July 2010 Archives

Playgrounds

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Today I saw an article on NPR about new playgrounds in New York City. Here's a quick overview link:

Imagination Playground FAQ

This got me thinking. When I was a kid, along with the standard swings and teeter-totters, our local park had a piece of old farm equipment - specifically, an old grain thresher, sort of like this:

Grain Thresher

sitting on a concrete pad. The thing wasn't so much rusty metal as metallic rust, and we climbed all over it, played inside it, you name it. Nobody I knew ever got hurt, in spite of the fact that it basically consisted of sharp rusty corners and edges, inside and out. I can still picture the "teeth" on the inside of the thing. Honestly, there should have been a tetanus shot station next to it.

There is no way on earth you could put something like that in a park today. I suppose that's good, on balance, but I wonder if we haven't overcorrected a bit when one of the selling points of the new park equipment is that all the pieces are the same color "in order to facilitate more imaginative play, without any distraction or competition that might arise from having multi-colored toys."

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