much fun, had my fair share of scrapes and bruises – but no broken bones, needless to say. I did chip a tooth playing baseball, though.
The school playground in San Diego where I went for kindergarten and about a month and a half of 1st grade – no wood chips, no sand, no gravel…it was ASPHALT, and a hard rubber base at the bottom of anything that was used.
Other playgrounds – merry-go-round, swings, slides, monkey bars, the works. Now with all that stuff either gone or replaced by “safe” plastic imitations and rubber shreds, they wonder why most kids are getting obese? I miss the days where if any kid got hurt, they were told to “walk it off”.
Plastic Radio Flyer Wagons? SUCK!!!!!!
There is a school up the street that has a kinder care section. They have the EFFING BADDEST tricycles made of STEEL and RUBBER. I would love to have one, just to have one. These things will last well past 2030. They are the kind of brutal, industrial toys that will maim, chip, slice, maul and rent that tender flesh on the playground.
Back in the day? If mom or dad ever backed over this model, you would have to jack the car up, remove the trike, then call over to the auto repair shop to get an estimate for a new bumper, exhaust and torn brake lines. Upon getting the news? You beat the shiat out of your sniveling kid for leaving it in the driveway.
Today?
You apologize to the child, grab a dustpan, sweep up the mess, hug the brat,
dump the little poly shards into the trash, apologize again, then RUN to Toys ‘R’ Us and left him pick out anything they wanted.
Wussies.
LOL i loved these the 3 that were still up cuz they forgot to rip them down
Ours was the tire teepee. As a matter of fact anything to do with tires back then was dangerous.
They are still dangerous for us adults.
Blow out a radial on the freeway!;)
i remember the daycare i stayed at after school in second and thrid grade had every single one of the thing listed in the description. my favorite ones were the barrels held up mby posts that you could climb in a d hide, or maybe read. i HATED the merry-g-rounds though. i remember tripping over a tree root, and falling head first onto the rusty metal edge fo that evil thing. i needed an x-ray and a few stiches. but you know what? i’d take an almost-beating from a hunk of metal than have my (eventual) kids never get hurt at all. it builds character, which is something today’s over-sheltered, molly-codled kids don’t sem to have.
We still have lots of these in Poland
But there are more and more wooden ones 
At my elementary school in the late 80’s/ early 90’s we had a playground that was built on top of an old CONCRETE parking lot. There was tons of old post- 60’s equipment that, after 20 years in the florida elements, were all either extremely rusty or sharp from rust. we had the 12 foot tall wall of chained together tires, which I fell off once, from the very top to the concrete floor, got the wind knocked out, and freaked out because I thought I broke my lungs. There was also a splintery old fiberglass boat to get you hands full of glass splinters. We also had a 2-story house-type jungle gym where sometimes we’d find a sleeping hobo or some used condoms (we thought they were balloons) and sometimes a stray cat (I caught one once and stuffed it in my backpack since I didn’t have pets). There were always teeth under the monkey bars, so we scared the 1st graders into thinking the tooth fairy lived under the trailers next to the bars. I miss the old dangerous playgrounds of my youth.
it’s just not right anymore…rounded corners, rubber floors, 2 ft tall bars…and faux plastic wood and smooth metal painted with heat resistant paint…where’s the slide that gives you third degree burns while sliding down at 80mph…soon everything is going to be bubbled wrapped and padded to the enth degree…
Agree completely. They took the cool rocket down in my park as a little girl because they said it was unsafe. Here is the article:
http://www.minneapolisparks.org/default.asp?PageID=4&parkid=280
Two words. Lawn Darts.
yessssssss.
Just did an inventory and a soul search on my childhood playgrounds.
NO wonder I wanted to climb on shiat.
I went to a catholic school whose playground consisted of four tether ball courts, six basketball courts, all on concrete, toss in some four square and hop scotch areas, a dirt baseball diamond and another small grass area.
The best action was trying to play sports in Emmeffing uniform pants and white shirts. HAHAHA my friend Brian and I were trying to hit the seagulls with rocks
on the area beyond the baseball diamond. We were evil little effers-to get the gulls close, we’d salt the grass with potato chips. We’d also toss our lunch out, right after walking around with a half sandwich in one hand and picking up rocks with the other.
We were chucking rocks at the birds when this one drops a deuce on his WHITE SHIRT. Seagull crap is the most vile element know to man, It’s a Jackson Pollak painting done with real feces!
Sorry, I digress……playing sports in dressed like a scientist really sucks willy!
What does sand taste like?
Bwahahahhahhahaha,
Let’s compare notes!
that would be a maypole. more fun w/ colored cloth instead of chains (medieval contraption)
What I miss the most were the tall playground swingsets–the ones that had anywhere from 10-15 feet of chain (or more!) between the seat and the top bar. First of all, it was a genuine workout to get one of those swings *really* going, and once you got yourself as high as you could go, it was the next best thing to flying as you went back and forth through great, long arcs.
Nowadays, even the “big kids” swing sets are puny beyond belief–I’ve seen parents/older siblings of children on the playground who are actually taller than the swingset! How fun can it be to ride on a swing that only takes a second or so to complete a back-to-front arc?
Another thing I remember from the swingsets of yesteryear–who else did this? You and a friend sat in a side-by-side pair of swings, then turned to face each other and interlocked your legs. Then you had either the tallest kid on the playground or a willing teacher* pull you back as far they could and let go, and then give an occasional push to keep you going. You not only went forward and back in the swings’ arc, but you started twisting from side to side as you went. Ah, memories….
(*Oh yeah, remember when, instead of sitting off to the side and “supervising” recess, teachers (as in other than gym teachers) actually went out and did fun things with the kids? Pushing them on the swings? Leading games of Red Rover or something? Now everyone’s so scared that *any* teacher is going to molest their kids or some such that teachers almost have to maintain a distance or be seen as “inappropriate”. Sad, isn’t it?)
i no, the rubber crap sucks
there should be an attachment to this. “when doctors remembered who you were, without looking at a chart or files”…i was in the hospital soooo many times from falling off of monkey bars and jungle gyms, onto black top…it was awesome, it was get in the room, ” LOOK WHO’S HERE!” stitches/casts/resetting bones/doctor listening to you retell your epic journey to the top of the bars, then lollipops…now you get lucky if the doc even looks at you for more than two seconds….sad.
Not too long ago, whenever we’d call my kids doctor on the weekend, his first question was “What has Trainwreck done today.” Trainwreck was his pet name for my younger son.
Danger Boy. That’s my son’s other name, Danger Boy.
You know how people measure their kids’ height over the years by making a mark on a wall? With my son, we did it by observing his face, because he managed to run into a piece of furniture (more than once) and mark himself – once around eye-level and then the next time it was at his jaw-line (hey, at least he was growing, right?).
I played in all the ‘unsafe’ playgrounds as a kid, even the ones with no sand under them and never got seriously hurt. I’ve never broken a bone, never needed to have stitches. Almost no one I know has ever really hurt themselves on playgrounds. Though I did learn how it felt to have all the air knocked out me after jumping off some swings. Ah… Good times.
The boys always used to do the most awesome things on the swings, like doing flips off them. Now kids won’t even jump off a swing because they are too scared.
Growing up in the 90’s, we had only a few short years of metal and wooden playgrounds before the council came and replaced them all with plastic equipment- except one.
Council were lazy, and simply dumped all the metal and dangerous equipment to a park outside town
Our parents would drop us off in the morning and pick us up when the streetlights turned on. My best friend broke her arm twice callig off the metal monkey bars, and i still have a burn on my leg from the edge of a giant slide.
The park also had camel rides once a month, for some reason?
Miss those days.
*falling, not callig
I remember that our school had a fort thing, 5 stories high and a ultra epic slide
and smaller slides. there where 2 ( or 3 if you what to be super man) way of getting there. 1 is the spider web, second is that rope tower thing that you see at the end of that chase scene in “shark boy and lava girl” only more of a zig zag. and then today i whent to a park. no epic slids. no wobboly bridge. and i was taller than the swing set! (trust me, i am short) i say brigh back the old ones and make then out of another matirial that plastic or metal, WOOD! sometimes it give you splinters, but its not booring like plasic or scorcing like metal!
My kid’s playground had wood, but then they took it down and put in a all-plastic one.
the problem is that people would sue other for anything. ” my child got a splinter!?! i shall sue you!!” or ” you are not my friend!?!?! i shall sue you!!” i can get sueing for things like a near death acsident, but there needs to be a limit. like a buglar can sue if they get hurt in a house that they are robbing. >_>;
we had two separate playgrounds: one for the older kids and one for the younger kids. The one for the older kids consisted of this huge arch made of wood. It looked like a big ladder bent in an upside-down U-shape. Under the arch was another U made of wood, but this one was a swing. The challenge was when a bunch of kids were swinging on the bottom and causing the whole contraption to sway, to climb over the top. The higher you went on the arch, the further apart the wooden logs were and someone could easily fall through them. I never made it over; i was too scared. Eventually some girl dislocated her shoulder on the thing and they replaced it with a plastic playground, but by that time, i was out of elementary school.
The playground at one of the parks near where I live still has one of those things in the picture.
I would vote this up a million times if I could. I’m sick of the way kids are coddled these days. In 30 years the country is going to be run by a pack of pantywaisted momma’s-boys who barely know how to wipe their own ass, let alone take (or give) an ass-kicking.
Not only that, a growing number of 30+ old people are still living at home and letting their parents foot the bills. Extended adolescence. They don’t want to grow up, and their parents whine but secretly don’t want their kids to grow up, so they enable them. So when the parents move into nursing homes or die, not only will their kids never visit them, but they (the kids) will have a much harder time adjusting to adulthood.
I also read that parents have a huge influence on their kids, but not necessarily of the sort that “experts” say we do. Like, parents have been focusing on “increasing their child’s self esteem” and trying to avoid anything competitive (no need to learn sportsmanship or graceful defeat), critical, negative (maybe that’s why playgrounds are so wimpy now), and so on…. They’ve been boosting self-esteem since the 80s, and what do we have? Certainly not more civility. We have a lot of rude, self-centered, perpetual adolescents with an enormous sense of entitlement and a minuscule sense of duty or obligation. Not everyone is like that, though, but enough to be noticeable. We’re all about “empowering” people (i.e. giving it to them), but don’t want to let them alone to work and discover their own power.
p.s. I was born in 1980 but I am not like those other people.
And I miss the wood and metal playgrounds with the packed earth “floors.” I remember wood castles and tall metal slides; chain ladders, sliding poles, jungle gyms, monkey bars, see-saws/teeter-totters (none of these springy things), merry-go-rounds, tether balls, dodge ball, tag, Red Rover….. So many things gotten rid of because someone might get hurt, physically or emotionally. I wasn’t popular or athletic as a child, and no, gym wasn’t fun much of the time. But I survived. And at some point, I decided to actually defy expectations and to try kicking the ball out of the court – and I came close to doing it, too! So, I decided to ‘fight back,’ and found great strength and courage through that, which is what competition is all about.
Final note – my favorite swings were the flat, hard plastic boards that you could stand on. I nearly fell off a few times, which was scary, but generally I didn’t…. The soft plastic swings pinch into your hips – they’re designed to keep you from falling out of the swing, but they end up just hurting. … At my old college, every year the students would request a swing set be installed, a way to play and work off some stress. Every year the request was denied, for “safety” (i.e. liability) reasons. And this was for college students.
I loved the tire swings… I remember the tires being so old and flat that if you sat on them a certain way it would pinch your legs and hurt like crazy. But all in good fun.
AMEN!!!!
You know how some playgrounds have those wood chips? Those were dangerous themselves! If you fell, you would just get scraped up by those woodchips more than the fall, they were terrible, plus my brother was allergic to molds and they were huge mold collectors even those “hypo-allergenic” ones…
Yup, wood chips would take perfectly safe playground equipment and make it a death trap.
I guess my school was wimpy. We had large, pointy woodchips. I can’t tell you how many times I got splinters which then broke off into teeny tiny splinters that were impossible to get out and which eventually found their way completely into your skin and began to fester. It was great fun to hunt for the biggest woodchips around and then stab your friends with them. :3
The playground I take my kids to has a tall rearing horse (in front of a monkey bar stagecoach). It’s full of that dangerous/fun stuff. People from all over come here for the playground (and we’re a small town in the middle of nowhere).
LOLOLOL,
You better find a way to hide your identity, Homeland Security will track you down for admitting you endanger your children.
So,
Like what is the difference between taking your kid to a ‘dangerous’ playground and giving them an AK/AKS/AKM rifle and telling them to kill infidels? Here we are trying to keep kids from killing themselves, Over there?
They are teaching kids to kill each other!
MAybe we should ship old playground equipment overseas and let THOSE parents deal with it?
Wow, rubber chips… I had gravel too, only it used to be just grass… which was SO much softer and less painful to fall on than gravel. Who decided to change it?
What does sand feel like in between your eyeball and eye lid?
Sand is basically fine powder and little rocks.
The powder dries out the surface of you eyeball, then the little rocks polish everything else.
You aleays knew who your friends were after a face full of play ground sand.
They stopped laughing long enough to get you to the drinking fountain.
Really? Rubber chips? A majority of playgrounds in my area have either woodchips or sand, or nothing except for some rubbery floor thing or sand.
Still, no matter how “safe” the playground may be, it will always be dangerous with woodchips and I doubt it will change anytime soon since many adults fail to realize how dangerous they really are!
I love danger though, it’s fun showing off your bruises and scars!
Hehe, my boyfriend turned his nose into a pancake falling off one of those slides. We joke that when we have kids, we’ll know the people who are making stuff up if they say ‘oh he has your nose Andrew!’
He got it fixed enough to breathe, and then two or three years ago he had plastic surgery to make it look normal. But because he was only 5 or so when he smashed it, we’ll never know what his nose was supposed to look like!
No playground equipment is safe schools should ban any playtime and make school even less fun. Sit and learn all day. No naptime either.
Pretty much any and all outdoor fun activities seem to be banned now. I live in Michigan, and the BEST day on the playground was that first day we got a good heavy snow. Building snowforts, snowmen, and having massive snowball fights the entire recess. Complete with the teachers joining in!
Last year, my younger brother (9 years old) got suspended for throwing a snowball. Kids arent even allowed to TOUCH the snow outside anymore.
I don’t get it!! What is wrong with people now?
That makes me really sad Melissa
I figure this whole paranoia thing will be cyclic though… our parents let us run wild so we’ll probably let our kids run wild too. Its the generation inbetween us and them that seems to be the problem?
Either that or I’m hoping the whole lawsuit culture we currently live in gets so out of hand that it eventually implodes.
Agreed. Once us 80s kids start having kids that are of elementary school age we need to rally together to bring back the snowball fights and wood chips! And playground equipment higher than 3 feet off the ground. I don’t want my kids to grow up having a lame as hell childhood.
And the lawsuit culture imploding would be a huge improvement too. Get that generation out of our hair so we can go back to having fun again.
Hahaha, nice one!
Hey, you want fun on an elementary school playground…
We had a trampoline! The frame was 2″ steel pipe. And there was at least 8″ between the trampoline and the frame. Padding…What’s that. And we had hard packed clay, with a few boulders thrown in for good measure. After a few broken bones, the trampoline was taken away. Fortunately, they left the frame so we could use it as a balance beam. A few more broken bones, and we lost it too. Awww… Childhood.
we used to get up on the balance beam and “fence”( actually just trying to shove opponent off )
one kid was “defender” and other kids stood in a row (also on the balance beam) to be a “challenger” .if defender won he faced another challanger, if “c” won he become “d”. when you fell off you got in the back of the line and waited your turn to try again. if both fell off then next in line became “d” and there was a race on who got to the back of the line faster.
the balance beam was up to our faces when we were in 2-4 grade
Our elementary school had two playgrounds. One was old and had metal things and pea gravel, the other was newer and had metal things and bark. We used to shimmy up the swing chains or the swingset frame and pretend we were spies that had to make it all the way across the 8-swing-long top pole or we would fall to our deaths down a canyon. The reality wasn’t far off, since those swings were probably about 16 feet high. lol
Oh, and the best part was that there were little kids swinging as we climbed past them, so the swing chains would be pushing us around as we went. Good times!
Ooh, ooh!
And at our local municipal park was a giant network of wooden towers and bridges with metal things coming out of it at odd times. Tire swings, fire poles, etc. But the best part was the sand box. If you dug deep enough by one of the sides, you could get under the sandbox wall and INSIDE the wooden towers! Your parents would literally never find you if you didn’t make a lot of noise and covered the sand hole properly. It was a secret world filled with spiders and lost earrings.
A playground me and my friends used to go to had my favorite piece of equipment removed after a kid’s foot got stuck in it, causing it (the foot) to swell some.
I remember getting hurt on carousel-like thing on the same playground, and no one threw a child-like tantrum over it. I even remember using it as frequently afterwards.
To me, playground equipment was not fun to use, unless you were allowed to be a little reckless.
oh man. we had a snail version of this, then the decided it was too unsafe after 20+ years and took it down. It was super fun though, to do dangerous stunts on.
My elementary school had a bunch of old large truck (?) tires as part of its playground. I seem to recall some of them having the rusty steel radials sticking out, not to mention frequently stagnant and almost certainly disease ridden water in them.
I will admit that metal slides did burn your butt pretty bad, but anyone who tries to tell me that plastic ones are any less blistery is going to get challenged by me.
The plastic slides in my old neighborhood were not only hot, but some older kids had burned it at the bottom so it was a twisty mesh, so every time you went down it, just before you hit the bottom, your behind would get greeted by nasty bumps that more than once tore the underside of my legs up. Oy.
So, No one ever went to the drive in and crashed and burned on the swing/slide in front of the screen?
Ah yes, the colorful cotton shorts that failed to protect my bum from the boiling heat of metal slides. and my sweaty thighs making me stop and burn even more. good times, good times…
Ah yes, the all metal playground where if you had wood chips to cushion your fall, you were lucky.
I remember may a day in my childhood searing exposed flesh on metal slides and other strange looking contraptions, falling, scraping my knees, and just having a hell of a good time.
Kids these days… they’re all wimps.
I’m 19 and I sound old, but OUR CHILDHOOD WAS BETTER
I remember going on the big metal slide. Kids jackets got caught and ripped, other kids including myself would have cuts running down our legs from it. You would fly down and hope to get your feet under you before you went flying into the woodchips. They eventually took it down, we all were forced outside for them to unveil it’s replacement, a plastic ‘fun house’ with 3 short slides.
Then the metal monkey bars that only the ‘cool kids’ would swing up and wiggle themselves onto the tops of them and sit there all recess. And we had this one, I still don’t know it’s purpose, it was like a big cage, but all hollowed out with vertical and horizontal bars everywhere. Only the brave would climb to the top of it.
It’s nice that the picture is one of those caterpillar things. My own childhood nemesis! I hurt myself quite badly falling off that thing and I still remember seeing the ground rushing up as I fell.
We drove past it last week for the first time in like 8 years or so, doesn’t look so big these days! =]
Man, I’m too young! The most dangerous playground thing in my school was this big, long plastic thingy made up of all these cubes, spheres and tunnels that you could crawl through, and at one end was a monkey-bar and at the other was a huge, wide slide. In one of the cubes there was this clear-platic half-sphere bubble that you could look up out of, but it kept smashing, and a lot of girls (like me) used to sit on it in skirts so that anybody inside could look up and see their knickers.
Eventually the school tore it down completely when too many fat kids were getting stuck in it.
I had a mostly metal playground during my early elementary years, but they were soon replaced with “safer” contraptions — safer. Not as much fun.
My playground at school had gravel as well, and when we first got back from summer vacation, there were these awful plants that had grown all over the playground, through the gravel, that had these sharp round burs on them. Coming in from recess we’d have to sit there and pick the burs off our shoes, socks, and sometimes more painful places.
When I was growing up, we had a pretty extensive playground – ok, quite a bit of blacktop with kickball and basketball – not to mention the “pole ball” poles (those things could pick up some speed spinning around!) But we also had *the* playground. Metal jungle gym, two (metal) slides, poles to slide down (or climb up!) and tires everywhere to climb up, climb across as a bridge and more, another of just five tires and timbers to use as a “fort” – and a toboggan slide out back in winter. Gravel on the ground, yes – and yep, playground monitors to make sure you behaved.
Of course, in winter we’d take full advantage of the ice and snow. They probably don’t let the kids outside these days.
I went back there a few years ago and saw the “oh so safe” plastic mess they’d replaced all this with. Slide? Try barely move. And it looked about as fun as math homework. I had so many adventures on those old tires, timbers, and *real* slides that I really *can* look at it fondly. Nobody got hurt past a scraped knee (and the occasional playground scuffle.) All it took was supervision, and non-lawsuit-happy parents.
We had big connected metal ‘dishes’ with holes cut out of them to use for climbing. There were some that were set up concave, like a bowl, and some that were set up the other way, like a dome, also with holes cut out of them. They were like giant metal colanders, with foot-sized openings. What connected them was open metal tubes (essentially bars with crossbars, wound into a tube shape.)
It was one great big festival of ankle breaking and other wonderful serious injuries. Which is why I’d go read at the other end of the playground.
Our FAVORITE piece of playground equipment was always a supermarket shopping cart. It was a lion’s cage, spaceship, stagecoach and beyond all that, you could actually ride in it!
Second favorite was that wheel you could sit on and go around and around. Someone would hold onto it and run for a minute or so to get it going , then hop on with everyone else. That was many kids first experience with getting high, the dizzy spinning thing.
Yes, the pole with chains around thing is not so rare. I had one at my school in Colombo Sri Lanka (Nalanda) there was only one chain left and all the others were broken so only one kid could hang at a time on the rusty half broken chain. And the slide was pure concrete. Kids now have it so easy.
i remember haveing this tall rusty rocket ship that was taken away 10 years ago when a kid broke their leg because they jumped off the tall slide that was all tall as the ship. there went my childhood..
i remember running all over this thing we called the “sprial deck” and getting the worst splinters ever. it had stacked tires on one side you would use to climb to the top, and a huge metal sprial slide. only after returning to my hometown a few years ago, did i see that it was all gone and replaced by 4 ft tall plastic things… we had 3 huge slides right by these woods that are now gone, along with the epic slides..
not to mention at least once a day i would be stung by some kind of bee. i believe giant splinters, scraped knees, being lost in those woods, fried butt from slides, and bee stings build character that kids lack today.
And these dangerous contraptions only served to make us stronger. Half the fun was knowing that you could bust your face. Today’s kid’s are wimps.
We had metal equipment with sand that had small gravel in it. It had money bars that we would climb on the top of, lay down and hold on and flip around. We also had this thing that shaped like an octagon, it had ladders all around the outside with fireman’s poles on the inside. You could either jump off the top rung or slide down on someones head.
There was a playground I used to go to as a little kid that had some of the most shockingly dangerous equipment I have ever seen. Basically, it had wading pools. Not great for unsupervised kids but this was worse, because these pools had 4-5 foot tall sculptures of animals: dinosaurs and the like, in the pools. Basically, what happened was, you wore a bathing suit, you scraped your knees to hell trying to climb on these things (made of rough concrete), and then you were on top of it, where you really couldn’t get down safely. You can’t jump into the water, obviously, it’s 12″ deep. Climbing back down on your scraped up knees is out of the question. So you basically try to jump carefully, close to the statue, and you invariably slip in the bottom and then hit your head on the statue.
If you want to see some nice dangerous play equipment, Google “St Kilda Adventure Playground” (picture in my name link). That used to be my idea of heaven – and my dad would come up with me because most of the equipment was adult-sized. There was a ‘pirate’ ship by the water, and a castle with slides everywhere, a maze, train things, swings, swing round-a-bouts… I think most of it is gone now, but I definitely have fond memories of it. Puzzle Park was also another wonderful playground, my favourite was the ‘monorail’ (basically two flat-top carriages just big enough for a child to sit on which you needed a huge running start to get to the other end of the track).
These were both in South Australia, btw. One day I should go see how much of St Kilda is still standing…
My elementary school had seven giant cement cylinders that were painted bright colours and arranged in a figure 8. We’d climb up on them and hop from tube to tube, playing tag. The red ones at each end were safe, while the others were open for tagging.
Went to get up on one once, using the small hole that was in it to hoist myself up and went straight over the other side, smacking my jaw on the sand. Other than the odd fall off the cylinders, that’s the only injury of any of us kids that I remember.
oh the giant cement cilinders
there were some of varying sizes(diameter from 1.2 m to 5 m) on the playground slash sandbox behind my cousins house. some on they`r sides some on ends. playng tag was fun. we had no safe zone and if you fell off you become “it”
My old playground was a one-storey high wooden tower. Kids used to stand on the top “floor” and shake the entire contraption. It wobbled at least a six inches in either direction. Also, we had used tractor tires half-buried in the sand. Some of them were big enough that we could actually hide inside them (and keep warm in the winter!).
Oh, and at another playground at another school, we had pebbles instead of sand. I remember one kid fell hard and had the most amazing pebble-shaped indents in his knee. That image haunts me still.
We just had dirt and sand. My fav was the wood and metal merry go round. We’d all get on it, spin as fast as we could and then hang our heads off it and get dizzy as hell. I don’t know how many classmates got hurt on that thing, it was great fun. Now it is a parking lot. And I loved the old chain swings sets. Our fun was twisting it and then letting loose to go round and round.
In elementary school, we had the jungle-gym-like thing shaped like a spider (and a second, smaller one that vaguely resembled a crab), the regular jungle gym, monkey bars, parallel bars, a metal slide that was higher than the basketball goal, a plastic spiral slide that, on a dry day, would leave your hair sticking out all over the place until you touched somebody (or something metal), a tire on three chains so that more than one person could sit in it (no holes drilled in it because we weren’t too good to get our backsides wet back then), the plastic rings on an overhead beam, and some weird round thing that always reminded me of the front end of a steamroller. You’d grab the handles on either side and try to stay up. And all of it was held together with wood that had been there since our parents went to school, in the days before Thompson’s Water Seal, except for the big slide, the spider, the crab, the jungle gym and the metal swingset. The wood was so old it looked like it had been salvaged from a sunken ship. In fact, that was one of our more imaginative games. Oh, I almost forgot, there was a wooden platform with four springs that you could jump on and sort of make it jiggle. Of course, on the weekends when parents would bring their kids to the playground (because we didn’t have a park in our town), somebody’s dad was always bouncing on the thing, and getting it to do more than merely jiggle.
Then in third grade we were sent next door to the intermediate school, and all we had was an open field in full view of the elementary kids having a blast on their unsafe playground equipment, and a phalanx of teachers whose only job was to keep us “big kids” from joining the “little kids” in their fun. Bastards.
Among other things, my elementary school had these monkey bars, made of two round arches, ladders crossing like an X. It seemed about 10 feet tall! There were about a dozen ways to cross it, crawling, hanging, running, under, over. As you got older you were able to do different things.
But does anyone remember hanging from these things, upside down?
This was the thing to do as a girl in the upper grades.
There was room for 4 people to hang by our knees, facing out from the center of the X. It was kind of a clique. We would do counting games etc, all upside down.
The ground was always solid asphalt, the cheap, lumpy kind.
Nobody ever fell.
I hate todays crappy playgrounds with slides you can’t slide down, big wooden castle things and tire swings, and monkey gyms. Now they’re way too safe and boring.
Oh, I got so nostalgic when reading all these comments… in our neighbourhood, there was marvelous playground. Some of the contraptions were actually MADE of concrete, for example concrete walls with big circle holes in the middle – the big children could climb up, two metres above, and little ones were just comfortably sitting inside.
But the best one was a flying saucer statue made from metal bars. The edge was made from monkey bars and it was tilted, so one side was touching the ground, while the other was more than two metres above. You could step on that edge and try to climb all the way up. The middle part resembled an orb woven from bars and you could get to the very top of the statue, which was approx. three metres high! I would sit there for hours, just daydreaming and enjoying the view.
Few years ago, it was taken away and new, wooden one was put instead – but it’s much more dangerous then the old one! And boring.
What I miss on those ’safety’ ones are size. I mean, it’s really great to have climbing wall, but what for, if it’s only a meter and half tall?
I really miss the big long teeter totters! They were so much more fun then those crappy spring ones they have nowadays. So what if you broke the person on the other ends ass when you got off?
I miss that equipment, too. The danger was what made it really fun. At my park, we had this balancing beam that got narrower as you went across at least 6 feet above the ground with only sand to break our fall.We had a rope-ladder wall, and this one seat in the playground that required some skill getting in and out without getting hurt and not all the upper levels had railing, and to top it off, it was mostly made of wood. Then they slowly made it safer by taking down the rope-ladder, boarding up the seat, removing the balance beam and putting in railing, and then just taking the whole thing down and making a new safe one… Except for the fact that mulch in your eye hurts about as much as sand.
I remember playing chicken on the money bars. The whole point was to try and knock your opponent off. another fun activity was to walk along the brick wall around the play ground with out falling off.
The old playgrounds were the best. Fortunately, I happen to live in a community that still has one! Down at the local soccer field we’ve got not one, but two of the old wooden play structures, the ones that look like they were made out of telephone poles held together by metal rods.
I think the reason it’s still there is because our soccer field is owned by the Scout group… anyone who spent their life in Scouting knows how to have proper outdoor fun!
This is nothing. We actually had an old army tank in our playground, rust and all.
I had one of these where I went to Kindergarten! Everyone used to climb on the head of the “caterpillar” because if you were on top, you were the “ruler”. As you could imagine, everyone was pushing eachother off. lol
my kindergarten had the same thing!!! And we used to do that often. I got pushed off the top a lot. I was a tiny kid (I’m still a little peanut lol) so the bigger kids would push me off. But even the many minor injuries (which earned me the nickname of “the bruise queen” from the school nurse lol) wouldn’t stop me from climbing back on and sassing those bullies off. They moved their asses alright lol.
I did a search to see what a witches hat is (never heard of them) and found a company that still makes all those old thing…witches hat, metal slides, “maypole roundabout”, seesaws,…even a farmgate made to swing on! Woo hoo!….don’t get to excited though,…the company is in South Africa.
(
Oops…forgot to add…the name of the company is Tharad, if you want to do a google search.
And my favorite thing at our playground was a lifesize concrete elephant…the paint was worn off so we skinned our knees up every time we tried to climb it.
When I was a kid there was a park near my house made of wooden posts (probably old telephone poles cut to size) and metal chains. It was the most thing ever!! When i got a bit older however, it was replaced by an ugly plastic park that got torn down soon after because it was used more as a place to vandalize, smoke drugs and drink than play in. I’ll bet none of the kids wanted to go near it because it wasn’t nearly as cool as the old wooden one. I used to call it the “wood park”
wen i was in elementary school the playgrounds kept getting worse and worse because they kept replacing stuff, but tehy never took away the old swings: fifteen feet of metal and rust!!!!! Then they tried to take those away too, but my class got the fourth, fifth and sixth grades to petition against it!! Needless to say, everyone signed, even a few parents. The swings are still there, in all their ass-burning glory. Even though i’m 14 now, it’s only a quarter-mile from my house! (guess where i go every saturday afternoon)
Back In My Day(tm), we learned that we actually had to be *careful* about things sometimes– that the world wasn’t going to be wrapped in bubble-wrap for our protection.
We learned to gauge risk, and decide how much of it we were willing to take. (Sure, we always pushed ourselves to take more, and we definitely took dumb risks sometimes, but we learned to make that assessment.)
Kids today (get off my lawn!) just assume that everything will be made safe and prefect for them, and think they can get away with anything.
(OK, it’s official– I’ve become a grumpy old bitch
(Seriously, though, I feel sorry for kids these days: between helicopter parents, paranoia, and fanatasism about safety, I don’t see how they can EVER experience the satisfaction of even the tiniest amount of independence… we didn’t know how good we had it, growing up in the middle of the whole “latchkey kids” thing. It sure beat “helicopter parents”).
I remember when the “rubber chips” first came out when I was little. They were not quite perfected yet, and they used any old tires they could find, which included the ones with the metal threads in them. I can remember falling into them and being impaled by a hundred tiny bits of metal. They lasted about a month before they replaced them with non-metal laced bits. Not as fun when the big bully doesn’t run crying because of a little bit of pain.
I remember when we had wood chips. They gave splinters. Some playgrounds still have ‘em.
Between my final year of elementary school and now they’ve completely revamped the playground system. The thing is, the changes they brought about for “safety” are way less safe in my mind. They replaced the gravel with wood chips. With gravel, the worst you’re going to get is some bruises or perhaps a cut. With wood chips, you can far more easily get infections. I’d classify those as far more dangerous than bruises. Landing on it is hardly softer and they’re so much more of a bitch to get out of your shoes.
It was also one of those last remaining older playgrounds. Wooden walkways, metal rails, slides, a metal tube, and a net-like array of tires to climb around on, as well as tires here and there for just messing around.
Perhaps the stupidest thing they put in when replacing all this stuff for “safety” is one of those one-person spinning things, but the bar in the middle was kinked twice, so if it’s spinning, it could easily smash your face in. Idiotic design, a merry-go-round (which I can’t find anywhere anymore) would be far safer.
Kids are resilient and are being astoundingly overprotected today.
My elementary school from when I was in grade 1 had a wooden playground. It had a suspended bridge, beams you could walk across that were each hanging from chains so it was really hard to walk across and a rope going up a wall made of half logs so that you could climb up it. It seemed really high when I was little but I think it was only about 10 feet. It’s since been torn down and replaced by one of those all plastic ones.
I was so sad when the school playground did away with all the hazardous metal contraptions I grew up on. They kept the gravel though.
At my elementary school we had blacktop with hopscotch squares, four-squares and basketball hoops. We didn’t have playground equipment until I was in 3rd grade and the PTA put in some kind of structure with a ramp, bouncy bridge and fireman pole. They also put in those cement tunnels that we crawled through.
When I was in 5th grade, I moved to a different school that had actual playground equipment. They had swings, a slide, merry-go-round, and lots of grass that we used to play kickball. and gravel under the equip.
Look at the length of this chat, 279 past blasters, in only 4 months! It is timely, we’re getting fatter, kids are mollie-coddled, allergies are up, look at what PC has done to us. It truly sucks.
My blast fav, the witches hat, oh yeah! We’d ram that thing into the ground, and then climb around the outside seated part, or halfway up the bars, until our combined weights made it violently swing back. It was scary but so much fun, and I don’t remember anyone falling off. You had to be sharp and have your wits about you – I guess we must have.
Recently a college here in New Zealand has reintroduced ‘dangerous play’, bullrush, mud sliding, tree climbing and the outcome… less accidents (because the kids have become more aware of their limits), and the academic standard has improved!
Back in the day, they just did. Today, we have over analysed ieverything, and created a whole new raft of problems.
When I was four I broke my right arm after falling off of some monkey bars.
It wasnt even dangerous playground. I dont even resent playgrounds
ah the old playgrounds, I may be 14 but my elementary school did have a metal slide, and this odd equipment that had monkey bars, a spiral slide, the bar you would hold on to and slide across, bars you would balance on etc. and next to the metal slide were swings and next to those were metal bars that looked like something you would lock your bike onto and the old tree with berries we were told were poisonous or something so we wouldn’t eat them (lol)… when I was in 5th grade everything except the bundle thing left and were replaced with a plastic slide (not much friction), new swings and a f*cking rockclimber thing… the tree became off limits and so did the back of the rock climber because they couldn’t see you, it was stupid, and I think the spiral slide had more friction afterwards because it sucked -_-”
we there’s my story :3
I miss merry-go-rounds and tire swings… if you put the tire swings up with rope instead of chains with swivel, you can twist them up and get really dizzy. Also, if you hang two close enough, you can play bumper cars with them. I also miss big tall swing sets. As an adult, I still wish I could spend a Saturday every now and then on a good swing set.
The three highlights of my childhood playgrounds…
1) An orange climber thing where you would sit on the top, wrap your legs around the bars and fall backwards and hope to hang on.
2) A 30 feet high wooden thing with a walkway across the top with rotting wooden beams and deflated tires you had to go across
3) Best of all, we actually had a zip line for a while. No way you would get those anymore.
My elementary school had a playground made entirely of wood, except for the searing hot, thigh-burning slides and a bunch of tires. It was pretty fun, (the wooden part was downright HUGE!) but before I went to middle school they replaced it with one of those dinky little plastic ones. Plastic or wooden, instead of wasps, we had CATERPILLERS. Yeah, you read that correctly. They were pretty gross, but you were fine if you avoided trees, as well as the kids who thought they were cute and held them. O.O