A piece on the art of Julia Jacquette in the New York Times also reveals the beginnings of something familiar to many children who grew up in the 1970s: the ‘adventure playground.’
Growing up on the Upper West Side in the 1970s, the artist Julia Jacquette saw plenty of the urban decay for which that era is known. … The typical city playground of that time was built as an afterthought, a corral for children, made of asphalt and chain-link fencing. The play equipment was sparse and isolated: a slide here, a seesaw there, a jungle gym. Nothing connected.
The new generation of adventure playgrounds, by contrast, was the product of careful planning, with linked play areas, often incorporating running water and sand. Most exciting for Ms. Jacquette was that the design allowed children to make up their own forms of play.
The concrete structures referred to ancient architectural forms: amphitheaters, pyramids and sunken gardens. And there was no one correct way for children to interact with them.
A 2008 view of the first adventure playground in Central Park, at West 67th Street. It opened in 1967.
The rise of the adventure playground, which is outlined in the book, was driven by architects like M. Paul Friedberg and Richard Dattner, who were the subject of a New York Times Magazine article in 1966 headlined “Putting the Play in Playgrounds.”
This movement, sparked by the parks commissioner Thomas Hoving, faced some resistance from traditionalists and defenders of the sanctity of Central Park’s green spaces. The whole saga was notable enough to provide the focus of at least a dozen other articles in The Times. (A 1967 editorial acknowledged that not all of the changes to Central Park then in progress were undesirable: “But it is essential that this new approach not get out of hand.”) …
The shift was prescient in another way. Facing tightening city budgets, the adventure playgrounds were originally funded by wealthy donors, like the Lauder Foundation, which gave hundreds of thousands of dollars for the earliest projects.
About three decades later, the adventure playgrounds faced a new challenge: safety regulations. In the late 1990s, there was a push to replace them. Eventually that drive ended in a compromise, and the playgrounds were only modified, dialing down the adventure, perhaps, but satisfying city litigators.
Ms. Jacquette … still treasures what remains of the original vision. “The architects who made these didn’t ever want to dictate play,” she said. “They offered the kids a vocabulary.”
“In a way,” she said, “I am still that kid.”
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A similar story could be told about the rebuilding of the gravel-and-dirt playing field of Lord Roberts School In the West End by a local group of residents led by UBC prof Gary Pennington in 1986 – a unique, ‘hand-crafted-and-built’ design that took the adventure playground to a new level. It lasted for a few years, until maintenance and safety issues led to its almost complete demolition. Only a handful of trees on a bluff in the southeast corner remain of the original vision.
In Canada we had a memorable adventure playground at Expo 67, designed by Cornelia Oberlander, and one in Ambleside Park designed and built by Heinz Berger.
There is also a great description of the 67th Street Playground by M. Paul Friedberg (who is a landscape architect) on the Cultural Landscape Foundation website. This oral history is very interesting! tclf.org/pioneer/oral-history/m-paul-friedberg.
My children are hoping for an adventure playground like Terra Nova to be built in the park next to their school that will shortly undergo a renovation. Terra Nova is probably too “adventuresome” for a small urban park, but it does provide a better experience for children, and it would be nice to have some options within walking or easy transit access, as opposed to driving, distance.
Terra Nova Adventure Playground in Richmond approaches this concept, but falls short. My kids’ interest is not sustained for long. It lacks challenges. And the line for the two zip lines is always frustratingly long. A kid wants to zip 5-6 times in succession, not zip seconds and then wait wait wait.
The best implementation of adventure play is Swanson School in Auckland. Kids climb actual trees and build rickety things. When one child broke his foot screwing around on a bicycle, the parent thanked the principal – the lesson was worth it to save his kid from getting run over by a car.
I grew up playing in the woods mostly, and none of the schools in my area even had playsets. Meanwhile, at Nootka School, which is adjacent to Renfrew Ravine, the little people aren’t even allowed to play in there. It’s inconvenient for the custodians. A shame really – playsets are boring compared to a real live stream and paths through the brush – not to mention the pleasure of picking salmon berries.
It breeds grown-ups who pay to plod mindlessly on a treadmill in a stuffy fitness centre rather than going for a walk.
The new playground at McBride Park at 4th and Waterloo is a big disappointment: down to 2 swings and a big roundabout thingee that a healthy adult can barely get moving. Weak.
Agreed. “Natural” play spaces would be ideal, but pose all kinds of problems on school grounds in the urban environment. Even when I was in elementary school in the early 80s, we were directed to stay away from the natural edged boundaries of the school yards (which we totally ignored because that space was way more interesting). Would be good to see lots of innovation in playground space in general, including, parks that directly engaged children in their design.
Terra Nova suffers from its success (hence the line-ups) because there aren’t very many (any?) other similar options close by.
It boggles my mind the vast array of play equipment offered to kids today. Are they being spoiled rotten?
Growing up in the suburbs on the Prairies we felt extremely fortunate to have a simple open field across the lane called a “park” where all the kids ran and tumbled and built snow forts, where the city flooded two side-by-side rinks in winter, and that came with the Standard Five in one corner: Tall swings with skull-cracking wooden seats; a merry-go-round decorated with patches of dried vomit; steel pipes welded together called ‘monkey bars’ that was alternately a spaceship, a castle and a submarine; the ubiquitous sand box that only the neighbourhood cats loved more; and of course ball-breaking teeter totters with smaller kids regularly flying off head first from the raised end.
The best playgrounds of all were the horse pastures and wooded river valleys and crab apple orchards from old remnant farms and homesteads at the periphery, only accessible by the most meaningful instrument of freedom ever invented: The bicycle. Riding 10 miles a day in summer was nothing to a 9-year old in the early 60s.
The most exciting adventure playground to me was the elderly neighbour’s garden where the grandkids and my brother and I spent an entire summer building a city using milk cartons for towers, taped cardboard for houses, plastic bags shaped into the dirt as a liner for lakes and ponds, and our brand new electric train set that poked through a tunnel in a mountain made with sand. Our mother was very peeved when she discovered it had rusted.
Terra Nova won an award. To me it’s a lot form over function. And those logs in winter? They should give the city park managers palpitations regarding liability. This kid would have headed for the nearby dikes on his bike.
There are far better adventures climbing cliffs, chasing horses and even just monkeying around on a spaceship with seven of your neighbourhood pals, the one at the highest level being the captain who had to provide an ongoing narrative and bark orders to counter the attack by aliens. All it takes is imagination, an element that seems to be underutilized now as everything is laid out in front of the kids today as though they cannot be allowed to work it out (or invent stuff) on their own.
Still, they didn’t have 12-year old data programming geniuses back then.