Dangerous Playgrounds of the 1970s: Photos That Prove Safety Wasn't a Priority

I was blessed with one of the best neighbourhood playgrounds ever and it included a white corkscrew slide nearly the same as the one pictured in the article. There were several summers spent in that playground all day every day it wasn't raining. I thought I was going to be a stuntman. I was 8 when I first leapt from the very top of the slide, which was the highest point in the playground. I was very proud.

Later we invented the game of "headtag", which was a game of tag wherein a tag was only valid if it was of a person's head. It was played entirely on the twirly slide, we allowed a landing and 2 steps on the ground which was enough to get back on the slide should one leap off to avoid getting tagged. This made for a compact, fast paced game of tag best played with 3 people. We started getting good after a few years, and used the slide like a piece of gymnastics equipment, chasing each other around it like squirrels on a tree.

I've since gone on many adventures and done many seemingly dangerous things and I owe my ability to keep my ass in one piece to the skills I cultivated in that playground. That slide in partivcular, I'm so nostalgic for it. In 2003 they ripped it out, along with a dozen others from various playgrounds of the 70s and early 80s.

According to this article, 200,000 kids are injured every year on the playground, and 15 die. I definitely romanticize some the past, but as with most things, it's probably mostly romantic.

https://www.brainline.org/article/playground-safety

In a lot of ways, I think the things outlined in the article, especially risk taking, are more mental than physical. You can be risk averse on that old metal gear and risk taking on the new plastic stuff.

But some of the descriptions, what fun is a slide that overheats? Who cares about the romantic notion that some kid might get burnt.

Some of that doesn’t even look fun, unlike the like giant wood labyrinths of the eighties, those I miss.

https://wjbq.com/wooden-playgrounds-maine/

I remember those metal bars placed over asphalt or cement. But, I also remember as a 4-yr old, performing the risk analysis in my head. I think I did less stupid things later in life due to the adventures I faced on the playground.

I lived in a place where the nearby park swings were made of iron rebar. As a 5 year old, I remember pushing my sister's swing a bit so she could pick up some height. Only to have the swing come right back and smack me on the face. It threw me and I ended up with a bloody lip. I'm lucky it didn't hit me so hard that I ended up dead. I wonder how many kids ended up hurt before they decided to change it. This was around 1972. "The good all days", huh.

> Teeter-totters were more than just playground staples, they were trust exercises. The balance of weight created a simple physics lesson, but one misstep could turn fun into disaster.

> If one child decided to jump off unexpectedly, the other would come crashing down with enough force to leave them bruised and battered, often ending friendships in the process.

This to me seem like perfectly valid lessons to be learned sooner than later.

I remember a park in San Jose that had a vertical steel art maze that only kids could fit into and a Korean-era jet in the sandbox. The boring safety helicopter parents ripped out everything fun and replaced it with corporate plastic garbage that's incredibly safe but soulless and rarely used.

Sure everyone eventually got hurt but we had a blast in the thunder dome all the way up to our teens. You can’t say the same with todays playgrounds. We invited risk and trouble, it never found or haunted us.

This article reads like a FUD hit piece on playground structures written by someone who never had a childhood outside of the house or grew up with an overprotective entourage. I was in glee to see a lot of old constructions that were used by normal human children back then to 'have fun as kids do', but accompanied by a brutal paragraph of worst-case-scenarios of horrors that rarely panned out in everyday life.