When you think of playgrounds, you probably remember the good times you had at your local school or park, playing on metal swings, testing your bravery on high slides, climbing the monkey bars, and getting dizzy on the merry-go-round. You don’t see those pieces much these days, because in the mid-‘70s they started to be replaced by safer plastic and fiberglass structures nestled in shredded wood or rubber surfaces. Kids can’t catch a good thrill anymore. Brenda Biondo finds and takes pictures of vintage playground equipment to document those pieces before they all disappear. Her book Once Upon a Playground: A Celebration of Classic American Playgrounds, 1920-1975 contains both her photographs and vintage ads for playground equipment. She tells us about playgrounds evolution.
Collectors Weekly: What was the impact of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which launched in 1973?
Biondo: Things started to change after that, which is why I limited to book to apparatuses made before 1975. New playgrounds were starting to be build out of plastic and fiberglass. I looked up the statistics, and according to the little research I’ve done—contrary to what you’d expect—there’s not much difference in the number of injuries on older equipment versus injuries on equipment today. A “New York Times” article from 2011 called “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” explains that studies show when playground equipment was really high and just had asphalt underneath it and not seven layers of mulch, thekids knew they had to be careful because they didn’t want to fall. Nowadays, when everything is lower and there’s so much mulch, kids are just used to jumping down and falling and catching themselves. So kids learned to assess risk by playing on the older equipment. They also learned to challenge themselves because it is a little scary to go up to the top of the thing.
Read about Biondo’s research and see plenty of pictures that will bring back memories at Collectors Weekly. Don’t miss the extra gallery of images at the bottom the article. You may find the Madonna song “This Used to be My Playground” running through your mind. Now get off my lawn!
Of course, we are under two miles from the park where a woman was caught putting razor blades at the bottom of the slide, so that might have something to do with it.