According to this they are.
If it’s true, it’s a real shame.
That reminds me…does anyone else here remember the “plane in the park” from 19th Avenue in San Francisco?
She’s found a good home, at the Pacific Coast Air Museum. That much, at least.
Ranchoth
(“Rest easy, friend…”)
I think it is true. Though I’m not sure that going back to the days of doing flick flacks on concrete is a good thing either lol.
That’s why God created video games. 
I remember the 20-foot-tall metal slide at my cousin’s school. Wow, that was fun. About a foot wide, a 1" edging, dangerous as hell.
Find one like THAT around today!
As a parent of three and five-year olds I have been exposed to a lot of new and old playgrounds during the past few years. Most of the newer ones reflect lots of safety concerns, but some are pretty clever as well. And the kids seem to enjoy them just fine.
A brand new playground in our part of the world suprised me: there is a very long slide that must be 15-20 feet high, so climbing all the steps is a challenge for younger kids. Also, as a parent I cannot reach up to help all that much. In addition, there is a sliding pole connected at the top of the stairs.
My kids love it.
The kids of today never got to experience the playgrounds of the 60’s & 70’s. How can you miss what you never experienced? A childs imagination can take them to endless places. Metal to plastic isn’t going to influence a kids future or their ability to develop their creativity.
Yup, I remember the tall metal swingsets at my elementary schools, with hard wooden seats that could break. But they were also large enough so that one kid could sit and another kid could stand in front of them. The standing kid pumped going one direction, and the sitting kid pumped when going in the other direction, and you could go really high. High enough for that little weightless experience at the very top of the swing, the sensation that you just might slide out that made it scary, and fun.
These swings were great for swing races, and for jumping out when you were still swinging too high for jumping to be entirely safe.
The other night I went to a neighborhood swimming pool where they still had diving boards*. Wow.
Mmmm…monkey bars!
Try finding a set of those these days!
I dunno…I have nostalgia for bright, polished, metal slides that give you 2nd degree burns on your hamstrings if you go down them later than 11am
i must say i am not surprised… the number of lawsuits have increased over the years…and it’s true, a lot of those playground funrides we had as youngsters were not safe, and a lot of kids ended up hurt or dead.
I’m still a Swing fan. Got on one a few months ago after a couple of years. I missed that tickling feeling as you swing back down
I just read an article a few weeks back about some neighborhood trying to sue a school because their new playground was too COLORFUL! Give me a break. (They actually suggested they plant trees around it to shield it from view…the local chief of police rolled his eyes at them. “Oh yeah, let’s give all the crazies and predators a place to hide.”)
I was just recently talking to my husband about the sort of playgrounds that started springing up in the early-mid 80’s that consisted of a giant metal tube that went up to a crow’s nest-type structure. Off the crow’s nest sprang 4 different slides: a twisty, a straight, some stairs down to one of those short, fat “baby” slides and I forget what the third one was…a sliding pole maybe. Anyways, they were all the rage for a few years and then it was discovered that little kids and assorted riff-raff were using the center climbing tubes as toilets and to the best of my knowledge they aren’t built anymore. (Some of the old ones have even been torn down already.) We thought that was the coolest thing when we were kids, and made our parents take us to the park nearly every day to play on it.
Then for a bit there was the craze where everything was built out of pressure-treated lumber, until it was determined that the chemicals in the wood were giving kids brain damage and killing them. (I hate when that happens!)
What I see a lot of now is the basic “old-school” swingsets/slide/merry-go-round set-up, which is nice. I think some of the newer ones that are built on the rubberised mats are sorta cool. (I think I remember reading somewhere those are made of old recycled tennis shoes!)
What I really sorta miss was those weird “hobby horse” sort of animals on giant springs. (I remember in the McDonalds “playlands” of my youth they had them as McDonaldland characters.) If you got on one with an old enough spring that was good and broken in you could nearly smack your head on the ground pitching wildly back and forth. After a while you started to see the springs being replaced with solid bases on a large hinge-type mechanism that barely moved at all (and totally sucked!) Now you just don’t see them period.
I confess, I still sneak onto the swings sometimes when there’s no one around.
I have to say I am personally affected by this. In my home town they have taken away all the merry-go-rounds. What’s with that? When I was younger, my primary hobby was trying to make people throw up on my marry go round.
“If you got on one with an old enough spring that was good and broken in you could nearly smack your head on the ground pitching wildly back and forth.”
LMAO voguevixen! Thank you for the very vivid memory…ouch! Reminded me of the time that the teeter-totter came down on my leg (and stayed there!) basically grinding my calf into the gravel. Oh happy day
How about the solid steel merry-go-round? The see-saw made from a solid plank about a foot wide and 6-8 feet long set onto 6" diameter steel pipes? we had swings made of two long steel chains and a rubber seat.
Oh, yeah - TETHER BALL!!!
Do they still have horse swings? Those were my favorites when a wee one (had to have the blue one). Haven’t seen them in a long while, but haven’t been looking, really.
Well, I’ve noticed that the playground at the elementary school up the street certainly sucks ass. No swings. No merry-go-round. No slides. No teeter-totters. Just an eagle’s nest (the metal frame geodesic dome thingies), some plastic climbing thing, and some monkey bars. Not even the cool sort of monkey bars you can climb on top of or hang from by your knees, but single bars set in a cross, with handles hanging down from them. I guess you could still hang there kicking at each other, but somehow it’s just not the same.
Jeez.
Admittedly, it’s BEEN a while, but recently, my daughter got a job at a Burger King near the house… and when I saw their indoor playplace, I was totally blown away.
I mean, I’d seen these playplaces before, but I’d never really wandered UP to one and really looked up CLOSE, you know?
And I think that if I’d been given a choice when I was five between a seesaw, couple of swings, merry-go-round, and a horsie on a giant spring…
…and this huge, insane, garishly colored climbaround thing with a corkscrew pipe slide, ball pit, net tubes, overhead climby thingies, and all this utterly wild pipe to crawl around in…
…it would have been no contest.
Kids today have it better than we did. And they don’t even have to worry about splinters, for potato’s sake…
Heck, that was happening even way back when I was a pup. We had a brand new elementary school with a very cool playground - but no one was ever allowed on it 'cause they were afraid of lawsuits. As far as I know, no one ever did play on all the need stuff.
Funny. Hubby and I were just discussing this the other day (must be that it’s playground season), and our kids have way better playgrounds than we did. True, there’s no merry go round. But, our local playground has lots of climbing stuff, a sliding pole, 5 different sliding boards (several quite high), a large set of monkey bars, and a swing set. It’s all set up on mulch, so kids don’t bust their heads or sking their knees too badly when they fall off. And, the slides are plastic; I certainly do remember the burn of a metal slide at 2PM in July!