My high school summer job was repainting all the equipment at the local parks. The fun ones were the domes that had to be painted four different colors - the dome was set up so you couldn’t lean a ladder on it effectively. So, I ended up climbing them and balancing, one hand holding the brush and the other holding the paint bucket. Do not attempt with a full bucket of paint. And then you had to remember which rungs still had wet paint.
Swing sets were another fun one to paint, especially the bar at the top. Climb up the ladder, paint, climb down, move the ladder 6 feet, repeat.
Mmm roundabouts… the ones that you could get your foot caught under and get pulled under and ground up into mincemeat. The ones that were most fun of all when you lay down on them with your feet towards the center, and your head hanging off the edge while one guy pushed.
Did anyone else here ever wax the old metal slides? We used to take a hunk of waxed paper to the local elementary school where they had one of the really tall slides. We’d start out by getting all the sand off, then we’d polish the length of the slide with one hunk of waxed paper. Finally, we’d sit on another piece of the waxed paper and slide down and about 4000MPH! Oh yeah, them were the days!!
I loved the monkey bars, too. I actually had upper body strength in those days. <sigh>
My memories of places my family lived up until I was about 6 are by the playgrounds! I remember what sort of swings and see-saws and merry-go-rounds (or roundabouts) were at all the playgrounds I would frequent, and where the playgrounds were in relation to our house.
Dijon Warlock, one of those playgrounds had horsey swings, and my (then) youngest brother loved them. I haven’t seen any horsey swings in ages, however. Just in case there’s anyone else out there that might remember, that playground was in Comstock Park, Michigan, near the old fish ponds.
My grade school had swings, and about 10 feet in front of them was the edge of the sand, with a concrete barrier. If you jumped off the swings (as of course we all did), you ran a good risk of landing on the barrier. Eventually a kid did land on it and broke his leg–the blood stayed visible for weeks. They playground stayed just the way it was. Ah, the good old days…
Actually, we have a nice playground at our current park, safe and fun. We spend a lot of time there. I do miss merry-go-rounds and those crazy towers, though. But not the smell in the towers.
Oh wow I really do miss the old playgrounds with everything made of metal and how fun and shiny everything was. I almost cried the summer that they took the merry-go-round out of my local park and the kids lost interest in the twisty slide when they made it plastic and so much easier to climb up.
The new parks do have their perks though… as an older teenager I’m in love with a park near my high school that has a really nice rock climbing wall and a miniature merry go round type thing for just one person.
I find it interesting that one playground that I loved when I was a kid that has gotten rid of all the cool stuff (merry-go-round, giant metal slide, etc.) but they’ve kept the one thing I managed to hurt myself fairly badly on. It’s a climbing thing shaped like a submarine, with ladders up the sides and a sliding pole down the middle for the periscope. When I was four, I managed to slip while climbing up the ladder and split my chin open - blood everywhere, according to my parents. Luckily I don’t remember much after I fell. I’ve got a nice big scar as a souvenir of the event though.
Oh, and I’m with you voguevixen - I still love to go on the swings if there’s no one around.
In the town I live in we just got a new playground and it kicks ass! It’s much nicer and cooler than anything I had as a kid. It’s all made of plastic and the really cool bit is that the ground around it is made of recycled tires. It’s like walking on a sponge. I wish I’d had a playground like that when I was a kid.
Totally, I played on that thing when I was a kid. What I heard was that someone noticed it was coated in lead paint. Which is kind of backed up by the fact that when they removed it, they had a fence around the perimeter for several months.
They recently removed a playground item from a park nearby that I grew up with, and frankly I’m shocked it stayed for as long as it did. I’ve never seen another one and it’s rather hard to describe, imagine if you will a metal spiderweb. It consisted of a tubular frame with this netting underslung from it made up of shiny (and potentially HOT) solid steel bars interlocked together so it was flexible but incredibly sturdy. This is the kind of net you’d want if you were going seine fishing for Nessie. I loved that thing, you could sit in the very center swaying daring all comers to invade your nest, hang from it, climb from it in all manner of ways and angles, jump on it ect. Sure you could probably get your head stuck between the bars of the ‘net’ if you weren’t careful, sure fingers could be pinched and damaged if you poked them into where the net bars connected… but it was very neat.
I do remember the pressure-treated lumber ones. We called them “Creative playgrounds”…and some of them were HUGE! No end to the multiple shapes they came in. But the most idiosyncratic form was the “boxy” type of structure, that had about 3 levels and many cave-like passages inside!
And the swings/parallel bars/passages between buildings! Some of the ones you could barely get from one end of the playground to the other, if you had good balance.
They were shaped like Fry Guys, IIRC. And they WERE fun…once I was at McDonald’s with a guy friend who was sitting on it backwards and managed to slam downward, slamming his crotch into the back of the seat before sliding off, clutching his ‘jewels’ with a look of intense pain.
I also remember my local park having some GREAT toys as a kid. It was themed after fairytales, with a giant metal Cinderella pumpkin coach, a junglegym/slide made to look like a big boot (Old Woman who lived in a shoe), a huge castle-themed slide where you climbed UP the tower to go down the slide and a giant spiral slide that was ridged, so you’d get funny bump marks on your leg going down it. The city decided, after all these years that the toys were ‘unsafe’ and took them down. One day I drove to my mother’s and drove past the local wrecking yard and saw the Cinderella pumpkin coach in the junkyard. I almost wanted to cry…playgrounds sure ain’t what they used to be.
My elementary school had a playground made from tires. It was the best. Tons of great tire swings, tire bouncers- tires bound together and attached to 3 poles so you could sit on them and bounce around- sort of like a trampoline, a big tire robot, a slide with a tire ship, it was so great. Of course it’s been torn down now because of the potential injuries I guess. The new playground stinks. It was much better back then.
The park stuff I had in my town was great. My elementary school got one of the first “safe” playgrounds around 1990, and it replaced some bare metal monkey bars, rings, and balance beams that were part of an obstacle course. Its key attraction was a handle that was mounted on a rail. You could glide from one end to the other. All the kids fought over that thing so much, and another favorite thing was to launch it from one end and hit the person across from you in the forehead. That’s what all the “cool” kids did.
It also had a slide made of rollers like what your luggage is spat onto out of the xray machine. Each one was the perfect width for getting your fingers squished. There were these cylinders you were supposed to run on like a hamster wheel, too. I can imagine kids falling off and going facefirst into rough orange plastic. Youch.
It also had a wonderful tube slide that no one ever used because people peed in it so much.
The other half of the playground was older and made of logs. It was almost like a medieval torture device with all the slivers it gave you. It had two sides connected by a log bridge. It was popular to get as many people as possible on it and bounce up and down. My sixth grade class managed to bring it down this way, compressing one guy’s spine in the process.
Ah, the memories.
In another park there was a big metal pole with a pyramid-shaped rope spiderweb made of steel-reinforced rope. That was really cool, and if you fell you could count on getting caught in it. I wonder why they took it down? Getting to the top was always a symbol of status.
That park also had this really tiny merry-go-round with four riding things on it which routinely gave me motion sickness.
Then near my grandma’s house there was this thing made of a gate. You were supposed to spin on it. Anyone else have something like this?
How about swings mounted on opposite sides of a rotating bar? If you used the swings, you’d cause the thing to rotate. It was cool in principle, but never worked. My friends and I just spun each other on it. I got a concussion from the center pole once too.
How about parks with picnic shelters that had restrooms with running water? I swear, it seems that they all were simultaneously and systematically defiled sometime between 1990 and 1992.
There was another park about 15 min from my house that had one of these for YEARS but it never got used (as far as I know) because it was mounted in a giant sand pit that was constantly flooded out due to poor drainage.
Oh, good grief. I had nearly forgotten about the waxed paper. My older brother did this bit on a long slide unbeknownst to poor little me. I shot off the end of that thing doing close to Mach 1 I bet.
During the heat of the summer my younger brother used to use the slide as an impromptu kitchen range. He fried caterpillars on it.
Creosote logs with open bolts as playground equipment. Swings that reached into lower rain clouds. The spin-a-bunch-of-kids-around thingie. You remember the one that held maybe a dozen kids, and if pushed fast enough would start throwing the kids off one by one? I loved that one. If two or three kids pushed it, it easily could maintain enough momentum to remove an arm or two.
Strangely, nobody I can remember was seriously hurt on these seemingly murderous devices.
And they WERE fun…once I was at McDonald’s with a guy friend who was sitting on it backwards and managed to slam downward, slamming his crotch into the back of the seat before sliding off, clutching his ‘jewels’ with a look of intense pain.