As just another example of the phenomenon in the wild, this park has had a tank in it since I was in was in kindergarten (if not earlier—we moved to the area just before I started kindergarten):
The tank is prominently featured in the opening seconds of the (very short) video tour at bottom.
Ha! I’m near Collesville just past the beltway towards downtown 
I remember the F-86 that was parked in the Lunken Playfield in Cincinnati. Mostly I remember not understanding why I only got to go once when it was clearly the greatest park in the history of parks.
Me too. In Maplewood on Alta Vista Rd.
Used to go there. The engine was removed so you could crawl through the the interior of the body from front to back.
We have a local park now owned by the town. It was until recently a monastery with a couple of WWII artillery pieces prominently displayed.
I am a member of a private organization that sometimes fixes up rusty static displays.
I don’t know about aircraft but all tanks on static display are still owned by the U.S. Army through TACOM. Here is a link to the program. As noted in the cite, it’s for places like museums and VFW halls. The equipment in front of National Guard posts comes from a different program.
In Los Gatos the Oak Meadow Park playground has a T-33. It’s been on loan from the Air Force since 1974.
When I was around 8 years old I remember playing on the six cannons at DeRivera Park on Put-in-Bay Island. We went back there about 20 years ago after we had children, and they were still there.
Never seen this in the US except on bases (e.g., Joint Base Lewis-McChord on I-5 in Washington) and museums.
There’s a park in suburban Chicago, Cantigny (pronounced can-TEEN-ee), which features a military museum, and has a “Tank Park,” with a number of retired tanks, primarily from WWII.
That said, while it’s open to the public, it’s apparently a privately-funded park, run by the McCormick Foundation (the park grounds were formerly his home and estate).
Okay, my local tank is at an American Legion but the jet is in a park, and is a memorial to a pilot from the Cuban Missle Crisis, which I read about at some point then forgot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/8y6a8r/anderson_sc_american_legion_has_a_nice_tank/
A few minutes walk from my home is the city’s central park, Victoria Park, once an army base when the city was founded.
It is home to a M4A2 Sherman Tank, from 6th Armoured Regiment, (1st Hussars), which landed at DDay.
I think every child in the city has climbed on that thing. It was recently removed, (my that’s a BIG crane and truck!) and totally rehabbed.
It’s known as the Holy Roller.
People do collect military vehicles including tanks and similar things. A friend of mine has a British Ferret. It’s a reconnaissance vehicle that looks like a small tank. It is outstandingly cool. It has rubber tires and is street licensed. It has been used in a movie. He is a class 3 arms dealer so he can mount a real machine gun on it although it has a dummy mounted. We went to look at another vehicle at some local company that specializes in all things military. He had a warehouse full of tanks and things. Two different restaurants near me have “Deuces” on display, large 6 wheeled cargo trucks.
Driving across Minnesota, you see lots of these displays in parks, especially in small towns. Tanks, artillery pieces, mounted old fighter jets. Maybe the local VFW or American Legion sponsors them, or there’s really nothing else notable about the town so they had to have something. Other towns commonly have an old steam locomotive or caboose. Or as in my small town, a US Civil War monument, installed about 1910, even though the town didn’t even exist then.
The most prominent Ferret owner is Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. I don’t know if he still has it.
I found this Facebook video about the history of this plane. It’s a Navy Panther from the Korean War. One of its pilots purchased it from the navy for $1 on condition that it be converted to playground use.
The Memphis Belle was on display at a the Armory in Memphis for decades.
It was in bad shape when I saw it.
The Air Force reclaimed it and did a restoration. It at a base in Ohio now.
Link The Memphis Belle
Originally Aus states always had a few canons in the parks: what else are you going to do with them? And everybody loves a gun (cf ‘gun control’). America was the same, with, as I recall, a lot of civil war canons around. Following WWI, the Americans took a lot of WWI trophy artillery, and distributed it to the states as war memorial / trophies. Aus and the USA diverge on civic display of more recent weapons.
In Aus, the military brought back weapons from WWI which were stockpiled, loaned to school cadet units, and given to RSL clubs (cf RSS&AL, Veterans of Foreign Wars, ‘American Legion’) as war memorials / ‘trophies’. Most of that was recalled at the start of WWII.
Not all of the war memorials / trophies went to the RSL. City councils got some of them and put them in war memorial parks. They were supposed to maintain and preserve the trophies, but didn’t. Some of it deteriorated very rapidly, and was junked within a couple of years. Regular garden maintenance continued to junk more as time went on. Eventually all that was left in civic parks was the very heavy remains of very heavy guns.
In the 70’s/80’s, left-wing city councils removed some of the remaining heavy guns from city parks as part of a performative political exercise. Sold for scrap, a couple of those were recovered by a private park near where I live.
When Aus banned ‘automatic weapons’ in 1996, the gun buy-back took mostly semi-automatic 22’s, but also included a few heavy machine guns held as war memorials by RSL clubs. And I think some of the recent artillery held by RSL’s disappeared at the same time. This was almost all Aus surplus – after WWII, not much was transported to Aus as ballast, perhaps the post-WWI experience had tempered their desire for park weapons.
When I was a kid in San Diego in the '80s, my dad worked for General Dynamics, and the company owned a private park next to the factory specifically for the use of employees and their families. It was called “Missile Park” because there was an Atlas ICBM standing upright near the entrance. You could run around underneath it and look up into it.
I believe the park was eventually donated to the city after GD closed up shop there, and the missile was removed and erected somewhere else.
