#980 Old, dangerous playground equipment

Tssssss!

Slides used to be dangerous.

After climbing up those sandy, metal crosstrax steps you got to the top and stared down at that steep ride below. The slide was burning hot to the touch, a stovetop set to high all day under the summer sun, just waiting to greet the underside of your legs with first-degree burns as you enjoyed the ride. It also smelled like hot pee, years of nervous children with leaky diapers permanently marking it as their territory. Lastly, to top it all off, there were no cute plastic siderails or encapsulated tube-slides, which meant that if you went too fast or aimed your legs poorly, your shoes would grip-skid on the metal, and you’d spill over the side, landing face down with a sickening thud in a bed of pebbles, cigarette butts, and milk thistles.

World of Unimaginable DizzinessIt wasn’t just slides, either. Everything in the playground was more dangerous. And they were different and unique, seemingly put together by the neighborhood handymen who in a burst of creative energy one Saturday morning emptied their garages of old tires, 2x4s, and chains and just nailed it all together.

There were wooden tightrope beams suspended high in the air, daring the confident, athletic kids to attempt a slow, heart-pounding highwire walk while other kids encouragingly showered them with handfuls of sand and pine cones.

There were fire poles two stories high — just a cheap, simple pole planted deep in the ground. It was popular, and educational too, quietly introducing children to concepts like gravity, friction, and badly sprained ankles. There was a certain Fire Pole Form too, a kind of arms-on, cross-legged-spider-wrap maneuver that was both awkward and majestic at the same time.

PerfectAnd of course, there was my favorite — the Big Spinner, also known as a Merry-Go-Round, but not the kind with lights and plastic horses going up and down. This was just a giant metal circle that laid about a foot off the ground and could be spun, usually by someone standing beside it. If you were lucky you’d get a pile of kids on there and somebody’s mom or dad would kindly whip you into a World of Unimaginable Dizziness. A couple kids would fly off from the G-forces but most would hang on, teeth gritted, eyes squinted, cheeks flapping wildly against the wind, until the Big Spinner reluctantly came to a slow stop and finally let you off. Then you’d all walk away in different directions, some kids hitting tree trunks head on, others falling down nearby hills.

These days those classic playgrounds sure are hard to come by.

Safe and aloneEverything is plastic now — unaffected by temperature, easy to disinfect, and bendable into all kinds of Safe-T-Shapes, the sharp, rusty nail heads of yesterday replaced with non-toxic washable adhesives poured from a cauldron of polymers and Purell. Now not only are our kids getting lame baby-approved fun, but just think what we’re doing to the tetanus shot industry.

Seriously though, new playgrounds sure are terrible. This guy agrees. They say that playgrounds have gotten too safe and become so sterile and boring that kids just walk away from them, preferring instead to hang out in the weeds by the railroad tracks or throw bottles in the alley behind the pizza place. Kids could actually be placed in more danger by these lame plastic netherworlds that encourage more video game time instead of fresh air and bruising. Another blow to childhood struck by overprotective parents and pesky lawsuits.

Going nowhereWell, we can’t change the world, so let’s just enjoy the good news: old, fun, dangerous playgrounds are not completely extinct. Yes, the Safety Conglomerate hasn’t killed all the buzz with their rocking horses two inches off the ground, pillowy-soft imitation sand, and stationary, bolted-on steering wheels. Old, dangerous playground equipment can still be found. They’re out there.

So please — when you find monkey bars taunting you from ten feet off the ground, extended see-saws that allow for maximum elevation, and rickety, sagging rope bridges with planks missing, please, run around like crazy, bump your head a few times, and twist your ankle. Because tell me something– is there anything quite like it?

AWESOME!

This post is in The Book of Awesome

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517 thoughts to “#980 Old, dangerous playground equipment”

    1. Yeah. It was. We were a lot tougher than kids now, and our parent’s weren’t such pussies where it came to letting kids be kids. Plus everyone wasn’t so friggin’ sue-happy like now.

  1. The best merry go round was the one in the Miles City Park in the fifties. It had a central tall pole and a structure that hung from the top on chains. So it could go both around and it could swing wildly. It was quite a ride. And yes, it was dangerous but ow what a ride, swinging and going around. There was always some mean boy who made it go too fast and too wild. You had to be careful not to pinch your fingers and if you fell off, you could be hit by that giant swinging turning structure. I never saw another one like it. Did you?

    1. When I was little, I played on one. I can’t remember the park but wherever it was, I remember the fun and the danger both + bullies.
      Did you know bullies are created by mean spirited people/parents.

    2. donaleen that is what I am going to build for my grandchildren. I wish i knew how big the wheel was that held the swinging chains, and how tall the pole was.. I need the diameter.

      1. I would guess 12 to 15 feet high and an equal diameter. Sometimes kids would swing it too hard the and bench we sat on would hit the center pole. I think there were 8 benches shaped into an octagon with chains attached at each corner. There was also a bar to hold onto.

        Maybe you could contact the Miles City Montana forum and see if anyone has a photo of that merry go round. There has to be someone who does.

  2. When I was younger my family always used to stop at a playground when we were traveling to my Grandma’s house. The best part was a giant barrel about 10 feet in diameter set on its side and open at both ends. Once you got inside you ran up the side and it would rotate. We would always try to go all the way around upside down, but would fall or roll down the side when we got up too high. Lots of bruised heads and knees and splinters. It was the best thing ever!

  3. have to agree sadly kids are missing out on the experiance of having fun and risking being evil kienevl on the play ground due to every thing being pc and the world being lawsuit happy. though at least glad to know that some parks some where have the old equipment. of yesterday . for after all some things like tetor toters lose something when plastic. same with the slide and swings.

  4. I remember my Grampop taking us to the playground, I was maybe 4 or 5, and he would throw the sand on the slide and use a newspaper to buff it up nice and slippery. What fun!!!! Another memory… at a family reunion. MY cousin and I on one end of a seesaw and my sister and another cousin on the other end. We pushed down real hard and made it stay so my sister and cousin went flying off. My poor sister broke her collar bone and put a quick end to the reunion lol. Believe it or not we still laugh about it 30 years later( well I do anyway). The old playgrounds were awesome.

  5. Those were days, not the days but days. if we were not inventing new ways of trying to ride the rides, we were making them.
    Old refidgerator boxes opened like a tank tread and crawl inside to propel. Worked great for sticker patches, but large chunks of glass were like IED’s. Sling shots, catapults, so many.

    We had great summer fun by attaching a truck inner tube (cut next to the valve stem) to our garden hose (wrap ends closed with coat hanger wire on each end, one end put the garden hose in). Then there you go!!! An afternoon of GREAT bouncing fun. It would take about 3-4 hours to fill it to bursting. The whole time we bounced and rode it like a horse. At a point it became sorta scarry, cause the tube woude get to be about 4 foot high and 12 foot long and just waiting to blow. When it did and yoiu were on it it was instant fall and wash. Not so mention how many gallons on the lawn (good to water the yard) though with todays metered water, would cost something to just keep kids playing in the yard.
    But no matter what as kids, I think they will find ways to challenge themselves with whatever they have, plastic or metal, or wood (ouch! for a slide, unless you ride down it in a mild crate, totally out of control). Heck where do you think the ‘X Games’ originate from? Skate boards (at one time we made them from skates and nails) before they were made like today. They have evolved and are even better, just not in the small kids budget.
    So many great memories, not all are safe, but that will never change
    kids will always be kids, just hope that injuries are not serious, though some will be. Play smart, have fun.

  6. Im only 18, and my earliest memories of playgrounds is getting hurt, getting back up and getting hurt again all whilst parents watched on and applauded me for being tough( this before i had started school). its the saying “its all fun and games ’till someone gets hurts, then it gets better.”

  7. my cousins and I used to enjoy playing at the local park that had a long metal slide, but we would sit on top of wax paper, well you remember that sledding scene in Christmas Vacation…WHOOSH! I’m disappointed that I can’t teach my nephew that trick.

  8. I am doing a thing on ‘are playgrounds art?’ would you share your comments with me???? Please i am student doing the arts award an it would really help me if i could have your view, are playground art?
    Thanks
    Shannon

  9. Back in the 60s when I was a kid, there was a pile of us on one of those merry-go-rounds and my dad started spinning us and really got up a momentum. Well the fun stopped when one of the kids flew off! LOL
    Funny but not. :D
    Also, I am the victim of teeter-tottering with a kid who decided to get off while I was up in the air. If any of you have ever experienced this, you can feel my pain. LOL
    We also used to get on the swings and get up as high as we could go and then jump off. Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!
    I’m not sure how parents lived through our childhoods back then. Of course we weren’t monitored and micro-managed like kids seem to be now. We pretty much were on our own for most summer days back then.
    We didn’t want to go in the house to go to the bathroom for fear that our parents would tell us it was time to come in for the night.
    It was AWESOME growing up in Kitchener as a kid in the 60s!!!

    1. OMG!! The bathroom thing & not wanting to go in the house becaue we’d have to come in for the night—I actually peed my pants once because I wanted to stay out longer so bad. Remember how we used to go out in the morning during the summer and not come back home til it got dark? And most of us survived? Good GOD. No one can let their kids do ANYTHING any more without “scheduling” a fricking “play date”–what horse crap. No wonder we’re going down the crapper and everyone’s damned kids are all obese with no imaginations. Sad.

  10. Also, while not playground equipment, one of the best pieces of play equipment was an old, abandoned Mini in Kitchener and a school bus in Belleville. What a riot we had pretending to travel to all kinds of exotic places.
    And forts! No one builds forts anymore! We started off with simple boxes and blankets to make ours and would add on as more kids would bring more boxes and blankets! What a hoot! We graduated to wood forts as we got older but built them ourselves without the aid of our parents. We were given the nails and hammers and left to it.
    We would put on plays. Hide and go seek. British bulldog. Simon Says. Double-Dutch. Dinky toys with roads made in piles of dirt. (Where are the piles of dirt anymore?) Some silly game with a ball in a silk stocking that I forget the name of. I could go on and on.
    I’m feeling rather nostalgic now. :D

  11. Our slide was the same – metal – very high but with a nice cement slab at the bottom :) ouch – hilarious looking back and sad to see the diving blocks being removed from pools along with the very high diving board we used to have so much fun on – all replaced with blow up stuff in the pool – oh well, the kids are still having fun

  12. Playgrounds have become sterile due to most owners or operators maintaining their equipment on a regular basis. It due to their negligence that it is now mandatory to follow playground safety standards.
    I have a friend who had a healthy boy and the jungle gym which he was playing on was so rusty it collapsed and he suffered a very traumatic brain injury. The boy is now mentally and physically disabled and cannot do a thing for himself. It has cost the family a fortune in medical cost and all this could have been prevented in the school followed a basic maintenance program for the playground equipment. Many of you would change your comments if this was your child.

    1. No, we probably wouldn’t change our minds. What you’re talking about is probably a 1 out of 100,000 or more incident. Most things that happen at a playground aren’t life-threatening. You can’t protect everyone from everything, even if the government is trying to make sure you can’t do anything without 1000 regulations on it. Everyone is turning their kids into pussies; the way you think, everyone should keep their kid encased in plastic til they’re 40 so they don’t get a bump or a scrape.

  13. I need someone to tell me how to build a giant swing or what they call a spider swing. it was about 12 feet in the air and several chains hung down from a wheel and we would run around the pole and lift our feet and swing out from the center. need it before Christmas for my grandchildren, thanks . reohelen@yahoo.com

  14. I honestly think this is one reason kids are fat. I grew up in the nineties. We ate the same food as kids do today. We had video games. We had TV. And, some lucky kids in the late 90s had the internet. But, we also had kick-ass playgrounds. And, we played tag/football/kickball in the school playground. Hardly any fat kids at all. We are now raising a society of squishy little dough balls who have no sense of adventure. Wonderful.

    Also. Not one kid I ever knew got killed from playground equipment. The one kid who ever got hurt that I know of was this little idiot at school (5th grade) that decided it would be fun to climb on top of the giant jungle gym/monkey bars and jump down. Broke his arm. His parents did not sue.

    1. You are right – no exercise is a big factor. Today’s playground equipment is nice to look at, but is not fun enough to keep kids’ attention and participation. Legal liability issues are the main driver of that change. Another big factor is diet. Everything has high fructose corn syrup and soy in it – the same thing to fatten up cattle for slaughter. Where I live nearly every student I see walking home from school is overweight.

  15. I’m a 10th grader, and I still remember back in elementary school there was this TALL metal slide. It was absolutely amazing. It was the only metal thing there, everything else was plastic shit. All the kids would go on it, getting burns and falling into the sand. Everyone fell from it, it was too steep for you NOT to. But it took one mother. And don’t say I’m against women or some shit like that because I AM one. One stupid ass mother to go “hey this slide is 5 times taller than my 3 year old son…oh look! Cookies! *wanders away from son*” of course I shouldn’t say it was the kid’s fault. After all, I would have looked at it amazed. He climbed up it, sliding down having so much fun, and falling face first into the sand. I was right there in line waiting for my turn. The mother practically screamed, grabbing him and telling us all that we arent allowed to get on. We all screamed at her to quit bulllying(it seemed that way when we were 8) and I remember the kids shoved her away and we all ran up the steps to slide down holding onto eachother (like a train) but you want to know what that mother did? She didnt notice her son was in the middle until it was too late. But she didnt care. She grabbed him in the middle of the ride and yanked him off. Since we were all connected… We all went with him onto the ground. Our parents came yelling at the mother, because they saw what happened. Nope, that mother denied it and blamed the school thereand went straight for the lawsuit. Did he cry? No. He laughed. Some people seriously need to quit whining. When I was 8, my classmates talked about how teachers should be able to discipline kids nowadays. When we were EIGHT. Parents are getting way too protective. You wanna know how much that changes a kid? So before you protective parents or angry parents talk about how dangerous it was, think about this: are you telling me YOU never did anything dangerous for fun? You never climbed up a slide, or played with the older kids?

    Let the kids live! Getting hurt is a part of life! It gets them ready for reality!

    Excuse my horrid ranting and rambling.

  16. Hi, I don’t really have anything to say, I just like talking. I was on a slide once. I was three years old on an industrial sized slide. I broke it. Tee-hee

  17. makes me morn for our beloved two story bumpy slide at our elementary school. We used to climb up it backwards and you had to climb up a chain ladder covered in rubber tubes. Sadly my class was one of the last to ever play on it when i hit high school they tore it down. as well as the metal pole barns, monkey bars, and everything else all of us mourned its passing.

  18. #980 Old, dangerous playground equipment | 1000 Awesome Things I was suggested this web site by my cousin. I am not sure whether this post is written by him as no one else know such detailed about my trouble. You’re incredible! Thanks! your article about #980 Old, dangerous playground equipment | 1000 Awesome Things Best Regards Schaad Cassetta

    1. I looked for years for a picture of the double firepoles that you wrapped your arms and legs around and went down like a slide. They used to be at a school in Chicago and none of my friends remembered them. Evidently I was the only one who loved them. Finally saw the picture of one on this site.. It is green, where ours was just smooth metal, but it is the same apparatis

  19. This is a great blog. I was a kid in the 50’s & 60’s. I remember jungle gyms made out of metal, 10′ tall and anchored in yards of concrete. Sliding boards so high you got a nose bleed climbing to the top. Had to take wax paper and polish the thing so you butt didn’t stick to the boiling hot metal. And the swinging gate. What fun spinning around in a circle until you couldn’t hold on a flew off into the dirt and gravel. The merry-go-round was always good for some splinters and a bruise or two. And the 20′ high swings with the wood seats. If you made it off safely there was aways the chance the 50 lb. wood seat would split you head when you friend decided it would be funny to swing it at your head.

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  21. My son is seven and I can’t find a park that has monkey bars, a fire pole, a merry-go-round…nothing! The worst that ever happened to me on those play grounds was getting the wind knocked out of me. Any further injuries would have been a freak accident. Where in Southern California can I take my kid to experience this? Maybe Tijuana, Mexico.

  22. Near my house there’s an old city park with rusty, rickety playground equipment. The slide is steep and shakes when you go down and the swings creak anytime someone sits on them. And then there’s the merry-go-round. It’s rusty and looks like it should never move again… but it does. OH boy does that thing spin!

    This merry-go-round doesn’t know friction. It spins faster than any plastic or shiny metal could. It’s good, clean, sick-to-your stomach fun.

    It’s even better that this old city park with its magical frictionless merry-go-round is only a short four-wheeler ride away.

  23. Reblogged this on 1000awesomefriends and commented:
    In this second post in our tribute to 1000 Awesome Things, I chose #980 because Neil said this is the first post that made his blog take off with daily hits in the hundreds. And seeing my baby daughter clamber all over the most dangerous contraptions in the playground last night, I know why ;)
    FYI, we’re getting our act together and many friends and fans are stepping forward to create new awesome posts every day of the month, starting May 1. To be part of the adventure, see the About page and sign up. Thanks to everyone for the positive energy, AWESOME!

  24. i think that it would be a better world if there would be safe slides that children and adults could slide down on.

    1. There NEVER has been such a thing called a `safe slide’, NO matter if it’s made of metal or plastic. When one climbs the ladder, they take their chances. and it absolutely has NOTHING to do with it about being made of metal or plastic, the safety of the children depneds on the parents and their willingness to keep their eyes on their children !!!!

  25. What is the name of the pictured spinning playground toy that usually made all the kids dizzy? It’s not the merry go round! What is it?

  26. My favorite was the giant barrel where you could run inside as if you were a gerbil. Even better you could get on top of it and try to stay up there while the kid inside tried to get you off. This disappeared, but I did find one a few years ago in a small town in Oregon that had a “protective” cover to keep kids off the top. Probably for the best, but I’m glad I was able to enjoy it as a kid.

  27. Posting again.

    I haven’t seen a merry-go-round in person since 2007. Seriously. The last playground that had one anywhere near me was Woodland Park. I was there in 07 with my then fiance. We took a spin on it as adults. LOL.

    When I went back to Woodland in 2010. It was gone. The old wooden/iron playset was still there. But, the merry-go-round had been removed. Along with the donut swings (they were plastic but were pretty cool) that were installed in 1996. They took the place of the Miracle Flying Pony swings that I LOVED as a young kid.

    What I don’t understand was. They claimed the ponies were dangerous right. That they could hit a kid in the head. But, why do I have that damn big scar on my leg from when I went flying from a ‘flying’ pony as a five year old.. Oh yeah. That huge fucking tree that was right in front of them. Funny that they never chopped that thing down.

    Ban trees keep ponies.

  28. But, yeah. The tomboy in me loved the merry-go-round. The girl in me loved the flying ponies. Ponies are awesome.

    I live in KY. So, sometime I should just take a drive up to Ohio. The old dangerous playground capital of the USA!

    Seriously. They still have EVERYTHING there. Metal slides, Bounce A Whirls, tornado slides, merry-go-rounds…and my beloved flying ponies.

  29. Learning to navigate the playground in grade school was more perilous than learning to drive, at least then I had an instructor. But I certainly learned to be aware of my surroundings after walking in front of a swing and being kicked about ten feet. Being flung from the merry-go-round taught me to think again before putting my safety in the hands of other children…SMILE*

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