Playground equipment again

I guess that posting about playground equipment of days gone by is the way to connect with my readership . . . first, I got a follow-up link to this site sent by frequent commenter (when I had comments open) "Da Wife":

Vintage playground equipment is fast disappearing from America’s parks and school yards. The equipment we grew up with — from spring-mounted animals installed in the 1940s to imposing rocket ships erected in the 1970s — becomes more scarce each year. Even seesaws, merry-go-rounds and swings are becoming things of the past, along with towering metal slides and elaborate wooden structures. The photos on this website celebrate the beauty and history of playground equipment that may soon be gone from the American landscape.

And then, I have Jon sending me his own thoughts on the original post:

The modern playgound is still pretty dangerous. There tend to be far more climbing areas now — (rock walls, ladders, steps, poles with footholds, rope ladders and nets — and there are more high places to serve as destinations for all that climbing. A modern play structure — I'm thinking of the one at [the local] school and another "all access for gimps" installation at another nearby school — still has monkey bars, suspended loops, firepoles, and occasionally a zip-line sort of thing between raised platforms. Of the playgrounds we frequent, half still have metal slides.

What seems to be a little disappointing about modern playsets, though, is the fact that they seem to be so small. Part of this may be due to the distortions of memory, but I think a good part of it may be due to design: they're making them smaller to discourage teens from hanging out on them.

The modern playset seems to me to be better equipped than the crap we had in the local park when I was a kid. There's more to do and there are actually places to _go_ within the playset. Contrast this to the stuff we played on, where the biggest decision about what to do on the bent pipe climber was whether to get the paint chip rammed under the fingernail at the top of the ladder or down at the bottom.

Humph.

Clearly, I should post on childhood nostalgia more often . . .

Update: And yet more from the virtual landlord:

And about this bit —

"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, 2×4s, and chains and just nailed it all together."

This dates the 1000 Awesome Things author. If she's fondly remembering the scrap-lumber-and-old-tires-held-together-by-chains sort of playgrounds, she's reminiscing about the late 70's and early 80's. That's when this sort of garbage started showing up in my playgrounds and schoolyards. My friends and I recognized these things as the crap that they were and we noted then that we really missed the bent pipe and sheet steel playgrounds of our youth. We were 11.